The Art of War

War and trauma are fundamental human experiences and central to German history, especially in the twentieth century. Since the First World War, which some Germans celebrated as the chance to annihilate the old culture to make space for a new one, German art has been implicated in war. War and trauma cause extreme conditions that can be negative and destructive, including deprivation or dislocation, and emotional and psychological stress. Paradoxically, war and trauma can also lead to positive outcomes, such as deepening interpersonal relationships, intellectual insights, and new, unforeseen opportunities.

The central concerns of the volume are the multivalent aspects of art that respond to war. It begins by considering art conceived of and executed in response to the First World War on the centennial anniversary of that event. The volume goes on to examine art in the wake of the Holocaust and artistic responses to more recent conflict, such as the Vietnam War. The essays in this volume explore a variety of media – including paintings by Otto Dix and Gerhard Richter, Holocaust photography by Heimrad Bäcker, and sculpture by Emy Roeder, Gela Forster, and Renée Sintenis – to chart the complex relationship between art and war in both its documentary and analytical functions.

Deborah Ascher Barnstone is Professor of Architecture and Associate Head of School at the University of Technology Sydney. Her primary research interests are twentieth- and twenty-first-century German and Dutch art and architecture and classical modernism. She is the author of The Break with the Past? German Avant-garde Architects, 1910–1925 (2017), Beyond the Bauhaus: Cultural Debates in Breslau, 1918–1933 (2016), and The Transparent State: Architecture and Politics in Postwar Germany (2005). She is co-editor with Thomas O. Haakenson of the German Visual Culture series at Peter Lang.

Barbara McCloskey is Professor and Chair of the Department of History of Art and Architecture and Director of the University Art Gallery at the University of Pittsburgh. She has published widely on the subject of twentieth-century German art and politics. She is the author of George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918–1936 (1997), Artists of World War II (2005), and The Exile of George Grosz: Modernism, America, and the One World Order (2015). Her current research explores the relationship between art and radical pedagogy in Weimar Germany.