Excursion: Artists at War – “Verdun, that is the incomprehensible…”

“The Blue Rider has fallen,

a grand biblical figure, around whom the scent of Eden lingered.

Over the landscape he cast a blue shadow…

he was the one who still heard the animals speak.

And transfigured their misunderstood souls.

Wherever the Blue Rider walked, he bestowed heaven.”

Else Lasker-Schüler after the death of her friend Franz Marc,
Berliner Tageblatt of March 9, 1916

Franz Marc, sketchbook from the field, sheet 24, "Combat", 1915 — Franz Marc, sketchbook from the field, sheet 24, “Combat”, 1915

As Unteroffizier (corporal), Franz Marc went to war on August 30, 1914. Having in the meantime been promoted to Leutnant (second lieutenant) of the Landwehr, he died, severely wounded by several shrapnel fragments on a reconnaissance ride, on March 4, 1916 in the village of Braquis in the Woevre plain, about 15 kilometers east of Verdun. Franz Marc had shortly before been included in the list of Germany’s most important artists and exempted from military service.

On the morning of March 4, 1916, Franz Marc had written a few lines home to his wife Maria:

„Yes, this year I will also return. To my unharmed, dear home. Amid the horrific images of destruction among which I now live, this thought of returning home has a halo that cannot be described as lovely enough. Do not worry, I will make it through.“

Only a few hours later, Franz Marc was dead.

Based on the war enthusiasm of intellectuals at the time, one can surmise why battles like the one at Verdun could happen at all. Not only military personnel, but also writers and artists volunteered and went to the front in 1914 with full enthusiasm. It was a common opinion that war was indispensable for overcoming societal encrustations and would have a cleansing effect on “sick Europe”. Thus Franz Marc prophesied to his artist friend Wassily Kandinski in a letter in 1914. In the spring of 1915, as a soldier, he noted in his field sketchbook: „I stand with a throbbing heart at the beginning of things.“

Along with Franz Marc, approximately 300,000 young men fell in the fighting at Verdun alone—Frenchmen, Germans, Austrians, Italians, Africans, Americans, members of other nations, and inhabitants of all continents. Most of them died between the ages of 18 and 30.

In France and Germany, the First World War wiped out a large part of this age group. Many of those who survived the war were sent home by the First World War as physical or mental cripples. The sons of these returnees in turn died between the ages of 18 and 30 in the next world war, which was to assume even more unimaginable dimensions.

Artists like Franz Marc and his best friend August Macke, who was drafted into the 160. Infanterie-Regiment (160th Infantry Regiment) in Bonn in August 1914, saw the coming war as a necessary political event. August Macke was already killed on September 26, 1914, near Perthes-les-Hurlus in Champagne. Other intellectuals saw the war as an artistic experience. Otto Dix, who took part as a volunteer in the entire course of the war in the East and West, is said to have stated: “I am such a realist that I want to see everything with my own eyes..” Max Beckmann wrote home in April 1915: “My art gets fed here.” The French painter Ferdinand Léger wrote to his wife on March 28, 1915: “To all the idiots who are wondering whether I am still a cubist or will be when I come back, you can tell them that there is nothing more cubist than a war like this, where a man is more or less neatly torn into several pieces and hurled in all four directions.”

The writer Walter Serner attempted a simple explanation for this war enthusiasm. He described the war as a reaction to the “roaming ghost of boredom” that many intellectuals and artists felt at that time.

The writer Ernst Toller, originally from Posen, was a Kriegsfreiwilliger (wartime volunteer) in the 1. K.B. Fußartillerie-Regiment (1st Bavarian Foot Artillery Regiment) starting August 8, 1914. After the war, he was one of the decisive November revolutionaries in the Bavarian USPD and later a convinced pacifist. In early 1914 he wrote, “We young people long for war. Peace is a rotten time and war a great time, say the professors. We yearn for adventure. Perhaps our last years of school will be remitted and we will be in uniform tomorrow. That would be a life …” In May 1916, Toller suffered a total nervous breakdown in the fighting near Verdun, which left him unfit for military service despite intensive treatments. Still during wartime, he began studying humanities in Munich and frequented various literary circles. Toller was significantly involved in the overthrow efforts of 1919 and had to serve a prison sentence until 1924. When the National Socialists seized power, he emigrated to the USA via detours. In 1933, his German citizenship was revoked. In the same year, he wrote the remarkable autobiographical book “A Youth in Germany”.

Many artists who were still very young at the time and whose works we revere today like those of the old masters became victims of this war. Without the First World War, art would be completely different, both because of those who died in it and because of those who survived it.

On http://www.zeno.org/Kunst/W/Inhaltsverzeichnis, the correspondence between individual protagonists of the intellectual scene of that time can be read, in particular the exchange of thoughts between Franz Marc and his friend August Macke, as well as Marc’s communications to his wife and family during the war. These are remarkably modern and clear depictions of these young men, which open up a realistic and also emotional view of their world of thoughts and feelings and of the entire social and political situation in Germany at the time.