Cultural Battlegrounds: Weimar Photographic Narratives of War

Abstract

At the height of commemorative activities in Germany in the year of 1924, the tenth anniversary of war mobilization, the anarcho-pacifist propagandist Ernst Friedrich founded the International Antiwar Museum in Berlin and published his photographic narrative Krieg dem Kriege! [War Against War]. When images from the book were publicly displayed in his bookstore window, Berlin police stormed the premises and confiscated them at bayonet point. Other bookstore owners who displayed images from Friedrich's book were similarly harrassed or arrested, encouraged by patriotic veterans' organizations who called for banning the book. Friedrich's use of war photographs was part of a larger antiwar visual campaign that included paintings, graphic portfolios, art and photography exhibitions. The antimilitarist visual campaign coincided with public revelations of Germany's secret rearmament program and the organization of a new secret army, the Black Reichswehr. By 1925, however, with the defeat of working-class rebellions and the relative stabilization of the economy, the organized pacifist movement was politically contained by the ruling Social Democrats and effectively moribund; war imagery shifted dramatically away from antiwar statements in graphic art and painting toward heroic imagery in hugely popular patriotic photography albums. Friedrich's visual strategy depended primarily on an identification of the viewer with the humanist image of the suffering soldier as a universal subject. Like other pacifists, he attempted to convey a picture of war that called forth visions of mutilation and meaningless death, shattered