Die bunte Welt des Krieges. Bildpostkarten aus dem Ersten Weltkrieg

Abstract

Studies relying primarily on visual sources have added significantly to our understanding of the experience of conflict situations and Christine Brocks's book on the interesting subject of German First World War picture postcards represents a useful contribution to the cultural history of war. One of the author's main contentions is that picture postcards, a highly popular form of mass communication, reflect a widely held understanding of war in which the new experiences of violence, mass death and destruction between 1914 and 1918 were either omitted or aestheticized. The author argues further that while the iconography of wartime postcards served to accustom society culturally to violence (p. 16), the thematic prevalence of secular traditional representations in wartime postcards undermines the orthodoxy that the experience of war led to a general brutalization of society (p. 238). Brocks adopts a complex theoretical approach to the examination of postcards that blends visual and communication theory and is, for the most part, based on analytical tools commonly used in advertising. The wartime postcards are divided into different genres, with two main chapters devoted to photographic postcards on the one hand and postcards of reprinted graphics (paintings, graphic art and caricature) on the other.