Encountering the ‘enemy’: civilian violence towards prisoners of war in 1914

Abstract

Introduction: pre-war civilian expectations of wartime captivity In 1886, the German artist Anton von Werner depicted a French soldier being taken prisoner during the Franco-Prussian war. The image is one of chivalry, order and calm; the prisoner kisses his wife goodbye, while one of his captors gently cradles the couple's baby. The reality of capture in the 1870–1 conflict, in which the majority of French prisoners captured at Sedan endured catastrophic living conditions at Inges before their transport to Germany, is excluded here. Clearly, this imaginative artistic interpretation, by one of Wilhelmine Germany's leading court painters, provided a sanitised version of the historical realities of the state's foundational conflict. However, it also offers an important late nineteenth-century interpretation of wartime capture. Two key characteristics of the painting stand out: it presents a highly romantic vision of the prisoner of war and it makes no reference to wartime violence. In fact, a romantic view of the prisoner of war, and the dissociation of violence from wartime capture, marked pre-1914 attitudes across Europe. Werner's image reflected a widespread cultural tendency to deny the concomitant historical relationship between wartime capture, violence and power. Believing that uncontrolled violence was a feature of man in his primitive state, Europeans thought their own cultural progress towards ever more civilised societies had eradicated violent behaviour towards prisoners of war by western European armies.