"Heroes" and "Whores": The Politics of Gender in Weimar Antiwar Imagery

Abstract

Weimar antimilitarist imagery shows that ideals of manliness and maternity, concepts central to the German patriotic view of World War I, were not limited to use by the political right but were redefined and deployed by antiwar artists Otto Dix and Kathe Kollwitz, and in photographs published by the pacifist propagandist Ernst Friedrich, who exhibited images by all three in his International Antiwar Museum in Berlin in 1924. These gendered representations of war, while throwing into question the straightforward “progressiveness” of antiwar visual imagery, reveal the relationship between gendered identity, militarism, and patriarchal capitalism.