Postcards from the Trenches: A German Soldier's Testimony of the Great War by Irene Guenther

Abstract

Reviewed by: Postcards from the Trenches: A German Soldier's Testimony of the Great War by Irene Guenther Joe Perry Postcards from the Trenches: A German Soldier's Testimony of the Great War. By Irene Guenther. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018. Pp. 232. Cloth $40.00. ISBN 978-1350015753. Cleaning house after the death of her parents, historian Irene Guenther made a surprising discovery: a dusty envelope, forgotten on a top shelf, that held eighty World War I standard-issue "field postcards," each hand painted with a scene from the German side of the western front. Guenther, whose publications include Nazi "Chic"? Fashioning Women in the Third Reich (2004), discovered that the postcards were illustrated by Otto Schubert, an artist who apparently knew her grandfather in Dresden in the 1920s. Intrigued, Guenther searched for further information about Schubert, uncovering a forgotten artistic career that spanned the final years of the Kaiserreich to the decades [End Page 605] after World War II. The postcards and a selection of Schubert's other war-related lithographs—contextualized with narrative coverage of World War I, contemporary German artists and art movements, and Schubert's biography—are at the core of this book, which argues that Schubert's work "implores a reassessment of [his] place in the canon of World War One art" (46). Indeed, Schubert deserves wider recognition. Born in 1892 in Dresden, Schubert's life was typisch deutsch. The man was tragically buffeted by the crosscurrents of the personal, the professional, and the political that drove German history in the first two thirds of the twentieth century. When the war broke out, Schubert was a student at the Dresden Kunstakademie. Drafted in October 1914, he served on the western front—and sent his future wife Irma ninety hand-painted postcards—until he was wounded in April 1916 at Verdun and subsequently released from military service. Back at the Kunstakademie, Schubert in 1917 published two sets of lithographs with images from the front: 24 Lithographs of the War in the West and The Suffering of Horses in War. He joined the Dresden Secession Group 1919, whose membership included luminaries such as Conrad Felixmüller, Otto Dix, and (as an honorary member) Oskar Kokoschka. In the 1920s, Schubert became a successful illustrator, providing lithographs and woodcuts for a variety of publications ranging from children's books to works by Goethe and the brothers Grimm. Schubert joined the Nazi Party in September 1932, and Guenther explains that the motivations for this move remain obscure. Did the artist sense economic opportunity? Did he approve of the Nazi economic or political programs? Did he share the party's racist ideologies? Whatever the answer, because of the antiwar tenor of his early art and his membership in Group 1919, he was labeled a "degenerate artist" and forbidden from exhibiting his work. Schubert lost his son on the eastern front in 1943, his wife in an early allied bombing attack on Dresden in October 1944, and his studio in the firebombing of February 1945. Although his two daughters moved to West Germany after the war, Schubert stayed in Dresden, remarried in 1950, and resumed his work as a book illustrator; he enjoyed "an extensive retrospective of his work" (73) in an East Berlin state museum in 1957. Before he died of Parkinson's disease in 1970, Schubert painted works critical of the Holocaust, including "Auschwitz Triptych" (1965), reproduced in the book. Schubert's postcards offer remarkable insights into everyday life in the German army in occupied France. His quick watercolors generally avoid depictions of explicit violence, no doubt because they were intended for his girlfriend. Yet the scenes of soldiers working or relaxing behind the lines; the portraits of French civilians, landscapes, and (sometimes ruined) villages; and the occasional view from the front lines comprise an intense personal archive that records the contradictions of occupation (a potential line of interpretation that Guenther ignores). Schubert's 1917 war-themed lithographs were more graphic, with disturbing scenes of death and destruction; the [End Page 606] twelve images included in The Suffering of Horses in War are a unique and moving tribute to the vast numbers of pack animals that served and perished at...