Abstract
In 1931 Alfred H. Barr spoke of Otto Dix's The Trench (fig. 1) as “perhaps the most famous picture painted in post-war Europe.”1 In the voluminous discourse on Dix, however, The Trench has received relatively little attention.2 Yet this is the painting that made Dix famous. And infamous. The wide notoriety it attained during the Weimar Republic and its reputation during the Nazi regime were the result of the controversy that followed its acquisition by the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne in 1923. In regard to this controversy historians have invariably concentrated on aesthetic criteria; it is generally assumed that The Trench caused a scandal because of its gruesomeness. Actually, its offensiveness went far beyond the gruesome. This study aims to reconstruct and clarify the actual public issues and battle lines as they appeared in German newspapers and art journals between December 1923 and January 1925, when the painting was returned to Dix's dealer by the museum.
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