English Studies Forum

Otto Dix: Artist Against War

Maggie Jaffe

I: Great Good War

1914: After he enlists

in the German army

Dix finalizes his

Self-Portrait as a Soldier.

Boyish features

of his earlier paintings

become brut: shaved head,

grossly thickened neck and mouth;

fierce black eyes skewer the civilian viewer.

Awash in red, metamorphoses into

War.

Along with his rifle, flak jacket

and helmet, Dix carries the Bible,

Nietzsche's Joyful Wisdom,

sketch pad and pen into battle.

Later, as a machine gun guard

on the western front, he'll write:

War is something bestial: hunger, lice,

mud, rats, gases, canons and insanity.

II: Trench Warfare, 1915-18

Freshly killed corpse "grins" and farts next to him.

Dix swallows his food, wipes his hands on mud-

caked pants, then sketches the corpse. 

If paint could scream, up and down the line,

ears ringing, within his restless sleep . . .

Dix has the hollowed-eyed vacant

stare of a "grunt." 

In reality he's an artist-worker,

the battlefield suggestive of his gaping

wounds or of a vagina.

Ultimately, all wars are fought

over and for the sake of the vulva.

III: Self-Portrait As Mars

1915: angles and planes after Cubism,

Dix draws himself as

            God of War.

Encompassing the figure are splotches

of blood, teeth biting into blood,

a runaway horse, white eyes

rolling.  Also half-ruined

buildings and burst-open cities. 

(Image from recurring dream: he must crawl

through blasted houses without issue).

Prophetic.  In the night sky above the carnage

at Battle of the Somme, the red

planet rises to the east.

IV: Demobbed, Berlin, 1923

Stump-legged enlistee.

Face chunked out where he took mortar. 

Skeleton works its way through his flesh.

With his one good eye, he looks

up at her ass.  She laughs.

Adjusts her shawl.

He smells cordite, sweat,

the sweet-sour corpse

in which he landed, face down.

He carries the corpse's stench like a cross.

Jazz throbs from Cabaret Amerika

where the cocksuckers dance

or grope each other's flesh. 

The cripple hates their smug faces,

especially the bushman drummer.

Let him go back to Africa.

Hunger is a chain-linked barbed-wire

fence he's stuck behind.

Through the fence, the cripple sees

the bloated Jew.  Reds and Jews. 

Hence he's all ears to young Adolf,

the co(s)mic house painter. 

Standing in the shadowed corner, Dix.

Sketches the crippled vet and the whore as

Two Victims of Capitalism.

She: pock-marked by the clap.

He: wasted by mortar.

V: Degenerate Art, 1937

Dix, Beckmann, Chagall, Grosz, Heartfield,

Kandinsky, Klee, El Lissitzky . . .

"degenerate" because they won't paint

golden bodies for the Reich.

In Goebbels' "art" catalogue, Dix's

War Cripples are cited as "sabotage

of the national defense."

In '33, he's stripped of his post as art teacher.

Turns the corner—there's the Gestapo.

Could he, should he,

get him in a stranglehold?

Black tongue thrust

from the Nazi skull.

Better: he'll sketch him.

Politics bore him,

prefers whorehouses.

They're alive and so (he thinks) is he.

But not the conscript he cradled one night—

guts spilling out all over his hands.

So.  Night sweats continue.

His wife snaps on the light,

bombs burst in air.

His screams drowned out by

thudding boots, raucous calls:

Jews Out!

VI: Prisoner of War, 1945

Turns out, Dix's service as a soldier

is far from over. 

In '45 when he's 54,

he's drafted into the Volkssturm,

a home defense unit.

Separated from his unit

and taken by the French as a POW.

He's recognized.  Forced to paint

de Gaulle posters in exchange for food. 

Demobbed again, he draws

Self-Portrait as a Prisoner of War:

an old man with a deeply lined face

imprisoned behind barbed wire. 

Behind him, two others—

one depicted as The Fool.

Instead of the "dominating"

red of his youth, he now employs

gray, green and blue.

Dix died one year after '68:

banner year for "free love,"

worldwide Revolution,

devastating casualties in the Vietnam War.

Sources

Self-Portrait with Carnation (1912)

I. Self-Portrait as a Soldier (1914)

III. Self-Portrait as Mars (1915)

IV. Two Victims of Capitalism (1923)

V. War Cripples (1920).  Exhibited in the Degenerate Art Show, thereafter destroyed by the Nazis.  In total, 16,000 paintings by 1,400 artists were destroyed.

VI. Self-Portrait as a Prisoner of War (1947)