Otto Dix: War

Otto Dix volunteered in the German Army during World War I in a machine gun unit. He took part in the Battle of the Somme, the bloodiest battle of the war and one of the longest. He was wounded several times and his unit was transferred to the Eastern front for the remainder of the war. When he returned, he created many artworks that portrayed what he saw and his opinions of the war. This particular piece is part of a triptych painted in 1929-1932.

When soldiers returned home, most if not all of them were shell-shocked if they returned home alive. Some soldiers were shell-shocked to the point of no longer speaking, taking cover at the slightest sound etc. and could not function normally in society again. Serving in the army meant facing the new weaponry every day such as living in the trenches, poison gases and machine guns. WWI was a new kind of war and a bloody one.

In this piece, Dix is conveying the horrors of the war. The soldiers constantly had to wear gas masks shown by the only living man in the painting. The masks had a dark and haunting appearance and erased the faces of the soldiers. The painting is set in a trench that the bottom has been flooded out of causing trench foot. In the background, the barren landscape, probably No Man's Land, is full of artillery holes as well as barren and vast. Bodies piled up and decayed where they fell because leaving the trenches was suicide. The trench is generally covered in filth, slime and is dark and dingy. In the foreground, the dead bodies have numerous bullet holes no doubt from machine gun fire or "Big Bertha's" pellets and shrapnel. Barbed wire is entangled among body parts.

The skeleton impaled on the metal arch takes the center of the shot as the focal point. The skeleton is the most decayed of the bodies in the painting and is looking down on the trench. Representing death, it points to the pile of dead bodies and looks as if it is laughing and mocking those still alive because they will eventually meet the same fate. Also, the skeleton is hanging over the trench as death hangs over the soldiers in the trenches and is a constant reminder that death is in the soldiers' faces.

Dix, like the other soldiers in the war, was mortified and psychologically as well as physically damaged by the war. A generation was lost to the war not only because of casualties and death but also from the psychological impact apparent in Dix's artwork.