Shock of the Unimaginable

...One must express oneself...

...Fulbright Senior Scholar in Germany, 1993-94 THE GREAT WAR-the "war to make the world safe for democracy," in President Woodrow Wilson's painfully inaccurate phrase-was recalled with hideous brilliance this past summer in an exhibition by Berlin's German Historical Museum...

...One could not prepare mentally for the unimaginable...

...Schoenberg could hardly have known that modern warfare would burst forth as a type of grotesque Expressionism, or that his idea of a purely subjective, instinctive art would prove inadequate to the moral outrage inspired by the War's instinctive violence...

...Recalling the clockwork-smooth Edwardian Age in antebellum Germany, the writer Stefan Zweig ruefully acknowledged that "No one thought of wars, or revolutions, or revolts...

...As the Great War took shape, its violence and atrocities beyond parallel, recognizable meaning collapsed, and avant-garde artists, stunned and disillusioned, wrestled within themselves to find responses...

...In contrast to Cork's more balanced assessment, however, the contributors often draw wildly pacifist conclusions, expanding from a denunciation of World War I to include war itself, and by implication World War II...

...Should the Kaiser have gone completely unopposed...

...The very same techniques were put to obscene use by government propagandists, eager to persuade an often skeptical public of the nobility of the War...

...This rebarbative attitude-again in contrast to Cork's fairness-fails to take account of the significant political and social changes that followed both wars...

...Western values may have been cracking apart in 1914, or as Modris Eksteins observes in his fine essay introducing the German catalog, the Westmay have been sloughing off the false peace of Edwardian society...

...The text of this remarkable volume included a hefty chunk of Richard Cork's masterful study of the wartime avant-garde...

...Gods and goddesses from the Nibelungenlied adorned the covers of German magazines, and trappings of Durer woodcuts and Rubens paintings lent European recruiting posters a tawdry grandeur...

...British, French, Italian, Russian, Canadian, and Hungarian artwork appeared in abundance...

...The new era of unreason was described with hastily punctuated eloquence by the Irish artist William Orpen, who had been wandering the exhausted battlefields near Amiens: ...miles and miles of Shell Holes bodies rifles steel Helmets gas Helmets and all kinds of battered clothes, German and English, and shells and wire, all and everything white with mud, and one feels the horrors the water in the shell holes is covering-and not a living soul anywhere near, a truly terrible peace in the new and terribly modern desert...

...For the fall exhibition at London's Barbican Gallery, consisting of some 220 of the 400 pieces shown in Berlin that represent the era's "fine art," the book has doubled as the catalog...

...In a 1911 letter to Wasily Kandinsky, the composer Arnold Schoenberg had defined Expressionism as belonging to "the unconscious...

...In many ways the Berlin museum's project reflects the current-and certainly disputed-liberal-centrist German skepticism that any war at all can be justified...

...Renaissance allegory, skeletons personifying death and medieval Christian images, as in Max Beckmann's 1918 Resurrection, gave wrecked urban landscapes an appropriately eerie dimension...

...All that was radical, all violence, seemed impossible in an age of reason...

...For artists, as for nearly everyone else, the shock of the new gave way to the shock of the unimaginable...

...But I do not mean to suggest that this rather bizarre view dominated the Berlin exhibition...

...But for the Germans Otto Dix and George Grosz, and the Englishman Paul Nash, the guilty present could be illuminated only with the techniques of the past...

...Abstract art coped poorly with murder...

...One is made to imagine a time before the Second World War, before the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Vietnam, when the horrors of modern warfare and the mass killing of civilians were comparatively novel phenomena...

...In his otherwise excellent essay on the War iconography of German magazines, Thomas Noll argues that World War I produced nothing but "uncounted, nameless victims...

...Convincing testimony required more than solipsism...

...Patriotism sinking into apprehension, despair and nausea is his constant theme...

...The British contribution was especially strong, due probably to the participation of London's Imperial War Museum, the world's most encyclopedic repository of martial art and artifacts...

...Cork's monograph, an expansion of the lecture series he gave in 1989-90 as Cambridge University's visiting Slade Professor, focuses mainly (though despite its subtitle, not exclusively) on the avant-garde's experience of the War...

...Nearly 20 years after the armistice, Constantin Brancusi's Endless Column, a 96-foot-tall, freestanding spindle of copper-coated cast iron that rises above a memorial "Avenue of the Heroes," might hint at resuscitation and serenity...

...Many of the best avant-garde artists were themselves soldiers, or were sent off to the fronts by their governments to sketch and paint what they saw...

...If a few artists foresaw the coming catastrophe-like the German Expressionist Ludwig Meidner, who in 1913 painted the wickedly prophetic Bombing a City and Apocalyptic Landscape-most were staggered...

...On the contrary, it was in nearly every respect a historical, international affair...

...Impressionism, Expressionism, and the abstract art introduced by Picasso and Braque in the cubist experiments of 1910-often naively attributed to a fundamental improvement in Western culture and civilization-were challenged by the sheer brutality of combat: the frozen ponds of blood, the mortuary trenches, the victories that had all the appearance of slaughterous defeats...

...Now the entire work, A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War, has been handsomely published in an oversized format...

...If Alfred Kubin, revolted by the use of poison gas, could depict the carnage inFrance as a disheveled skeleton wearing sabots and picking at the earth with a shovel (a print from his Dance of Death cycle), his countryman Hans Roehm could turn the German Army into a patriotic Archangel Michael slaying a foreign dragon...

...The saccharine had crumbled into the hopeless...

...In other words, the 9 to 13 million who perished were merely dupes of deceptive salesmanship...

...It overlooks the creation of democracy in Germany, impermanently in 1918 and then more durably after 1945, and the defense of democracy elsewhere: The millions who lost their lives in these struggles were certainly not dupes...

...While such extreme pacifism remains the rage among many German liberals and academics- a consequence of inhumanity and loss still acutely felt after 50 years-it leaves most outsiders bemused...

...Reviewed by Paul Oppenheimer Professor of comparative medieval literature and English, City College of New York...

...Nevertheless, an awesome, ultimately positive meaning can be pieced together from the spilled blood and gassed lungs...

...The shattering conflict of 75 years ago serves implicitly as a case history for pacifism...

...This may be why Picasso, whose reportorial-abstract Guernica lay far in the future, as well as Matisse and Braque, scarcely figure in Cork's lucid account of esthetic transformation...

...Express oneself directly...

...Curators assembled the largest and best collection of modern war art to date-a vast display of contemporaneous paintings, posters, drawings, postcards, sculpture, film clips, and photographs-plus a provocative, lustily illustrated eponymous catalog, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit: Bilder des Ersten Weltkrieges (The Last Days of Mankind: Images of the First World War...

...Not these acquired characteristics, but that which is inborn, instinctive...

...Or Hitler...

...Even Americans aware that their own Civil War, with its repeating rifles, machine guns and troop trains, was the first to mechanize death, or the French remembering how in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-72 besieged, starving Parisians ate giraffes and elephants from the zoo, or Germans still mindful of the 17th-century Thirty Years' War and its atrocious carnage, were astonished by these modern nations that demonized each other and scrambled less after victory than mutual extinction...

...The result, as Cork's book makes plain, was a tortured, humbling transformation of their esthetics...

...Artists who once were bent on turning inward, away from ethical conflict, found themselves exposed to torments that demanded the objectivity of a journalist, or at least the indignation of an embittered editorial cartoonist...

...Not one's taste, or one's upbringing, or one's intelligence, knowledge or skill...

...The Berlin catalog is especially good at showing the propagandistic subtleties of hawkish avant-gardists and commercial artists...

...The nonviolent position be-speaks chilling contradictions...