Limbs at War: Amputation, Mutilation and Paralysis – Wilfred Owen, Blaise Cendrars and D.H. Lawrence.
“We are among the ruins” (LCL 5), the narrator of Lady Chatterley’s Lover asserts at the beginning of the novel. If this postwar outlook obviously refers to the economic, political, social and moral situation of Europe, the ruins were also significantly individual: shell-shock (as Rebecca West depicts in The Return of the Soldier), disfigurement (notably represented in Henry Tonks’s paintings) and, what will be analyzed here, dismemberment, were particularly striking and new. The new war mach...
The Rhetoric of Disfigurement in First World War Britain
Summary During the First World War, the horror of facial mutilation was evoked in journalism, poems, memoirs and fiction; but in Britain it was almost never represented visually outside the professional contexts of clinical medicine and medical history. This article asks why, and offers an account of British visual culture in which visual anxiety and aversion are of central importance. By comparing the rhetoric of disfigurement to the parallel treatment of amputees, an asymmetrical picture emerges in which the ‘worst loss of all’—the loss of one's face—is perceived as a loss of humanity. The only hope was surgery or, if that failed, prosthetic repair: innovations that were often wildly exaggerated in the popular press. Francis Derwent Wood was one of several sculptors whose technical skill and artistic ‘wizardry’ played a part in the improvised reconstruction of identity and humanity.
Cultural Battlegrounds: Weimar Photographic Narratives of War
At the height of commemorative activities in Germany in the "antiwar year" of 1924, the tenth anniversary of war mobilization, the anarcho-pacifist propagandist Ernst Friedrich founded the International Antiwar Museum in Berlin and published his photographic narrative Krieg dem Kriege! [War Against War]. When images from the book were publicly displayed in his bookstore window, Berlin police stormed the premises and confiscated them at bayonet point. Other bookstore owners who displayed images from Friedrich's book were similarly harrassed or arrested, encouraged by patriotic veterans' organizations who called for banning the book. Friedrich's use of war photographs was part of a larger antiwar visual campaign that included paintings, graphic portfolios, art and photography exhibitions. The antimilitarist visual campaign coincided with public revelations of Germany's secret rearmament program and the organization of a new secret army, the Black Reichswehr. By 1925, however, with the defeat of working-class rebellions and the relative stabilization of the economy, the organized pacifist movement was politically contained by the ruling Social Democrats and effectively moribund; war imagery shifted dramatically away from antiwar statements in graphic art and painting toward heroic imagery in hugely popular patriotic photography albums. Friedrich's visual strategy depended primarily on an identification of the viewer with the humanist image of the suffering soldier as a universal subject. Like other pacifists, he attempted to convey a picture of war that called forth visions of mutilation and meaningless death, shattered