"As a young man you don't notice at all that you were, after all, badly affected. For years afterwards, at least ten years, I kept getting these dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, along passages I could hardly get through"
About this Quote
Trauma shows up here not as a dramatic confession but as an almost bureaucratic delay: you "don't notice at all" you were damaged until the body starts filing its complaints years later. Otto Dix, a veteran who turned the First World War into one of modern art's ugliest and most necessary archives, is describing the psychic lag between surviving and living. The sentence structure does the work. It begins breezily, even defensively, then lands on a blunt time stamp: "at least ten years". That specificity punctures any romantic myth of the young soldier as resilient by default.
The recurring dream is pure Dix: architectural, physical, claustrophobic. He doesn't say "I was scared" or "I felt guilty". He gives an obstacle course of rubble and tight passages, an embodied metaphor for memory itself. The ruined houses read like the shattered European homefront and the ruined body politic of the Weimar years, but also like the inner life after mechanized slaughter: no open vistas, no clean exits, only constriction. "Crawl" is the key verb. It's animal, undignified, a reversal of heroic posture. Even in sleep he's reduced to survival movement.
In Dix's paintings and prints, war isn't an event you process; it's a habitat you keep moving through. The intent isn't to moralize but to testify with brutal clarity: the war keeps renovating the mind long after the armistice, turning everyday consciousness into a corridor you can barely fit through.
The recurring dream is pure Dix: architectural, physical, claustrophobic. He doesn't say "I was scared" or "I felt guilty". He gives an obstacle course of rubble and tight passages, an embodied metaphor for memory itself. The ruined houses read like the shattered European homefront and the ruined body politic of the Weimar years, but also like the inner life after mechanized slaughter: no open vistas, no clean exits, only constriction. "Crawl" is the key verb. It's animal, undignified, a reversal of heroic posture. Even in sleep he's reduced to survival movement.
In Dix's paintings and prints, war isn't an event you process; it's a habitat you keep moving through. The intent isn't to moralize but to testify with brutal clarity: the war keeps renovating the mind long after the armistice, turning everyday consciousness into a corridor you can barely fit through.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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