Life & Mortality Quote by Otto Dix

Otto Dix doesn’t posture as a war-haunted innocent; he implicates himself. The blunt repetition of “I had to experience” is less confession than compulsion, as if the only way to earn the right to speak about modern life was to stand close enough to watch it end. “Someone beside me” keeps the scene intimate and interchangeable: a comrade, a stranger, a body that could easily be his. Then the sentence snaps shut on the fact of impact - “squarely” - a word that sounds almost tidy, a grotesque echo of military precision.

The most disturbing line is “I wanted it.” Dix isn’t celebrating death; he’s admitting the fatal magnetism of proximity to it. For an artist formed by World War I, “want” can mean hunger for authenticity, a refusal of salon distance, a desire to see what industrialized violence really looks like when it isn’t filtered through propaganda posters or patriotic myth. It’s also an indictment of the era’s aestheticization of war: the way horror becomes a kind of raw material, a credential, even a thrill.

The closing question - “I’m therefore not a pacifist at all - or am I?” - is the real knife. Pacifism is framed not as a moral label but as a psychological riddle. Dix’s work (and this quote) lives in that contradiction: to document brutality with surgical clarity is to resist it, yet the act of seeking it out risks becoming another form of participation. He leaves the reader stuck where he is: between witness and accomplice, repelled and seduced.