War & Peace Quote by Otto Dix

There is a chilling self-authorization in Dix's logic: war as a chosen laboratory for extremity. He doesn't frame enlistment as duty or patriotism, but as a compulsion to see - to earn firsthand access to the "ghastly, bottomless depths" that polite society keeps abstract. The phrasing turns catastrophe into curriculum. "I have to" is the key; it reads less like bravado than a diagnosis, as if the only honest way to make art (or a self) is to walk straight into the furnace.

The subtext is that representation without exposure is fraud. Dix, a German artist who volunteered in World War I and later became one of the Weimar era's most unsparing witnesses, stakes his credibility on proximity to violence. That impulse helps explain the harsh clarity of his later work: bodies rendered with surgical attention, heroism stripped of its costume, the battlefield treated not as myth but as meat. Volunteering becomes a perverse form of method acting, except the stage is mass industrial killing.

The quote also smuggles in a critique of spectatorship. If the modern world manufactures horror at scale, the artist can either aestheticize it from a safe distance or accept contamination. Dix chooses contamination, and the payoff is moral: his art refuses the sentimental alibi that war is tragic-but-noble. He went looking for the truth and found a truth that permanently disfigures the one who looks.