"People were already beginning to forget, what horrible suffering the war had brought them. I did not want to cause fear and panic, but to let people know how dreadful war is and so to stimulate people's powers of resistance"
About this Quote
Memory fades fast; Otto Dix is furious about it. The quote reads like a manifesto for an artist who saw World War I not as a chapter in national myth but as an injury that keeps reopening. Dix isn’t trying to “raise awareness” in the soft, contemporary sense. He’s describing a deliberate aesthetic strategy: to jolt civilians out of the comfort of forgetting without tipping them into paralysis. That tension - refuse panic, provoke resistance - is the tightrope of political art when the subject is mass death.
The subtext is a rebuke to postwar normalization. Germany in the 1920s was busy with survival and distraction, and later with narratives that tried to metabolize defeat into grievance or glory. Dix recognizes the danger in that drift: when suffering is abstracted, war becomes thinkable again, even seductive. His phrasing implies that forgetting isn’t neutral; it’s the first stage of repetition.
Context matters because Dix’s work (especially the etchings of Der Krieg and the brutal realism of his portraits) doesn’t offer catharsis. It offers evidence. He renders bodies and landscapes as damaged material, insisting that the viewer confront the physical cost of ideology. The intent isn’t moral purity; it’s inoculation. Show the wound so the next generation resists the rhetoric that romanticizes it.
There’s also an artist’s humility here: he can’t legislate peace, but he can sabotage the lies that make war feel clean. In a culture always tempted by heroic framing, Dix chooses disgust as civic education.
The subtext is a rebuke to postwar normalization. Germany in the 1920s was busy with survival and distraction, and later with narratives that tried to metabolize defeat into grievance or glory. Dix recognizes the danger in that drift: when suffering is abstracted, war becomes thinkable again, even seductive. His phrasing implies that forgetting isn’t neutral; it’s the first stage of repetition.
Context matters because Dix’s work (especially the etchings of Der Krieg and the brutal realism of his portraits) doesn’t offer catharsis. It offers evidence. He renders bodies and landscapes as damaged material, insisting that the viewer confront the physical cost of ideology. The intent isn’t moral purity; it’s inoculation. Show the wound so the next generation resists the rhetoric that romanticizes it.
There’s also an artist’s humility here: he can’t legislate peace, but he can sabotage the lies that make war feel clean. In a culture always tempted by heroic framing, Dix chooses disgust as civic education.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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