Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture

3. Chivalrous Knights versus Iron Warriors: Representations of the Battle of Matériel and Slaughter in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940

STEFAN GOEBEL Chivalrous Knights versus Iron Warriors: Representations of the Battle of Matériel and Slaughter in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940 n he First World War marked a turning point in the history of military conflict. The Great War of 1914–18 was not only the bloodiest but also the first industrialized mass war the world had seen. In the military service of Britain and Germany alone, three million men died; many of them were killed by machine-gun bullets and artillery shrapnel.1 In this essay I examine and compare how these two outstanding features of the First World War—the enormous bloodshed on the one hand and the battle of matériel on the other—were culturally reconfigured in Britain and Germany during and after the 1914–18 conflict. I argue that the endurance test of the Materialschlacht and the soldier’s “experience” of war dominated German representations, whereas British imaginings focused on the slaughter and the soldier’s conduct in war. Interestingly, Britons and Germans mobilized an almost identical visual imagery to represent these two sides of the same coin: medievalist images of knights in armor proliferated in both countries, but the same iconography carried fundamentally different meanings in Britain and Germany.2 While images of iron warriors helped to accommodate the shocking and novel experience of industrialized mass warfare in Germany, in Britain representations 80 STEFAN GOEBEL of chivalrous knights were employed to legitimize the carnage and to restore a sense of moral superiority. This preliminary finding poses a methodological challenge to the study of visual images in the era of the Great War. Iconographic evidence examined in isolation can be misleading. In order to appreciate delicate nuances of representation in Britain and Germany, visual images of knights in armor need to be located in their respective cultural settings. In this essay I pay particular attention to the contexts that connected the visual and linguistic fields, concentrating on the process of memorialization in the aftermath of the Great War. War memorials combined visual with discursive and performative modes of representation; their iconography was incomplete without public rituals and rhetoric and vice versa. Memorial designs required interpretation, and agents of remembrance were anxious to clear up any ambiguities in the preliminary discussions, unveiling speeches, and newspaper articles.3 Such representations of war were, of course, embedded in a longer tradition. Apart from sources relating directly to the construction and reception of war memorials, I also read memorials in relation to other visual objects that shaped commemorations, notably wartime poster art and picture postcards (both bearing the stamp of nineteenth-century medievalism), which function as what Daniel Sherman calls “registers of experience.”4 The imagery of visual propaganda, once freed from its wartime aggressiveness, offered a template or repository of images for the construction of memorials and memory after the catastrophe of 1914–18. Representations of the Materialschlacht: Germany’s Iron Warriors The German dream of a crushing military victory in the early stages of the war failed to materialize. Commentators thus had to adjust their language to the reality of a stalemate. Notations CHIVALROUS KNIGHTS VERSUS IRON WARRIORS 81 of holding out or resilience instead of advance proliferated by 1915: “In the east and west, in the north and south we clench our enemies with an iron fist.”5 To be sure, the Russian retreat from Poland in summer 1915 aroused new excitement. Germans at home imagined that the Imperial “mailed fist hovered menacingly in the air for the ultimate, crushing blow.”6 The “iron fist”—an implicit reference to the story of Reich Knight Götz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand (thus the title of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s drama)—was firmly established in the corpus of propaganda. It symbolized the army’s unbreakable determination to resist the enemy attack and to achieve a lasting “peace.” “This is the way to peace—the enemy wills it so!” reads a 1918 poster by Lucian Bernhard advertising war loans. It depicted a clenched mailed fist as a symbol of somber resolve (fig. 13).7 Propaganda of this kind backfired on the Kaiserreich . Abroad, the image of the iron fist—dating back to Wilhelm II’s infamous “mailed fist speech” on the German occupation of Tsingtau in 1897—was identified with German barbarism. “Have you read the Kaiser’s speeches? . . . They are full of the glitter and bluster of...