The Aesthetics of Loss: German Women’s Art of the First World War by Claudia Siebrecht (review)

This book studies the trajectory of the work of more than thirty women artists in wartime Germany. They began in the tradition of patriotic mobilization and the stoical acceptance of the deaths of their loved ones. By the end of the war, their work expressed ambivalence about the war, and they constructed an image of women as bereaved and suffering mothers. Some arrived at a notion of redemptive sacrifice, which they tried to express in their visual representations of victimhood. Others could not stay within conventional boundaries and took on a more political and critical social role. The author has analyzed a vast body of material, both in written and in visual archives, which supports her claim that she has uncovered a part of the female experience of war which—until now by and large—has escaped historians. This book adds to the cultural history of war by documenting visually the passage from imagining war as a masculine effort to emphasizing civilian trauma in wartime, especially that of women devastated by the massive casualties of the conflict. Once representations of war became detached from a sole focus on what Edmund Wilson termed masculine Patriotic Gore (1962), it became possible for many people then and now to see it in a new way. Re-gendering suffering in wartime, these women artists both drew on earlier tropes derived from Christian tradition—in particular that concerning Stabat Mater, a medieval Catholic hymn to Mary as the “Sorrowful Mother” of Jesus—and helped undermine the redemptive message of many of these Christian motifs.

Drawing on notions of performativity and the construction of multiple identities through the creative arts, written or visual, Siebrecht also contributes to both the history of what we now term testimonial literature in visual form. She goes beyond the old debate between the traditional and modern to show how elements of both were combined to enable women to express their grief at the bloodbath of the war, to establish a distinctive role in wartime society as females and particularly as mothers in mourning, and in some cases to use art to try to transcend grief and to give some kind of meaning to loss of life in wartime.

I have a different point of view from Siebrecht on the use by Helmut Kohl of Käthe Kollwitz’s Pietà, symbolizing loss of life in wartime, in the Neue Wache in Berlin in 1993. She sees the controversy surrounding this incident as indicating “a change in German memories of war” (300). Following Reinhart Kosseleck’s article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 8 April 1993 entitled “Bilderverbot. Welches Totengedenken?” (3), I still believe that the adoption of Kollwitz’s work to represent the victims of both Nazism and communism was an indefensible conflation of the two groups of victims. In addition, Kohl’s use of the Kollwitz Pietà, ballooned to fit the site, created a monument that had no place whatsoever for Jewish remembrance of the Holocaust. Thus to use this form, at a site of political and military significance in Berlin, was to Christianize German mourning practices and to add insult to injury for Jews and others on a grand scale. To equate the Holocaust with the crimes of the East German regime is indefensible. Siebrecht does not defend Kohl here; she uses the incident as an instance of her central argument about how women managed to escape from being limited symbolically to the role of patriotic stoicism to which they were assigned by German society in 1914. By choosing this symbol of women’s suffering as a national symbol, Kohl underwrote the exclusion of Jewish suffering from the story of German suffering in the twentieth century. That was a high price to pay for the admission of mothers in mourning to the national pantheon of representations of war.

Siebrecht’s achievement is to show...