Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture

Introduction: Reading World War I Posters

PEARL JAMES Introduction: Reading World War I Posters he First World War (1914–18) was the first fully modern war: it was waged by industrialized nations with arsenals that included machine guns, long-range artillery, submarines , airplanes, tanks, and mass-produced industrial goods. It was publicized in daily newspapers and documented with the modern technologies of photography and motion film. It was also the first “total” war, waged not just by soldiers conscripted en masse but by whole populations of men, women, and children on what came to be called the home front. While our own historical vantage point dictates that we view the war with the knowledge of all it unleashed and bequeathed, it must also be situated on a continuum with an earlier phase. Many of the conditions that the war brought to a focal point had been growing aspects of European life for a century— industrialization, urbanization, the rise of mass media, and increasing centralization of national powers and identities. The war grew out of a long nineteenth century and was waged with nineteenth-century notions and cultural assumptions. Those who volunteered or were conscripted into armies had been born in a time of peace; for them, war had mostly been reported from imperial provinces. Third Republic France, Czarist Russia , Imperial Germany, and Victorian England all entered the 2 PEARL JAMES war with a host of cultural certainties in place. Paul Fussell’s by now aphoristic description of the prewar world as one of “prevailing innocence,” in which “traditional moral action” could be “delineated in traditional moral language” reminds us that the war unfolded in an essentially nineteenth-century cultural landscape.1 Mass-produced, full-color, large-format war posters are at the crux of this contradiction. They were both signs and instruments of two modern innovations in warfare—the military deployment of modern technology and the development of the home front. In some ways the medium of the war poster epitomizes the modernity of the conflict. In addition to being sent to the front, they reached mass numbers of people in every combatant nation, serving to unite diverse populations as simultaneous viewers of the same images and to bring them closer, in an imaginary yet powerful way, to the war. Posters nationalized, mobilized, and modernized civilian populations. Through the viewing of posters, factory work, agricultural work, and domestic work, the consumption and conservation of goods, and various kinds of leisure all became emblematic of one’s national identity and one’s place within a collective effort to win the war. It was in part by looking at posters that citizens learned to see themselves as members of the home front. Yet for all their newness, war posters constituted a political adaptation of a medium that already pervaded European cityscapes . They presuppose “the modern concept of the public— in which the members of a society are defined primarily as spectators and consumers” and imply an “urban, public space” that had already become “an arena of signs: the image- and wordchoked façades and surfaces of the great modern cities.”2 War posters reflect the period’s confusion of traditions and modernity . In war posters new national identities coalesce around nostalgic visions of the past. Women wear both traditional and INTRODUCTION 3 nontraditional guises, appearing as old-fashioned mothers, wives, and damsels in distress but also as nurses, drivers, and munitions workers. Depictions of imperial subjects conform to some racial hierarchies but challenge others. Posters proffer a complex blend of folk art, traditional “high” art, and slick advertising sense. War put pressure on longstanding cultural traditions (the family, sentimentalism, the military hero, to name a few). Properly viewed, posters record both traditions and the pressures impinging upon them. These Janus-faced images look back to nineteenth-century empires and forward to modern bureaucratic nation-states. Posters were “the medium for the construction of a pictorial rhetoric of . . . national identities”—identities upon which the waging of war hinged.3 They not only functioned as illustrations of the war in popular understanding but also had an impact on the facts of the war, including its duration and its reach. Without the consent and material support of the home front, combatant nations would not have been able to sustain the huge losses a four-year war of attrition entailed. These posters are preserved in several private collections and institutional archives in every combatant nation, and since...