Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture

1. Imaginings of War: Posters and the Shadow of the Lost Generation

JAY WINTER Imaginings of War: Posters and the Shadow of the Lost Generation n et me open this set of reflections on images of war with the assumption that what people see affects them more than what they read. In wartime, images overwhelm words. This simple fact dominated the most powerful and widely disseminated propaganda campaign to date, elements of which are preserved in collections of poster art in different parts of the world. Collections of World War I posters provide a window onto a world that has largely vanished, but it has left behind so many iconic images that when we see them, we conjure up an entire set of representations of war. It is these that frame what Samuel Hynes has called our “war in the head,” our mental furniture on which perch our images of war. These images are not memories—we were not there—but they are representations of the memories of others who were there. Many of those who designed posters brought to the task personal experiences and recollections. Many of those who viewed them during the war certainly linked them to memories of a personal kind. Now all we have are the traces of those memories, fixed onto canvas and paper, deposited in libraries and archives from the Hoover Institution in Stanford to the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte in Stuttgart and beyond. They conjure up second-order memories, our understandings of how the men and women of the Great War imagined and remembered the upheaval through which they lived. Like all representations, posters have a life history. Their meanings are never fixed for all time. I want to offer an interpretation of some of these documents first in terms of a semiotics of solidarity. Posters were, I believe, a reflection rather than a cause of national unity in the First World War. I then describe a number of other ways in which societies at war, civilians and soldiers alike, imagined war, conjured up its dimensions and texture, and by and large justified its continuation , despite casualty levels the world had never seen before. Given the rich trove of images we find in World War I posters, I want to turn to a puzzling question. What happened to this grammar of consent in subsequent years and decades? Why, in the Second World War, were such images generally absent from poster art or indeed from broader imaginings of war? I propose an answer to this question, and thereby conclude that many poster images help us see aspects of the disenchantment of the twentieth century—the progressive retreat from these representations of war and warriors into more complex and compromised images. And this is not even to broach the topic of what images of Auschwitz and Hiroshima did to representations of war. In sum, what we of a later generation are left with is a mixed and shifting landscape of imaginings of war: some still heroic, others negative, troubled, unresolved, unsettled. And so it is bound to be, since that moral conundrum—how to imagine war without glorifying it—is with us still. Social Representations of War before 1914 Posters are social representations of combat, combatants, and causes. As such in Britain they drew upon popular ideas of combat in a country with a formidable naval tradition but nothing 38 JAY WINTER IMAGININGS OF WAR 39 remotely resembling what on the Continent is called “militarism .” Militarism is the elevation and celebration of military virtues and values as admirable principles of national life. Generals on horseback stride across Europe throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, but they had virtually no place in British political culture in 1914. Militarism was alive in British culture, though not primarily in Britain. The scarcely veiled iron fist of British power was evident in India, in Egypt, and, though battered by a relatively small force of Boer farmers, in South Africa. British power was a force of repression closer to home, too. In Dublin, the second city of the British Empire, the British Army was a force resented by a small but stubborn Republican movement. When Home Rule for Ireland became a real possibility, Protestants in the British Army made their displeasure known, but as usual, what applied to Ireland had little bearing on popular attitudes in mainland Britain. Ireland was always a world apart. And no one in Britain clamored for the army to clean up the...