UC San Diego

My dissertation is a critical analysis of subjectivity and otherness in Der Krieg (The War), German artist Otto Dix’s (1891-1969) 1924 portfolio of etchings based on his tenure in World War I. Comparable only to Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War (Los desastres de la Guerra, 1810-1820) etchings, the breadth and intensity of Der Krieg surpasses the pacifist politics of many of Dix’s contemporaries and engages the images with issues of otherness and the loss of one’s identity in war, encompassing larger issues of visual representation in relation to these experiences. The first war to take an acutely psychological toll on combatants, WWI disrupted conventional modes of expression for artists because of the unprecedented nature and psychical shock of the experience. Dix’s combat experience, coupled with his penchant for physical exaggeration in art and his technical skills, provided him with a unique means of addressing the psychological aspect of the war, the material that proved most problematic to visual representation. With Der Krieg Dix bridges the gap between the inexpressible firsthand experience of war and the visual expression of the experience by manipulating the visual field. Dix transposes the instability of the war onto the image by attacking the conventions of representation without abandoning realism altogether. The human body serves as an index of trauma and dehumanization: of the fifty randomly ordered images that comprise Der Krieg, almost all focus on battle-wearied, injured and dead soldiers and civilians, along with devastated landscapes and makeshift burial sites left in the wake of battles. This study aims to analyze Dix’s visual techniques in order to see how traumatic and unprecedented experiences––that which, by definition, lies outside of representation––can be represented in art and thus better understood by others.