JF Ptak Science Books Post 2789
This extraordinary photograph shows prisoners of war taken by the German army near Chauny-Coucy-le-Chateau and published in the unblinking photographic history of WWI by Hermann Rex called Der Weltkrieg in Seiner Rauhen Wirklichtkeit (printed by Herman Rutz in Oberammergau eight years after the end of the war). It is unusual to my experience to see a work like this with such an unofficial character to it. During the War the U.S. population was mostly given approved photos of the conflict, passed through censors and for the large part made by photographic pools (with ready-made captions for publication). The German side of photos in the popular press seems to me to have been grittier--this is hardly an academic appraisal, though I have leafed through every page of the war years for several journals like The Illustrated London News and Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig), and that is the general sense that I take away with me. The work by Herr Rex is about 600pp long, and if you work your way through the whole thing in an hour, it is a somewhat exhausting experience. Unlike most work that was done during the war, this book has a definite you-are-there quality to it, and is in many parts aggressively observational.
The 13 soldiers were British and French including several French Colonial soldiers (differentiated by Rex as "weisse und farbige ")--they represent .0000016% of the 8,000,000 prisoners taken on all sides during the course of the war):
Also, here's the very striking cover for this book--its one you won't soon forget:
Another image from the same source shows the movement of a large number of French prisoners--another photo of dense humanity:
And this extraordinary photo showing 5,000 German prisoners (or .000625% of the total number of POWs 1914-1918):
This is not a war-as-glorious sort of book, though I'm not so sure that it is necessarily/overtly an anti-war Johnny Got his Gun book, either; at least not so much as Ernst Friedrich's definitely anti-war book Krieg dem Krieg! ("War Against War!") that appeared on the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the war and which was badly received by Weimar officialdom. The 200 or so photos in the Friedrich book are exactly those that would never have been published during the war, especially in the ending sequence that shows very disturbing facial wounds. The overall effect of Rex's book--not nearly at the same level of Friedrich's--is very effective, and definitely does not fill you with the spirit to sit down and wrap up your leggings to join your comrades in a trench.
Comments