Postcards from the Trenches

German art student Otto Schubert was 22 years old when he was drafted into the Great War. As the conflict unfolded, he painted a series of postcards that he sent to his sweetheart, Irma. During the battles of Ypres and Verdun, Schubert filled dozens of military-issued 4' x 6' cards with vivid images depicting the daily realities and tragedies of war. Beautifully illustrated with full-color reproductions of his exquisite postcards, as well as his wartime sketches, woodcuts, and two lithograph portfolios, is Schubert's war diary, love journal, and life story. His powerful artworks illuminate and document in a visual language the truths of war. Postcards from the Trenches offers the first full account of Otto Schubert, soldier-artist of the Great War, rising art star in the 1920s, prolific graphic artist and book illustrator, one of the 'degenerate' artists defamed by the Nazis, and a man shattered by the Second World War and the Cold War. Created in the midst of enormous devastation, Schubert's haunting visual missives are as powerful and relevant today as they were a century ago. His postcards are both a young man's token of love and longing and a soldier's testimony of the Great War.

This book on the wartime postcards of a German artist who served on the battlefield deals with a compelling but under-researched subject in art-historical scholarship [An] intimate, personal account of the Great War frontline experience. The postcards themselves are poignantly beautiful objects, and this work will finally bring to a wider readership the work of a key German war artist.

Vorwort
A German soldier's intimate view of the First World War, told through a series of hand-painted post-cards sent from the trenches by an important German artist to his sweetheart.

Autorentext
Irene Guenther is Instructional Professor of 20th-century European and American History at The Honors College, University of Houston, USA and recipient of the University of Houston's Provost Teaching Excellence Award and The Honors College Student Board's Distinguished Teaching Award. She is the author of Postcards from the Trenches: A German Soldier's Testimony of the Great War and Nazi Chic? Fashioning Women in the Third Reich.

Inhalt

Acknowledgments
Preface

1. The Great War and the Uses of Art
2. German Artists and the Great War

3. The Life and Art of Otto Schubert
   Postscript
   The Artworks

   List of Illustrations
   Endnotes
   Bibliography
   Index