Chapter ID: CBB213575422

“Gas, Gas, Gaas!” The Poison Gas War in the Literature and Visual Arts of Interwar Europe (2017)

unapi

Kaufmann, Doris (Author)


Springer International
Pages: 169-187
Publication date: 2017
Language: English


The gas attacks during the First World War stood for a new kind of warfare and shaped the soldiers’ experience of living through an apocalypse never before imagined. This article examines the literary and artistic topics and forms used to express this ordeal by German, British and French writers, poets and painters, the majority of whom had fought in the war. There are striking similarities in their representation of the gas war: the impersonality of this enemy, the feeling of helplessness in gas attacks, the shock of seeing one’s comrades “guttering, choking, drowning” and not least the exposure to an infernal landscape. Nearly all of the authors and painters condemned the waste and pointlessness of the ongoing or past war, but their vision of the future often differed according to their national background. The second part of this article addresses the public battle over the interpretation and collective remembrance in the war’s aftermath. Particularly at the end of the 1920s, a wave of publications mainly in England and Germany displayed a renewed public interest in the preceding war. The written recollections and paintings of the gas warfare played a significant role here.

...More
Included in

Book Bretislav Friedrich; Dieter Hoffmann; Jürgen Renn; Florian Schmaltz; Martin Wolf (2017) One Hundred Years of Chemical Warfare: Research, Deployment, Consequences. unapi

Citation URI
data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB213575422

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Similar Citations

Chapter Ulf Schmidt; (2017)
Preparing for Poison Warfare: The Ethics and Politics of Britain’s Chemical Weapons Program, 1915–1945 unapi

Chapter Miloš Vec; (2017)
Challenging the Laws of War by Technology, Blazing Nationalism and Militarism: Debating Chemical Warfare Before and After Ypres, 1899–1925 unapi

Article Ivan Martines; (2021)
Ciência e Ética: Fritz Haber e a Guerra Química unapi

Chapter Jeffrey Allan Johnson; (2017)
Military-Industrial Interactions in the Development of Chemical Warfare, 1914–1918: Comparing National Cases Within the Technological System of the Great War unapi

Article Reed, Peter; (2015)
Making War Work for Industry: The United Alkali Company's Central Laboratory During World War One unapi

Book Johnson, Jeffrey Allan; MacLeod, Roy M.; (2006)
Frontline and Factory: Comparative Perspectives on the Chemical Industry at War, 1914--1924 unapi

Article Tanaka, Hiroaki; (2011)
A History of Japanese Poison Gas Warfare unapi

Article Ede, Andrew; (2002)
The Natural Defense of a Scientific People: The Public Debate over Chemical Warfare in Post-WWI America unapi

Chapter Edward M. Spiers; (2017)
The Gas War, 1915–1918: If not a War Winner, Hardly a Failure unapi

Book Palazzo, Albert; (2000)
Seeking Victory on the Western Front: The British Army and Chemical Warfare in World War I unapi

Article Vilensky, Joel A.; Sinish, Pandy R.; (2006)
Blisters as Weapons of War: The Vesicants of World War I unapi

Book Susan R. Grayzel; (2022)
The Age of the Gas Mask: How British Civilians Faced the Terrors of Total War unapi

Book Russell, Edmund; (2001)
War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring unapi

Article Sheffy, Yigal; (2009)
Chemical Warfare and the Palestine Campaign, 1916--1918 unapi

Article Van der Kloot, William; (2004)
April 1915: Five Future Nobel Prize-Winners Inaugurate Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Academic-Industrial-Military Complex unapi

Book Peter Thompson; (2023)
The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany: Visions of Chemical Modernity unapi

Book Micale, Mark S.; (2004)
The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880-1940 unapi

Book Michael Boulter; (2018)
Bloomsbury Scientists: Science and Art in the Wake of Darwin unapi

Chapter Bretislav Friedrich; Jeremiah James; (2017)
From Berlin-Dahlem to the Fronts of World War I: The Role of Fritz Haber and His Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in German Chemical Warfare unapi

Article Peter Thompson; (2017)
The chemical subject: phenomenology and German encounters with the gas mask in the World War I unapi

Authors & Contributors
Johnson, Jeffrey Allan
Peter B. Thompson
Ede, Andrew G.
Friedrich, Bretislav
Kloot, William Van der
MacLeod, Roy M.
Journals
Ambix: Journal of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry
Bulletin for the History of Chemistry
Chemical Heritage
Circumscribere: International Journal for the History of Science
History and Technology
Journal of Military History
Publishers
Springer International
Cambridge University Press
Springer
Stanford University Press
UCL Press
University of Nebraska Press
Concepts
World War I
Chemical warfare
Science and war; science and the military
Technology and war; technology and the military
Chemistry
World War II
People
Haber, Fritz
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
Places
Great Britain
Germany
United States
Berlin (Germany)
Ottoman Empire
Europe
Institutions
Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für physikalische Chemie und Electrochemie
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment