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Chapter ID: CBB213575422

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

Kaufmann, Doris (Author)

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

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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.

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

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