The only known copy of this poster is in the possession of the French Government, as evidence of German iniquity for which reparation must be exacted. It is worth noting that all these proclamations are rude specimens of typography, a fact indicating the difficulty which the Germans had in getting them printed.
When we pass to the pictorial posters of Germany and Austro-Hungary, we find that the Central Empires, like ourselves and our Allies, found the necessity for a constant stream of posters appealing to their peoples for aid in men and money for the prosecution of the War and for stimulating love of country as expressed in the resolution and determination to hold out to the last. But though the nature of the national appeals are akin, the posters of Germany and Austro-Hungary (we need scarcely continue to distinguish between them) disclose the varying national temperament and idiosyncrasy.
Since the days of Dürer and Holbein, Germany has been barren in pictorial art. In all her applied arts, as well as in her graphic arts, she has followed a policy of skilful adaptation, borrowing and remoulding on more economic lines the best products of other countries.[2] On the one hand—in the years before the war—the sanest British methods of typography and book production were deliberately imported into Germany; on the other hand, the most freakish of cubist and vorticist paintings found in Germany their principal buyers. If any note was added to what she adapted, it was that of an additional violence—the open assertion of Germany’s idea that “force is beauty.”
The war posters of Germany act as a mirror to German mentality. They dwell chiefly on one thing—force. Subjects and treatment are often crude and brutal, marked by a scorn and avoidance of human sympathy. Here and there we find a certain sensuous beauty, but, as a rule, they look on life with a coldness that is almost cynicism, an impassiveness that is nearer cruelty than pity. The remotest student could deduce a clear idea of the enormous gulf that lies between the national temperament of Germany and of France by a comparison of the posters of Engelhard, Leonard, and Erler with those of Steinlen, Faivre, Roll, Poulbot, and Willette.
But when all that is said, one has to admit that the German, above all others, does grasp the essential value of the poster as a means to an end. He realises that in the best poster there must be something of what was aimed at in the Post-Impressionist movement in painting, a desire for summarised form, strong and simplified line, and the reduction of tones to an arbitrary convention. And though we have used the word “Post-Impressionism,” we are only suggesting that the poster should accomplish what the stained-glass window at its best—with a religious instead of propagandist or commercial purpose—accomplished five hundred years ago. While the British poster must see everything in the round, must try to reproduce all that is intensely obvious in the varied texture and material pageantry and inexhaustible colouring of life, Germany is rightly content to be deliberately abstract, to seek the common factors from what is large and general, and to endeavour to find symbols to express ideas. She is not concerned with the pursuit of spiritual or physical beauty, but with a striking novelty or decorative composition. The colour schemes of the German posters are more curious and insistent than attractive, but they do possess that knock-down force which, after all, is the object of a poster. Its pictorial quality is a secondary matter; if it is a fine piece of wall decoration that one would like to live with, so much the better; but its function is to arrest and to make itself remembered. Indeed, the poster must be like a beacon set on a hill to which all eyes must go, all roads must seem inevitably to lead. The beacon is a flare in the night; the poster must act as a flare in the day.
The famous sentence from the Academy discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, which is inscribed as a motto over the entrance to the Victoria and Albert Museum—a sentence much quoted during the Victorian era, but in these latter days perhaps little regarded—may be applied to the poster equally as to more durable and delightful works: “The excellence of every art must consist in the complete accomplishment of its purpose.” If the poster which accomplishes its purpose is indeed the most “artistic,” then Germany excels in the artistic poster. It may be brutal, it may be ugly, it may even shock and repel; but there is always in the best examples, instinct in their very conception, a definite purpose which gains full expression, because the artist has been trained to limit himself to what he has to say, and to say that with all his might.
The illustrations to this volume include work by several of the German poster artists, which, symptomatic of the whole, will serve to illustrate the foregoing remarks. Mention has already been made in the section dealing with British posters of the strong, rugged simplicity of Louis Oppenheim’s “Hindenburg.” The artist has in this most successfully imposed upon the spectator, not the bolstered-up individual of real life, but the strong, massive calm we seek for in the ideal leader, the man in whom we can place entire confidence. It is thus, in addition to being a successful poster, a piece of successful propaganda. But as its strength is in its reserve and the quiet it imposes, so in Engelhard you get passion released and surging over the onlooker with its flood of hatred. His “Nein! Niemals!” (illustration No. [43]) is a powerful instance of this. It is almost impossible to look at the grasping, claw-like hands and ravenous face without a fury of hate, and a realisation of how Germany mastered her people. “Elend und Untergang folgen der Anarchie” (Misery and Destruction follow Anarchy), a poster of the German Revolution by the same artist, is another example of intense force, but this time, for all the brutality of the bestial gorilla figure, wonderfully held in reserve and simple. Bearing a curious comparison with the Czecho-Slovak posters by Preissig, published in New York during the last stages of the War, is the German War Loan poster (illustration No. [35], used also as a design for the back of the cover) by Otto Leonard, “Zereisst Englands Macht” (Rend England’s Might). Wohlfeld’s poster appealing for women’s hair, which is reproduced as a frontispiece, and the poster of the Ludendorff Fund for those disabled by the War (illustration No. [46]), show other phases of strength and reserve equally good in their way.
The poster used for the front cover of this book is, apart from its own intrinsic merit, a matter of historical interest, insomuch as it served as a figure in the notorious speech to the German National Assembly at Berlin on May 12, 1919, when the peace terms had been handed to the plenipotentiaries at Versailles. Herr Scheidemann in the course of his denunciation of the Allies’ terms said:
“Ladies and Gentlemen,—All over Berlin we see posters which are intended to arouse a practical love for our brothers in captivity; sad, hopeless faces behind prison bars. That is the proper frontispiece for the so-called Peace Treaty; that is the true portrait of Germany’s future: sixty millions behind barbed wire and prison bars; sixty millions at hard labour, for whom the enemy will make their own land a prison camp.”
The Austrian poster artists, Krafter, Arpellus, and Puchinger, did important work, examples of which are reproduced in this book; but several of the Hungarian artists, in particular, did distinguished posters, as will be seen by a reference to illustration No. [41], that by Biró, No. [57], and the little group by Biró and Kurthy, Nos. [59], [61], and [62].