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, Postcards from the Trenches 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. **Please note that this will work best on a colour device**

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, Postcards from the Trenches 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. **Please note that this will work best on a colour device**

The unprecedented magnitude of death during World War I forever altered how people perceived their world and how they represented those perceptions. In Postcards from the Trenches, Allyson Booth traces the complex relationship between British Great War culture and modernist writings. She shows that, through the experience of the Great War, both civilian and combatant modernist writers found that language could no longer represent experience. She goes on to identify and contextualize several of the resulting modernist tropes: she links the dissolving modernist self to soldiers' familiarity with corpses, the modernist mistrust of factuality to the apparent inaccessibility of facts regarding the "rape of Belgium," and the modernist interest in multiple viewpoints to the singularity of perspective with which generals studied battlefield maps. Though her emphasis is on literary works by Robert Graves, E.M. Forster, and Vera Brittain, among others, Booth's analysis extends to memorials, posters, and architecture of the Great War. This interdisciplinary quality of Booth's study results in a much deeper understanding of how the Great War affected cultural representations and how that culture represented the War.

She links, for example, the modernist representation of an unstable self to soldiers' familiarity with corpses, the modernist mistrust for fact to the competing nationalist discourses of August 1914, and the modernist description of buildings as having shaken off the past to a desire to forget the war. Booth argues that the dislocations of war often figure centrally in modernist forms even when the war itself seems peripheral to modernist content.

The First World War was unique in being fought largely in trenches. Men ate, slept, fought, played, sang, prayed, and died in the trenches. This book brings together a collection of postcards which portray this strange subterranean world in its various manifestations.The cards have been selected to show how life progressed from day to day in and out of the trenches. We see wounded men smiling obligingly for the camera; others appear to be suffering from the onslaught of boredom. Some take part in a mock party with very meagre provisions. One image shows a group of men kneeling to receive communion before going into battle.The tone of postcards encompasses the range of human experience, from sombre realism to light-hearted humour. There is also the soldier's good-natured lightly smutty card.This is a fascinating insight into the everyday lives and behaviour of the men who fought one of the most gruesome wars in history.