Overview

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.

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9781350015753

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Reviews

In 1916 Otto Schubert, a young German artist, faced a future as chaotic and destructive as the war from which he had returned. His output, dispersed or lost as the result of another war and the vicissitudes of German politics, has now been recovered in this beautiful and moving book. Irene Guenther has brought good luck and careful research to lay bare the artistic achievement of an ordinary man in extraordinary times. -- Hew Strachan, military historian and author of 'The First World War' [The author] has found an ideal way to use microhistory to tell a universal story of young lovers separated by war. The postcards are strikingly beautiful and intimate, and describe sentiments which existed in every combatant army on every single front of the war. -- Jay M. Winter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History, Yale University, US [A] sympathetic biography of the German expressionist artist, Otto Schubert, focusing on his truly outstanding World War I painted postcards sent to his Dresden fiancee. ... Guenther has clearly and profoundly uncovered an important but heretofore neglected artist whose works speak to the universal issues of war and remembrance. A critical art historical and cultural intervention into 20th century German art - and a superb tour de force! -- Marion Deshmukh, Robert T. Hawkes Professor of History, emerita, George Mason University, US

[The author] has found an ideal way to use microhistory to tell a universal story of young lovers separated by war. The postcards are strikingly beautiful and intimate, and describe sentiments which existed in every combatant army on every single front of the war. -- Jay M. Winter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History, Yale University, US

Author Information

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 also the author of Nazi “Chic”? Fashioning Women in the Third Reich.

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