Paul Fox's study, which takes a longue-durée approach to popular representations of Prusso-German militarism, tracing continuities from the mid-nineteenth century to the interwar period, purports to break substantial new ground. Fox contends that images of the German military which were marketed for consumption by the general public, such as illustrated histories, postcards, posters, and photobooks, as well as drawings and artworks, form a coherent corpus that has never previously been subjected to sustained analysis due to the ostensibly “unpalatable” and “unfashionable” nature of its themes (20). Fox blames the prevalent art-historical preoccupation with European modernism and its depictions of alienation, alterity, and trauma for this long-standing lacuna, asserting that such categories are unhelpful when it comes to analyzing mainstream cultural militarism because they “[privilege] dissent without ever taking seriously what it was that was being dissented from” (9). Siting his inquiry within a broad spectrum of subfields, including memory studies, military philosophies, and theories of identity and performativity, he seeks to lay bare “discernible aesthetic and rhetorical codes, extending to dominant visual tropes, which served to shape, police and affirm judgments about what how [sic] a ‘real German’ at war ought to behave, and what that implied about wider German identity and territorial integrity” (7).
The sources that Fox explores potentially encompass all forms of martial combat, including counter-insurgency and futuristic imaginings of mechanized warfare, providing a generalizable mapping of that “cultural patterning” that supposedly inculcated belief in a specifically German way of war, “characterised by an overweening will to battle, manifest in the translation of the military commander's intent into offensive action” (2). Yet his analysis focuses for the most part on two nineteenth-century illustrated histories, by Adolph Menzel and Julius Pflugk-Harttung respectively, and two photobooks published after World War I by Ernst Jünger. Fox claims that the images in these visual sources can unproblematically be interpreted without any particular reference to the texts that they illustrate—perhaps a somewhat convenient assumption, given the author's self-confessedly recent and hard-won acquisition of the German language (cf. xii—this may also explain the relative dearth of relevant German-language secondary literature in the book's rather brief bibliography, as well as the occasional slips in translation of the illustrations’ captions, e.g., figure 11).
The monograph is divided into four parts, beginning with an extensive introduction entitled “Representing Armed Conflict in the Industrial Age,” which introduces the aims and methods of the inquiry. Part 1, “Adolph Menzel and the Rhetoric of Command,” examines artistic tropes of military conferences and battlefield exhortations through the lens of Alois Riegl's ideas concerning the portraiture of moral attention, focusing on two paintings by Anton von Werner and some of the illustrations contained in Menzel's Geschichte Friedrichs des Grossen (1842). Part 2 explores “Combat and the Politics of Landscape” in the aftermath of World War I, seeking continuities in pre- and postwar depictions of conflict in contested borderlands, and exploring two of Ernst Jünger's photo-histories, which sought to create new phenomenologies of experience through their “photographic claims to documentary reality,” providing “reader-viewers” with a fresh understanding of the “military sublime” (116). Finally, Part 3, “Technology and Combat,” explores the development of visual narratives of conflict that depicted soldiers’ interactions with battlefield technologies, in which fighting power was subordinated to the moral idea of the will to power, focusing above all on the moral superiority of common soldiers. Following the Franco-Prussian War, this dichotomy was epitomized by the arms race between rifles and artillery, whereas during and after the Great War, it was the immense technological challenge that the tank posed to German martial virtues which emerged as paradigmatic of the dilemmas of the Materialschlacht. Medieval chivalric iconography of the Teutonic Order was often used to illustrate this neoromantic fascination with the paradox of armored man versus armored machine.
Fox is undoubtedly to be commended for drawing attention to this substantial corpus of often-overlooked visual material. As far as his overall argument is concerned, however, the source base he analyzes seems far too small for his generalizations to convince. Moreover, it is often unclear how well some of the material analyzed here genuinely fits into his ostensible argument, which can get lost in thickets of overanalysis or incoherent theorizing; chapter 5, which treats aerial photography and maps, seems especially irrelevant to the overarching thesis.
Furthermore, numerous important methodological questions are never satisfactorily addressed. First, is it truly the case that the portraits and illustrations discussed here, especially in part 1, have no analogue in other military cultures—are they really so demonstrably and specifically German? There would surely have been scope here to bring in transnational perspectives; at the very least, the book should demonstrate that, for example, drawings and paintings of military conferences or battle exhortations (or depictions of war graves) in other national cultures during this period emphatically did not possess the supposedly German traits that Fox ascribes to them.
Second, what do we actually know about the nineteenth-century artists’ intentions, or the contemporary reception of these images? Would “reader-viewers” really have divined the complex psychological relationships in these engravings, and the meanings and interpretations of Prussian martial virtue, which Fox ascribes to them? Did many readers ever do more than take a cursory glance at the illustrations? For Fox's argument to be fully convincing, therefore, more contextualization and historicization, as well as detailed discussion of a much wider source base, would be necessary. Ultimately, this attempt to fuse military micro- and macro-history with art-historical modes of analysis represents something of a missed opportunity, though it could provide a potential starting point for future research.
