Dresden– the capital of Saxony, has always been a rich and luxurious city, which was also called “Florence on the Elbe”. And the pomp of architecture, and refinement, and patronage of the Saxon princes – electors – everything matched this comparison. The Saxon monarchs loaded art, one might say, with barrels: Old masters, paintings, sculptures – because of such flourishing variability by the beginning of the XX century, the city turned out to be full of art. At that time, postcards with images of timeless pictorial masterpieces – Vermeer, Rembrandt, Liotard, Raphael – were flying from Dresden all over the world.

Jean-Etienne Liotard “The Beautiful Chocolate Maker”
All these masterpieces are still kept in the Dresden Gallery – one of the main treasures of world art. In 1923, a former German soldier and a real German artist Otto Dix painted a canvas that will forever go down in the history of world art, which will also be within these walls.
This picture will be perceived by the public not only as an insult to those looking at it, but also as an insult to the entire German nation. What did Dix depict on it? To figure it out, first you have to plunge into history.
The artist was born in 1891 in the small town of Gera, but it was Dresden that always attracted him personally. Young Otto started painting early, and the aforementioned city attracted all creative people with its brilliant Academy of Arts and Crafts, as well as an outstanding collection of Old Masters in the Dresden Gallery.
Young Dix is making progress – his drawings are wonderful, although he doesn’t read too much. But still there is one author for whom he feels a real passion – the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Dix, as a provincial youth, like thousands of others throughout Germany, Nietzsche’s ideas are dragged out into the “big world”. They tell him, a man from the “small world”, about the coming reconstruction of Europe, the breaking of former ideals, the death of God and the superiority of power, where the latter cannot but refer to the German anthem – “Deutschland Über Alles” (“Germany First of All”). So the artist was picked up by the revolutionary mood in the country, preparing him not for the most humane battle for defending German ideals. War is an abomination, filth and meanness. But, going to it, Otto Dix does not know any of this yet. He goes to war, full of idealistic ideas and Nietzschean ideas – both of them will disappear instantly.

Otto Dix, self-portrait
A hundred years ago, Germany entered the First World War inspired by hope and faith in its own greatness, but not only Germany, but all the warring countries are sure of “their own greatness”. And this “victorious” war stretches for four years in the trench mud, from which Germany emerges the loser.
Otto Dix will return home only four years later. It will be a completely different person – the war will dispel the former sense of superiority and willingness to change the world at the click of your fingers. Dix’s drawings will become full of horror and compassion for all living things preparing to die.
Then, as a kind of result of this period of awareness, in 1923, nine years after the First World War, Otto begins to create his magnum opus – a canvas on which he will best convey the collective memory of compatriots of that dark time for Germany. The war that has ended will wake up in his picture again – it will blow the smell of death on those who have already managed to forget about it.

Otto Dix “The Trench”
“The Trench” with its images refers to other great works of painters, including the “Isenheim Altar” by Matthias Grunewald and the “Crucifixion” by Rogier van der Weyden. But the Old Masters knew that the crucifixion was followed by the resurrection, and no one knew how to live after the trench. In the same year, the “Trench” is exhibited in Cologne, which causes a violent scandal in society.
Mayor Konrad Adenauer personally protests after showing such a work.

Rogier van der Weyden “The Crucifixion”
With his painting, Otto made a real revolution in painting – such themes, moods and atmosphere had not been shown in the works before. He portrayed the horror of which war really consists, as well as soldiers of a wild and brutal kind, not heroic. The painting itself was put up behind a curtain in Cologne, because they were afraid that visitors would feel bad. Subsequently, Adenauer forbade buying the painting in his personal collection.
For the next five years, from 1923 to 1928, the painting had no owner. Dix and his business partner are trying to sell the scandalous canvas, until finally there is a buyer – in Dresden. In 1928, the society of patrons of the Dresden Gallery, together with the Dresden City Hall, found money to buy a “Trench”.
By the year of the purchase of Otto Dix’s painting, not only commodity-money relations are connected with Dresden, he himself becomes a Dresden man when he is appointed a professor at the Dresden Academy of Arts. Having become an academician, the artist, nevertheless, does not change his beliefs and begins work on a new, huge military painting. Although compositionally it will look like a “Trench”, but the new canvas may turn out to be even more monstrous – in it the same military stench, darkness and horror will be even clearer and more realistic.
After the war, Germany is rapidly saying goodbye to dreams of its own greatness. The former empire lost everything: millions of fellow citizens, colonies, wealth and unshakable self-confidence. At the same time, art is flourishing in Germany – German expressionism is becoming the world’s leading artistic force: Emil Nolde, Ernst Kirchner, Erich Heckel and, of course, Otto Dix. It is clear that German museums are aware of what is happening and are buying up young German art in their collections.
In 1919, after the end of the First World War, the victorious Allies signed the Versailles Peace Treaty – it defines the post–war structure of the world and consistently humiliates Germany. According to the agreement, it was obliged to pay huge reparations, which would put a heavy burden on the country’s economy and become the main cause of discontent among the population. Germany is also losing 13 percent of its territories and 1/10 of its population. Alsace-Lorraine is leaving France again, and the entire left bank of the Rhine River should be demilitarized. The worst of it is that East Prussia is separating from Germany to restore Poland, which will now have access to the sea. The Polish corridor will become the problem that will eventually lead to the Second World War.
In the eyes of many Germans, the conditions for the disarmament of paramilitary anti-revolutionary formations will aggravate an already difficult situation. They are watching the destruction of their submarines, warships and planes. The German army is being reduced to a hundred thousand people. For a whole decade, the country has been living in the status of an outcast, until one person decides to use the infringed national identity for his own purposes.
Being demobilized against his will, the future German Chancellor finds himself in Bavaria, where far-right extremist movements flourish. Here he gets on film for the first time during a demonstration of the DAP – the German Workers’ Party. Back in 1919, the army instructed him to infiltrate this group and monitor it. But due to the lack of better prospects, he remains a member of the Party and becomes its main political agitator.
Politically, Bavaria remained ultra-right, while the government of the newly formed Weimar Republic in Berlin took a left-of-center course. Quickly turning into a typical Bavarian, the future dictator began to brand with curses the “November criminals” – supporters of the armistice and the Versailles dictate. These views were shared by the army, especially the war veterans who gathered in the spacious beer halls of Munich. One of these pubs was the Burgerbreukeller, where on August 13, 1920 Adolf Hitler made his political debut with a lecture entitled “Why are we anti-Semites?”
For Hitler himself, the answer is: “In addition to dislike of Jews, because of Germany’s defeat in the war, anti-Semitism is the best strategy to attract nationalist–minded paramilitaries.”

Beer “Burgerbroykeller”
In July 1921, he activates the radicals of his small ultra–right extremist group – they proclaim him the leader and buy him a car as an attribute of his high position. Then Hitler changes the name of the party, combining the words “nationalism” and “socialism”. His goal is to attract as many supporters as possible and show his anti–capitalist attitude. The DAP party turns into the NSDAP – the National Socialist German Workers’ Party of Germany, whose members began to be called Nazis.
The NSDAP, whose leader claims to restore Germany to its former greatness, is becoming more popular every day when in January 1933 the National Socialists triumphantly won the elections. Now the new chancellor of the country is also an artist in the past, only devoid of an innovative spirit. “Modernism” is an invaluable word for him. In his own words, “the mission of art is not to wallow in dirt in the name of dirt; not to show a person in decomposition; not to paint cretins as a symbol of the Motherland; not to portray idiots as representatives of human power.”
The question was, where did the Modernists represent this “greatness of Germany”? As an anti–example – the work of Otto Dix “A woman with a child”. The National Socialists believed that real patriots who confidently look to the future of their homeland have healthy children and women. And Dix doesn’t show it.

Otto Dix “A woman with a child”
The judgments of the new leaders of Germany are supported by the theory of Max Nordau, a Viennese psychiatrist and critic of the XIX century. He explains that the predisposition to this kind of art is nothing but degeneration or degeneration.
The term “degenerate art” will be used by the Nazis as the main weapon against modernism – against everything that will not be fully understandable and unambiguous and will not carry to the masses the “greatness of Germany” and its Fuhrer personally.
The war against modernism will begin in Dresden. Already in the autumn of 1933, a few months after the Nazis came to power, an exhibition of “Degenerate Art” was held in the Dresden Town Hall. It is personally opened by the mayor of Dresden, fully dressed in a Nazi uniform. The exhibition is unique in that it presents canvases, in relation to which one should not feel admiration, but indignation. It showed all the paintings bought by the Dresden Gallery in recent years, among which was a canvas created to offend high civic feelings – “Trench” by Otto Dix.
In the same year, 1933, the artist was expelled from the Dresden Academy. And at this time, the Nazis, who have just come to power, are already disposing of everything: they burn anti-German, according to their idea, books. However, in the visual arts, everything was not so clear. National Socialism proclaims high ideals and art without cripples, so that it is beautiful and understandable. The catch was that not only Hitler was at the top of power, but also other people, such as, for example, Joseph Goebbels – the Minister of Propaganda – who greatly appreciated and even defended some modernists. Because of such heterogeneity in opinions, German art seemed destined to become a whole field for political intrigues and battles.
When four years have passed since the Dresden “Degenerate Exhibition”, the Nazis have entrenched themselves in power seriously and for a long time. The last Olympics in Berlin showed the human face of National Socialism – strength, power and perfection. There is always a place for a feat in life, but there is no place for everything else in life. Therefore, all the modernist acquisitions of German museums of the 20s have been removed deep into the “storerooms”, because to show such a thing is to desecrate the “greatness of Germany”.
In 1937, it was decided to hold a large German art exhibition in Munich, for the venue of which the current Munich House of Art began to be built. Everything that the German leaders, responsible for the whole people, consider beautiful should appear at this exhibition. A few months before the opening, in the summer of 1937, Hitler personally goes to Munich to see what the great German art will embody, but becomes enraged. On the way back, he gives Goebbels a whole lecture on why the works of modernists should never be exhibited at a German exhibition. To appease the Fuhrer, Josef comes up with a plan – to make two exhibitions, one of which will be classic, and the other, like the one that was in Dresden.
To implement the plan, a detachment led by an artist loyal to Hitler, Adolf Ziegler, is being equipped. He goes around all the major museums in Germany and requisitions from them all the canvases of modernist artists. In just two weeks in June, they tour 32 collections in 28 cities, taking 5328 canvases from there. Among the requisitioned artists, of course, Otto Dix is also listed. Goebbels’ plan was extremely simple: reducing the large German exhibition to five hundred exhibits, across the street, in the park, to open an exhibition of “Degenerate Art”.
The exhibition with a modernist orientation opens triumphantly, at least for Goebbels – he personally leads the Fuhrer through it. Masterpieces of the color of German painting hang crooked and askew, and mocking signatures are painted on the walls.
When it’s like across the street – real grace and majesty.
Ironically, as many as two million people come to see the exhibition representing cripples and abomination – five times more than the exhibition of beauty. Otto Dix is also among the “degenerates” – his masterpiece “The Trench” travels with the exhibition throughout the Reich.
Ziegler’s squad continues to travel around Germany, seizing modernist masterpieces from everywhere – 17,000 paintings from more than a hundred museums. Most of them will be sold abroad, not in the name of art, but to get hard currency for new tanks and submachine guns.
“Trench” was sold in 1939, at the next sale of “Degenerate Art”. The canvas was going to be bought by one of the Swiss museums in Basel, but as a result, someone else bought it – from that moment the trace of the painting was lost.
So, Otto Dix’s masterpiece will disappear forever in the chronicle of the Second World War, and the current generation will get it only in the form of a black-and-white reproduction. Another, previously mentioned painting by Dix of the same composition and the same terrifying theme “War” will be in the Dresden Gallery, but its path will be just as difficult. When the artist finished working on it in 1932, the Nazis had already come to power just a year later. Given the experience of the “Trench”, this picture could not be exhibited, but even kept at home. So, Dix will hide the “War” from a friend – Friedrich Binary – a major industrialist. The canvas, for all twelve years of Nazi power, lies hidden in a flour mill in Dresden.

Otto Dix “The War”
Unemployed and exiled from everywhere, Otto Dix will be drafted into the army at the age of 54, in 1945. He will be captured and will meet the end of the war in France, and Nazi ideas will be condemned and forgotten by the Nuremberg Tribunal.
Author of the article: Varvara Kartushina