Lens is Bombed, from War

World War I was the first industrial war, and it took full and destructive advantage of symbols of progress, such as the airplane shown here. These images of civilian destruction would have played off the 10th-anniversary celebrations of the beginning of the “glorious” war taking place in 1924, the same year that Otto Dix’s print cycle was produced. For the artist, the human capacity to destroy trumped the glamour of the stories of the fighting aces like the Red Barron or Hermann Göring being taken up in nationalist circles.