/ CRIPPLES OF WAR AND NORMALITY /
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For wars to produce heroes they must also produce monsters. The monuments to warriors are founded on that monstuosity. Without horror there is no glory possible. It is so that war must also produce, along with the smiling decorated ones of the parades, a whole court of mutilated and confused madmen.
There is a Dadaist painting by Otto Dix, which the Nazis destroyed and of which some photographic reproduction has been preserved, that delves into the backstage of the war spectacle. The painting is called War Cripples (1920) and presents a group of veterans, missing several members, parading in front of a window of what may be a military shoe store. The first two characters have mangled faces, they are followed by a one-eyed man in a wheelchair, and the one who closes the line holds his lower jaw in place with a screw. Arms, legs and hands are missing. But the decorations they wear on their uniforms place them in the category of heroes, of martyrs of the homeland. The composition is reminiscent of that used by Brueghel in his painting The Parable of the Blind (1568), with the difference that what Brueghel intended to be moralizing, here becomes sardonic. These heroes/monsters are the testimony of warmongering idiocy. It is logical that as soon as they came to power, the Nazis destroyed the painting. But what Otto Dix does not tell in his painting was not only uncomfortable for them.
The maimed of war are inevitable, even necessary to give amplitude to the drama of the homeland in danger, but their place is not the monument. The hero, the unknown soldier, should not show his stumps to the world. It is important, therefore, to make them disappear, to “integrate” them, as we would say today. There is a small piece of documentary propaganda of the British Ministry of Information, from 1943, entitled BACK TO NORMAL, in which the crippled condition is tried to be diluted through the recovery of “normal” life. The protagonists are individuals who, due to the war, have had their legs and arms amputated.
As opposed to the sad spectacle of those mutilated people of the First World War, who spent their caps in the streets showing their ills, here we are presented with various characters, housewives, soldiers, children who have been able to recover not only their full social life, but even their work efficiency, thanks to all kinds of mechanical implants. The documentary would be what today is called “inclusive”. And yet, as we progress in its viewing, certain unintentional snippets, gestures that try to be “normal” but become shocking, give a glimpse of the nightmare that Otto Dix portrayed in his Lisiados de guerra. What makes the piece distressing is not the mutilations but the optimism with which it tries to erase the underlying horror, the savagery that is war, under a “positive” message. The delirium of the man-machine, Marx's dictum that under capitalism the worker becomes the living appendage of the machine, is reproduced here with a chilling naivety and optimism.
