Often, their flip sides contain short greetings or cryptic lines of poetry written in both German and Esperanto. Dix enlisted for service in 1914 and saw front line action during the Battle of the Somme, in August 1916, one of the largest and costliest offensives of World War I that spanned nearly five months and resulted in casualties numbering more than one million. By September of 1918, the artist had been promoted to staff sergeant and was recovering from injuries at a field hospital near the Western Front. He sent one of his final postcard greetings to Helene Jakob on the reverse side of a self-portrait photograph, in which he stands with visibly bandaged legs and one hand resting on his hip. Dix begins the greeting in Esperanto, but quickly shifts to German to report on his condition: https://blog.oup/2014/08/german-feldpostkarten-first-world-war/
Posted on: Tue, 26 Aug 2014 03:02:05 +0000
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