"WHERE DEATH BECOMES ABSURD AND LIFE ABSURDER": LITERARY VIEWS OF THE GREAT WAR 1914-1918
 
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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Potsdamer Platz (1914)

 
On the eve of the Great War, Kirchner depicts the centre of Berlin life, the Potsdamer Platz, as an eerie scene of nocturnal horror: Two elongated female figures with yellowish faces (ostensibly prostitutes) are standing on a traffic island, which due to the distorted perspectives resembles a sloping, erratic bloc of ice adrift in a lurid green sea. All iconographical conventions are being flouted and symbolical traditions ignored. The colour of hope has come to denote morbidity; the punters who are surreptitiously approaching the whores have been deprived of their human dignity. They are mere black, faceless creatures reduced to the state of obnoxious vermin. In this abysmal metropolis, communication has ceased and sexuality has become a barren and competitive business deprived of all connections with a transcendental plane of existence. 
 
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