Description
By Ernst Friedrich
Foreword by Bruce Kent
Originally published in Germany on 1st May 1924, this classic pictorial record of the First World War has long been hard to obtain.
‘War Against War! is one of the most shocking books I have ever seen. As much a series of photographs as a book, it first appeared in 1924, the work of Ernst Friedrich, an anarchist, socialist, internationalist and peace worker.
Friedrich’s aim was to make people understand what war actually means, and the horrors it inflicts on people and, indeed, on animals. Gruesome are the photos of maimed men with their faces blown half away. How did those wretched war victims get through the rest of their lives? Hidden in some home? We do not even know their nationalities: just human beings who went through the horrors of a war which should never have been fought.’
Bruce Kent
Cover: Ernst Friedrich addresses German soldiers in Berlin’s Siegesallee, calling them to revolution.
Reviews:
In August 2011, the photographer Craig Ritchie wrote an article about WAR against WAR!, he says: ‘The German pacifist anarchist, Ernst Friedrich, … produced one of the first (and arguably, still the best) photographic attempts at scrutinising warfare in his seminal photobook, WAR against WAR! Since its publication in 1924 there have been as many as a million copies in circulation, translated into forty languages.’
For the full article visit: http://craigritchie.co.uk/archives/2581
Gabriel Carlyle – Peace News, August 2014
Steve Andrew – Morning Star, 4 August 2014
Paul Mason – The Guardian, 23 Nov 2014