ERRORI E ORRORI. ECHI DELLA GRANDE GUERRA NELLA CULTURA EUROPEA

The Great War was interpreted by European artists and writers as a war that transformed the world. At first deluded, then disenchanted, they considered their artistic and literary works as a useful tool in order to analyse some aspects of the war experience in which fiction played a leading role. New literary and figurative forms clearly displayed particular roles that the soldiers were assuming separately or at times together (i.e., the good soldier, the reluctant warrior, the prisoner, the deserter, the wounded, the veteran and the dead). Some artists also tried to define the conflicting relationship between war and mass death to prevent war from hiding its dominant role behind sorrow and grief. To disclose this deception, the image of danse macabre or, more generally, the vision of the return of the dead were used. To this purpose, the parable of Angelus novus devised by Klee, Benjamin and Kiefer, landed at Jerusalem after a seventy year flight, was very important.