Endloser Krieg Project Statement
I had hoped that the twenty first century would not be filled with wars of extermination: genocide seems to be commonplace now, driven by nationalism and fear. Who would have guessed that a large, artillery and trench style war would consume Ukraine? Who would have guessed that a new war in the middle east would focus on eliminating an entire people?
Brooding on these evils, I decided to make a new piece concerning the nature of war and the history of war. About that time I became aware of a call for proposals at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wölfenbuttel Germany to produce an artists book relating to the holdings or or thematic focuses of the HAB. I started this project by looking at the online catalog of the holdings of the HAB, which include extensive high resolution digital images.
Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB) is a research library in Wolfenbüttel, Lower Saxony, Germany. It is one of the oldest and most important libraries in the world for the study of medieval and early modern cultural history. HAB’s digital collections provide online access to a wealth of historical manuscripts, prints, and rare books, supporting scholarly research and exploration.
As I learned more about the holdings at the HAB, I became aware of an existing visual literature from the 17th century—German political broadsheets, a genre that most often included an intaglio print accompanied by letterpress text. I had stumbled across an amazing piece of scholarship by John R. Paas, a twelve-volume series of books collectively titled The German Political Broadsheet 1600-1700. This amazing, life-long project, contains halftone reproductions of more than 3000 of these broadsheet prints, along with the names and locations of collections that held them. At the same time, I read Grimmelhausen’s Simplicius Simplicisissimus, a novel from the 1660s, largely inspired by events of the Thirty Years war.
I focused my intentions on the Thirty Years war.
The Thirty Years war was the first mediated, modern European war; it was also a long protracted struggle with no clear winners. The social displacement and chaos surrounding the conflict were at least as costly as the wars themselves, with perhaps more than five million people dead from plague, violence, and famine. The population of central Europe took generations to recover, and the villages and farms in the area of conflict remained desolated for a generation. The political outcomes of the war included an increased tolerance for religious difference, and the technological advances ushered in significant changes in the ways that wars were waged. The cultural and technological changes ushered in by the war reshaped the political ecology of Europe.
The conditions surrounding the Thirty Years War and its aftermath have profound resonance with our contemporary condition. We are living through the largest land war in Europe since the end of World War II as well as a dismaying war in the Middle East. Our understandings of these conflicts undoubtedly find some origins in the Thirty Years War, and I went to the HAB with the intention of exploring the visual expressions of that war and its aftermath to see what relevance it might have for our current experience.
I eventually arrived at a book design in six parts: a prologue that invites a suspension of disbelief, a contextualizing history leading to the Thirty Years War, an examination of the professionalization of the military during the thirty years war, a section on the battle of Lützen, a chapter on the fearful consequences of war, and finally a section on Endless War. Each of these sections presents a different graphic solution. I finished writing and designing this book right after Hurricane Helene devastated the mountains of Western North Carolina, which is where I live. The loss of life—hundreds died in the aftermath of the hurricane—and the devastation of the landscape were instrumental in helping me imagine some of the horror and destruction of the Thirty Years’ War. I printed this book myself in the offset shops of the Art Department at Appalachian State University, requiring nearly 200 press runs on a single-color offset press to realize this book.
This book manifests my hope that at some point we, as a species, will grow out of war.