The Floating One
Der Schwebende (The Floating One) 1927, cast 1987
World War One was the first truly global war. Countries from all continents lost lives on an inconceivable scale and vast ruins were left behind. Aftermath surveys the traumas, the responses and the visions for the future in works of British, French and German artists. In Britain and France national monuments were built to honour the dead. In Germany though there was no state-sanctioned will to commemorate a lost war and with the exception of local monuments, no such memorials exist. The frustration and the anger brewing in the guts of this humiliated and impoverished nation would soon
give birth to Nazism. One of these local memorials was Ernst Barlach’s
The Floating One (also known as The Floating Angel), housed at the
Güstrow Cathedral in northern Germany.
Barlach belonged to a generation of artists who celebrated the age of the machine and exalted speed and the future. They envisaged a new world risen from the ashes of the past. All these tendencies were incarnated in F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto; a celebration of war and violence, a call for the destruction of museums and libraries, reeking of misogyny, nationalism and ultimately fascism. They craved a war that would erase the canvas of the past so that the world could be drawn and painted anew. But instead, the war burned down and smashed the canvas to pieces. As a consequence, many artists, if not dead or damaged, became disillusioned. Barlach was one of
them and subsequently dedicated his art to anti-war protest.
‘No Heroism, no Glorification’
We see a hovering figure with the eyes and mouth tightly shut and arms crossed over the chest, gloomily surveying devastation and ruins. It’s not a typical memorial of a fallen soldier or a sombre tombstone. The figure has long hair and wears a cape. It was modelled after his friend and artist Käthe Kollwitz, whose son was killed in combat. The ethereality of the sculpture contrasts with the material form of its 250 kilograms of bronze. The serene and mournful facial expression rebuffs the heroism and glorification of war.
It is a monument to lamentation, loss and contemplation. Amidst the explosions and the screams of a rampaging war, the world can only be perceived through the deafening silence engraved in the angel’s face. Nothing more can be said, nothing else can be expressed. Theodor Adorno, one of the leading Frankfurt School thinkers, would later say that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’It’s exactly this numbness and muteness that transpired through Barlach’s work.
In 1937, after the Nazi ascension to power in Germany, The Floating One was defamed as degenerate art. Its pacifist character clashed with the Nazi ideology and it was thereupon melted down and used for ammunition. Thankfully, the mould was preserved and three new versions were cast after the war. Barlach died in 1938. He didn’t live to experience the horrors of war at its worst. Even if the trauma induced was unprecedented, what would follow was unimaginable. WWI was a shock for the people of that time but for the generations to come, it will always lie in the shadow of WWII, the total war. This is when the battleground shifted from the trenches and the rural to
the cities and the urban, and the bodies of innocents were devoured in their millions. Barlach’s work, however, stands as a timeless monument to all wars and conflicts. It pithily captures the war’s essence, which is truthfully represented, not in fight and bravery, but in pain and loss.
