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On Masculinity and Male Sexuality in Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner’s Soldiers’ Bath
James A. van Dyke

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It takes years to look at a picture.1 (Tom Hess, quoted by Leo Steinberg, 1988).

Completed by the German expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in late 1915,

Soldiers’ Bath [Soldatenbad, usually translated as Artillerymen or Artillerymen in the Shower]
is a remarkable painting. The picture offers a view into a simple, if irregularly
rendered shower room, a rectangular space like a stage with a proscenium, with
walls and ceiling painted emerald green and a floor of various chilly tints ranging
from Wedgewood blue to a pale, icy whitish-blue (plate 1). The principal actors on
that precipitous stage are some fourteen naked recruits or soldiers, who surround a
towering water heater and mostly crowd under five showerheads that emit presumably
hot water. A moustachioed and uniformed supervisor watches.
In one important respect, this painting is quite typical of the realism of Kirchner’s
artistic engagement with military life that year. Like most of his other drawings, prints,
paintings, and photographs that were directly prompted by and referred to his brief,
unhappy, and ultimately utterly unsuccessful service in a field artillery regiment, it
depicts a ‘trivial’ everyday, yet clearly also significant, moment in the lives of ordinary
soldiers behind the lines and scenes.2 With the exception of his famous self-portrait
with its fantasy of amputation (plate 2) and a few lithographs depicting imagined combat
scenes, Kirchner turned to inglorious things that he would have experienced as a fresh
recruit in basic training in and around the barracks of his regiment in the city of Halle,
southwest of Berlin: horseback riding and the care of the animals, physical examination
and personal hygiene. Soldiers’ Bath did differ, however, in its ambition.Taking up the
theme of bathing, which had been a crucial component of Kirchner’s artistic production
and the subject of many of his most ambitious and monumental paintings up to that
time, this picture is significantly larger than his other depictions of soldiers and war. He
painted only one larger picture at some point that year, a thematically complementary
triptych, the central panel of which showed women in and around a tub.3
Despite its size and other evidence of its particular significance to the artist, Soldiers’
Bath has not received the same kind of extended scholarly attention as the much smaller
Detail from Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner, Soldiers’ Bath, 1915 yet seemingly more perplexing, disconcerting Self-Portrait as Soldier.4 Nonetheless, art
(plate 1). historians have produced a steady stream of short commentaries about the painting
since 1956, when Morton D. May, a department store magnate and major art collector in
DOI:
10.1111/1467-8365.12531 Saint Louis, unexpectedly donated it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.5 These
Art History | ISSN 0141-6790 attest to an almost unanimous critical and scholarly consensus about the painting,
43 | 5 | November 2020 | pages
892-926 comparable to the one that Leo Steinberg once challenged in his pioneering essay on

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1 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. Kirchner’s painting, apprehended only generally and always
Soldiers’ Bath (or Artillerymen)
[Soldatenbad], 1915. Oil on in isolation, has repeatedly been described as an image of brutal dehumanization and
canvas, 140 × 153 cm. Private murderous deindividualization.6 Over and over again, commentators have stressed the
collection. Photo: Solomon R.
Guggenheim Foundation/Art vulnerability of the men represented in the picture.7 A few have associated the scene,
Resource, NY.
painted in 1915, with the gas chambers of Nazi death camps.8
There is no question that Kirchner was severely disillusioned and perhaps traumatized
by his particular experience – though it was far behind the front lines – in the second half
of 1915, as well as by his perception of the war’s effects on German society and culture
in general. However, such anachronisms are facile and unpersuasive. What is more, the
assumption that Kirchner regarded military service as just one thing, as something to be
simply condemned, is not really convincing. There is no question that this painting has
to be seen in relationship to Kirchner’s fears, and the nascent criticism of the war that
he began to express in his letters of late 1915, even as he continued to try to contribute to
Germany’s affirmative war culture.9 Yet this criticism did not constitute the entirety of
Kirchner’s response to events. Furthermore, political ideology and opinions about the

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James A. van Dyke

war were only one, albeit important and potentially existential, aspect of the totality of
Kirchner and his situation. Reviewing what people have written about Soldier’s Bath, one
cannot help but sense a certain ossification or lack of attentiveness and imagination in
the overwhelmingly repetitious statements that one finds in catalogue entries and essays.
The closer one looks at the painting in detail, the more one situates it in broader fields of
representation, the more one thinks about the biography of the person who made it, the
less compelling the consensus becomes and the more interesting and challenging Soldiers’
Bath becomes. The painting begins to seem less a confident and unequivocal anti-war

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statement, and more a materialization of competing and contradictory thoughts and
impulses. One might say the queerer it becomes, if one defines queer as something related
to but not the same as gay identity, or as ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps,
dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent
elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify
monolithically’.10 Give that this is a large, in many respects highly unusual, potentially
transgressive picture that shows a room packed with naked young men, several of whom
are fully exposed to their superior’s, the artist’s, and the viewer’s gaze (and several of
whom are not), it is really quite remarkable that no one has thought more carefully and
extensively about the painting’s representation of masculinity and male sexuality.

2 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,

Self-Portrait as Soldier
[Selbstbildnis als Soldat], 1915.
Oil on canvas, 69 × 61 cm.
Oberlin, OH: Allen Memorial
Art Museum, Oberlin College.
Photo: Allen Memorial Art
Museum.

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On Masculinity and Male Sexuality in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Soldiers’ Bath

Without neglecting the historical materialist question of the politics of the modernist
avant-garde in Germany, that is what this essay proposes to do. It argues that Soldiers’ Bath
was not only the product of Kirchner’s brief, debilitating experience as a soldier in 1915,
but also of the rapid development of a new set of powerful, pleasurable, and positive, yet
fragile homosocial and, possibly, homoerotic relationships and desires since 1914. For a
moment, at least, his heteronormative masculine self-image as an artist whose bohemian
life and avant-garde work revolved in large part around sex with women and the depiction
of the female nude appears to have been opened to question. At the very least, he strongly

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registered and frequently represented same-sex eroticism and sociability. At its core,
then, this argument builds on insights and empirical scholarship produced over the last
twenty-five years by a number of art historians who have worked on this painting in
particular, or Kirchner more generally. Annegret Jürgens-Kirchhoff is one of the few to
question the consensus about what the painting conveys, briefly suggesting that pictures
such as Kirchner’s have to do not only with the horrors of war but also with the pleasure of
bathing.11 In an essay on Gauguin, Picasso, and Kirchner, Hal Foster took a psychoanalytic
approach in order to argue that their work – including Kirchner’s Self-Portrait as Soldier – was
not simply an expression of control and domination, as important feminist art historians
such as Carol Duncan had argued, but rather the excessive symptom of profound, oedipal
anxiety and ambivalence.12 Thomas Röske has published ground-breaking research
reconstructing Kirchner’s friendships with gay men, interpreting his representation
of the male nude, and drawing attention to his changing, increasingly ‘de-eroticized’,
attitude towards women in the 1910s and 1920s.13 Re-examining Kirchner’s work of 1910,
Hansdieter Erbsmehl has argued that Kirchner’s paedophilic turn from the depiction of
the voluptuous bodies of adult women to the androgynous figures of Fränzi Fehrmann and
other prepubescent girls was part of a crisis of masculine identity that pre-dated his move
to Berlin in 1911 and the outbreak of war in 1914, but that would come to a head in 1915.14
In some respects, the single recent piece of art-historical writing that is
most closely related thematically to the subject and approach of this essay is not
a monograph on Kirchner or modern German art, but rather Aruna D’Souza’s
impressive, absorbing study of Cézanne’s bathers.15 As is the case there, the goal here
is to reconsider a radically different representation of bathers painted by a canonical
modernist artist. This enterprise starts with the process of looking again carefully,
in close detail, in order to break the object of study out of a hidebound interpretative
tradition. Ultimately, the point is, similarly, to draw attention to an erotics of painting,
and to relate acts of painting to the artist’s biography. But that also marks one principal
difference. D’Souza closely and extensively examines the tropes of and tensions in the
rich, extensive posthumous discourse that emerged about Cézanne in the early 1900s
in order to critique the constraining, distorting, gendering effects of biography as a
set of literary forms. This essay seeks instead, in part with reference to what is known
about the artist’s life, to link both the lived experience of a social subject and the
production of a particular picture to the determining pressures exerted by historical
crisis. D’Souza’s work is a remarkable, sophisticated example of critical art-historical
scholarship informed by feminist and poststructuralist thinking about representation
and the concept of genius. This essay seeks simply to re-examine a well-known yet
understudied picture by relating some elementary insights of queer theory to the well-
established principles of the materialist social history of art.

Modernity and Tradition

For aficionados of modern art in Imperial Germany, whose private taste was precariously
institutionalized among museum curators in the 1920s and became hegemonic after

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3 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,

Soldiers’ Bath, with
superimposed figure of the
golden section.

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1945, Soldiers’ Bath may not have been a particularly puzzling picture to view. It is certainly
neither as radical in its play with spatial illusion, representation, and figuration as
analytic cubism or post-Fauve Matisse, nor as absolutely abstract as the work of Kandinsky
or Malevich. To some it may have been anything but unpleasant. Its range of icily pale,
never quite Prussian, blues and rich emerald greens are complemented harmoniously by
the pale yellows, burnt siennas, warm oranges, and reds of the figures and the glowing
fire visible through the open door of the oven, just to the left of the picture’s centre. A
strong sense of counterpoint is generated by the interplay of the rhythmic curvilinear
pattern of the figures and the diagonal, silvery white rectilinear structure that enframes
them. The appreciative viewer can take pleasure in the coalescence of substantial figures
out of loosely applied, raw paint. Soldiers’ Bath is, in sum, a carefully balanced yet vibrant,
dynamic picture, even a beautiful one, interweaving thoughtfully developed structure
with spontaneous gesture and material physicality. Indeed, it comes closer than one
might think to the proportions of the golden section, if one positions the small part of
that figure’s spiral over the body of the kneeling man who tends to the fire, letting the
expanding sweep of the curve rotate in a clockwise direction (plate 3).
Yet for viewers socialized to accept the traditions of idealizing classicism or
official naturalism in academic art as the legitimate standards for technical skill
and cultural value, Kirchner’s painting would doubtless have presented a serious
challenge. Technically and formally, it could not have been more unlike the work
of Anton von Werner, who had dominated official artistic culture since the 1870s
with his highly finished, richly detailed depictions of cultivated soldiers, victorious
generals, and triumphant statesmen, and who was at the centre of the debate over, and
struggle against, modern art in Imperial Berlin from 1892 until his death in January
1915. Kirchner’s painting offers the viewer legible space, illusionistic modelling, and
coherent anatomy. Nonetheless, it was a modernist picture that resisted naturalism’s
seemingly objective, yet in actuality always thoroughly ideological, reality effects. The
space is shifting, irregular, and flattened. Bodies are mannered. Colour is exaggerated,
and at the same time shapes emerge out of open, complex configurations of quickly,

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4 Max Beckmann, Soldiers’ gesturally applied pigments. There is no looking past the countless traces of the
Bath – Soldiers Under the
Showers [Soldatenbad – painterly process on the flat surface of the canvas. One must register its insistent
duschende Soldaten], 1915. material facticity, its reality as an object as much as its realistic verisimilitude.
Black China ink on paper,
30.2 × 36 cm. Hannover: That said, Kirchner’s painting corresponds closely to the essential elements
Sprengel Museum. Photo:
bpk Bildagentur/Sprengel
conventionally needed to represent convincingly the phenomenon of the military
Museum/Michael Herling/ shower room, judging both from photographs and, in particular, illustrated postcards
Aline Gwose/Art Resource,
NY. from the period: a large room fitted with rows of showerheads, a group of bathers in
various poses, a uniformed supervisor, a man tending to the oven that heats water
(see plate 6).16 However, Kirchner’s frank, frontal representation of ordinary soldiers’
naked bodies, his refusal to conceal their genitals with clever compositional tricks,
was very unusual and potentially shocking or outraging. It constituted a departure
from the frequently heroic, sometimes sentimental and humorous, occasionally
tragic, and almost always fully clothed manner in which German soldiers appeared
in Imperial German art, art journals, and illustrated satirical weeklies, as well as
later official regimental chronicles.17 Comparable works by contemporaneous artists
were extremely rare, and even those that came closest to Kirchner’s picture are still
quite different. There was a drawing made by Max Beckmann the same year, which
includes most of the same elements but was very different in size and far less explicit,
and was probably unknown to Kirchner (plate 4). At the Prussian Academy of Arts

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James A. van Dyke

in the spring of 1919, Arthur Kampf, a leading academic painter in Berlin, exhibited
a Michelangelesque picture entitled Surprise Attack [Ueberfall], in which a group of
heroically muscular, naked or partially clothed, yet discretely posed German soldiers
rush to defend themselves against unseen enemies.18 Had it been exhibited during the
war, Kirchner’s painting could only have provoked the Imperial censors.19 It may well
be for that reason that its public debut seems to have taken place in a private gallery in
February 1919, during the revolutionary months that followed the sudden end of the
war, the abdication of the Kaiser, and the collapse of the Imperial government.20 It is

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hard to imagine a less Wilhelmine, less Imperial representation of ordinary soldiers
and everyday military life.
5 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,
While there was never a public outburst of spluttering critical outrage over the
Soldiers’ Bath [Soldatenbad], painting, as one has come to expect of key works in the modernist tradition, such a
1915. Lithograph on yellow
paper, 57.8 × 65.3 cm (paper), conjecture is supported by the reception of the exhibition ‘Art in War’ in 1916.21 It is
50.5. × 59.3 cm (picture). unclear if Kirchner’s painting, or the lithographic version that he made at about the
Halle (Saale): Kulturstiftung
Sachsen-Anhalt, same time (plate 5), were in fact included in that exhibition, as he proposed after being
Kunstmuseum Moritzburg invited to participate by Karl Ernst Osthaus, the event’s organizer. Osthaus professed
Halle. Photo: Kulturstiftung
Sachsen-Anhalt. interest, but claimed to be worried about space.22 In any case, critics writing for

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On Masculinity and Male Sexuality in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Soldiers’ Bath

Berlin’s daily press curtly dismissed all the modern art that was presented in one part
of the show, and two reviews published in important mainstream art journals named
Kirchner, without referring to any specific pictures, as a representative of an ‘extreme
direction’ in art.23 Indeed, Soldiers’ Bath was still capable of causing discomfort forty
years later, in a very different historical, geographic, and institutional context. In 1956,
the director of the Saint Louis Art Museum believed that it would be ‘unwise’ for his
museum to accept the painting as a gift, if it were offered by its owner, although he
himself – like Alfred Barr – liked it very much. The Museum of Modern Art in New

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York would not face the same ‘difficulties’, he believed.24
There will be more to say about those bodies, but before doing so it is worth
considering the space in which they are depicted as a key part of this discussion of
the painting’s modernism. Just as unconventional, though presumably less potentially
scandalous than the frank nudity of the figures in Soldiers’ Bath, is the modernity of their
setting. Showers were a relatively recent invention, deployed across Europe in mass
institutions such as prisons, army barracks, elementary schools, and public baths since
the 1860s.25 In Prussia, for instance, army regulations stipulated that new barracks have
modern bathing facilities with hot showers, which used less water and were widely
believed to be healthier than tubs; this was part of an effort to improve hygiene and
fitness and thereby to shape a ‘more efficient soldiery’.26 These austerely functional and
strictly regulated systems – officers could get individual shower cabins that locked, but
groups of less privileged and ostensibly less sensitive enlisted men were supposed to
follow a briskly paced standard group procedure that was monitored by an attendant
– rapidly became a ubiquitous part of German military routine.27 Official and amateur
photographs show soldiers using or posing as if they were using well-built, if not
permanent, indoor and outdoor shower rooms apparently installed just behind the
combat zone. Mobile shower units installed in railroad cars or compact enough to be
transported by wagons were developed and in wide use by the end of 1915, as design
and procurement documents, photographs, and regimental chronicles attest.28 Soldiers
improvised showers with available materials.29 Given their ubiquity by 1915, especially
in the lives of enlisted men, it should come as no surprise that images of soldiers
taking showers appeared in modern forms of visual culture. In addition to official
and amateur photographs, images of men showering together under the supervision
of uniformed attendants were printed on didactic postcards, which promoted them
as an instrument to combat vermin and disease (plate 6).30 They were the subject of
humorous ones, which envisioned the use of barrels, buckets, and watering cans as
opportunities for impromptu hygiene, refreshment, and hilarity among cheerful
comrades (plate 7).31 A carefully calibrated nudity was evidently less of an issue in such
materials than it was in traditional artistic mediums, spaces of display, and vehicles of
circulation.
Soldiers’ Bath shows no café or brothel, no circus or boulevard. But the picture
nonetheless brings together a challenging style with an iconography rather more
common in modern mass culture in a way that was characteristic of modernist art
at its most provocative. Kirchner thus produced an unusual and notable picture that
evoked the landscape in its blues, greens, and yellows (one thinks of the palette
and passage of Cézanne’s paintings of bathers), yet broke sharply with the traditional
iconography in European art of soldiers bathing.32 From Michelangelo’s cartoon of
the Battle of Cascina and its various copies, to the Viennese academician Viktor Petrin’s
late nineteenth-century scene of a large group of Austro-Hungarian troops stripping
down on the beach for a mandatory swim,33 to Cézanne’s Baigneurs,34 Mikhail Larionov’s
Bathing Soldiers of 1911, and John Singer Sargent’s Bathing Tommies of 1918,35 eminent

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James A. van Dyke

6 ‘Our Field Grays in

the Delousing Facility’
[‘Unsere Feldgrauen in
der Entlausungsanstalt’],
illustrated postcard produced
by Hüglin & Fischer, Barmen,
postmarked 19 September
1917. Collection of the author.

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professional painters had almost always envisioned the soldier’s bath as something
taking place in an idyllic landscape.36 During the First World War, official war artists
and amateurs from a variety of combatant nations followed suit, depicting groups of fit,
strong, tanned, and unblemished troops skinny-dipping under sunny skies in ponds,
rivers and the sea.37 Countless photographs took the form of relatively organized group
portraits of completely or partly naked bathers posing for the camera in or at the edge
of the water. Others were more casual snapshots clearly taken privately by men who
had brought their small personal cameras with them to the front.38 Such episodes
were also occasionally recorded in the diaries and logs of officers, which found their
way into such things as regimental chronicles.39 These images were thus not simply
anachronistic and ideological. Soldiers continued in fact to bathe and swim outdoors
when opportunities arose. However, they were selective visions of soldierly life, legible
within the framework of the older tradition of representation.
The traditional iconography of soldiers bathing outdoors was also a common
motif in European literature about the war. Ernst Jünger and Erich Maria Remarque,
prominent and influential post-war writers and intellectuals in Germany on opposite
ends of the political spectrum, both invoked it in their ideologically supercharged
memoirs and controversial, best-selling novels. They usually did so in order to
highlight either the possibility of the chance eruption of devastating violence or the
fragility of the soldier’s body, but also on occasion in relationship to the relaxation of
military discipline and the adventures that ensued.40 A third, Arnold Zweig, touched
on the sensuous pleasure that a combat soldier felt when bathing, distinguishing
between occasional plunges into cold streams and warm showers during weeks in or
near the trenches, on one hand, and the luxury of sitting in a deep tub filled with hot
water, on the other.41 Perhaps the most extended and vivid example of this iconography
in a German war novel, however, is found in Walter Flex’s The Wanderer between Both
Worlds [Der Wanderer zwischen beiden Welten], a novel that was originally published in 1917.
At one point early in the story, the narrator and his good friend spontaneously decide
during a march to dive into an enticing river on a beautiful day, after already having
bathed in a peaceful lake in the quiet of early morning. The description of the narrator’s
friend after they emerge from the water is striking: ‘Wet from the water and gleaming

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On Masculinity and Male Sexuality in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Soldiers’ Bath

7 ‘A Shower’ [‘Ein
Brausebad’], illustrated
postcard produced by
Postkarte Ad. Hoffmann,
29 June 1918. Collection of the
author.

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doubly from sun and youth, the twenty-year-old stood there in his slender purity,
and the words of Ganymede crossed his lips simply, beautifully, and with an almost
painfully clear longing.’42 This idyllic, joyous image of bathing involving high-spirited,
educated, and idealistic, ephebic young men serves here as an obviously homoerotic
counterpoint to the brutal reality and bloody carnage of trench warfare described
elsewhere in the book. It thus closely resembles the way in which young, carefree,
unblemished, beautiful soldiers bathing in idyllic settings were likewise recalled in
the memoirs and poems of many British writers as they reflected on their experiences
of the war. Such poignant images – Sargent’s watercolour has been described as their
visual corollary – have been characterized as a ‘set piece’ in this literature.43
The enclosed, cramped, crowded mis-en-scène of Kirchner’s painting abandoned the
idyllic tradition to which earlier painters, Flex, and the British war poets all belonged.
Kirchner’s turn from this tradition is a product not only of the circumscribed and
interrupted nature of his military basic training, but also, more fundamentally, of the
realist impulse of his modernism, which focused above all on the spaces, structures,
and technologies of German modernity. Yet even this break in Soldier’s Bath from the
artistic tradition of bathers in the landscape is not complete. The depiction of long,
lithe, boyish young men, bending like grass or reeds in a breeze in a spare institutional
space painted in the blues and greens of nature, continues to permit interpretation
that focuses on what is perceived as the fragile beauty and vulnerability of the bathers’
bodies, the kind of bodies evoked in many poems on the same subject during the war.
Furthermore, and this is what has gone entirely undiscussed, the painting
possesses an erotic charge, not unrelated to that found in the work of Flex’s novel
or the writing of the British war poets. In this respect, it is perhaps worth noting
that Kirchner was a reader of Walt Whitman’s poetry, as were the Uranian poets in
England – who idealized the adolescent male, celebrated paiderastia, and appreciated
Henry Scott Tuke’s paintings of boys bathing – and, for that matter, Thomas Eakins,
who in the 1880s had painted young male bathers watched by an adult swimmer.44
To be sure, there is no evidence that Kirchner knew the writing of those poets or
the paintings of Tuke or Eakins. His letters of the 1910s indicate neither a particular
interest in the homoeroticism of Whitman’s poetry nor an awareness of German

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debates about the poet’s sexuality.45 In December 1914, when he still dreamed that he
and his contemporaries were witnessing ‘great things’, the artist instead communicated
the hope that he would have the chance to illustrate a new edition of Leaves of Grass,
‘because this most spiritual depiction of the world and the songs of battle correspond
so marvellously indeed with our time’.46 At that point, he may have had in mind the
section ‘Drum Taps’ more than anything else. Still, fifteen years later he noted, in a
letter sent to a young married couple along with a copy of Leaves of Grass, that that book’s
‘healthiness and love’ [Gesundheit und Liebe] had kept him ‘above water’ when he had been

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miserable as a young man.47

Soldiers and Sexuality

This discussion of Kirchner’s Soldiers’ Bath as a depiction of one important aspect of
modern military life – namely the deployment of recently developed technologies and
practices of mass hygiene – as an austere, impersonal experience does not contradict
the prevalent art-historical understanding of the painting as a horrific image of
deindividualization and dehumanization. Indeed, the picture uses the formal devices
and compositional licence of modernist painting to represent emphatically the
transformation that is the fundamental and universal goal of military basic training.
Upon arriving at their barracks, new recruits in Imperial Germany immediately
surrendered their civilian clothes, bathed (perhaps in a shower room like the one
Kirchner described), had their hair cut short, and then were examined by doctors for
disease, after which their ‘perfect and naked bodies’ were transformed in the ensuing
weeks by exercise and drill.48 During this process of separation from their prior
different lives and particular selves, forms of privacy customary in civilian life were
eliminated and everything was done together with the members of the unit, ‘whether
washing in the morning, showering, or even using the latrines’.49 In 1928, Remarque
commented laconically on the constant surveillance of new recruits, which gradually
broke down and destroyed deeply inculcated feelings of shame.50 The resultant
uniformity indicated the recruits’ submission to military authority and discipline. It
testified to the emergence of their new collective identity as soldiers.51
Comparing Soldiers’ Bath both to what appears to have been a sketch of Kirchner’s
initial impression (plate 8), and to the more developed compositional drawing (plate 9),
underscores how the final state of the fully developed painting emphasizes the sense of
collective identity that the army sought to produce. In the sketch, which is much more
like Beckmann’s rendering of the same subject, five bathers are arranged loosely in
two groups and take a range of poses under two showerheads, while a sixth figure sits
in the background. The oven and supervisor are not shown, and there is no emphatic
sense of collective mass or regimentation. In the compositional study, the picture’s
composition is set, and one discerns all of the scene’s main figures. The stage-like space
is now divided by the towering bulk of the water heater, which separates one-third
of the scene from the rest. To its left, one man arches backward and a second bends
deeply at the hips. In the centre, one bather squats to tend to the furnace. To the right,
several figures stand under the showerheads, one figure in the right background sits
while looking on, and in the foreground the uniformed attendant occupies the corner.
However, in its relatively loose arrangement of the figures in the space and its use of
scale to differentiate between figures at the front and those behind, Kirchner’s study
still resembles Beckmann’s related drawing more than his own finished painting. In
the painting, Kirchner’s use of a single body type, schematized facial features, and
isocephaly all contribute to a strong sense of collective rather than individual identity.
Furthermore, as they stand in a room with irregular lines of recession, on a floor

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On Masculinity and Male Sexuality in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Soldiers’ Bath

that plunges steeply downward so as to compress the space, and under showerheads
that appear to be far closer together than they typically were actually installed in
German barracks (about one metre apart, according to a report of 1899 and later
photographs), the figures of the men overlap tightly. At first glance, they lose the
discrete contours, individual integrity, and even muscular monumentality evident
above all in Beckmann’s drawing, but also in Kirchner’s compositional study for and
lithographic version of the painting. The compact, frieze-like, rhythmic composition
of the figures in Soldiers’ Bath has a powerful effect, going far beyond related works

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of art and visual culture. Unlike the verism of Otto Dix, who in 1924 portrayed the
survivors of trench warfare in a wide range of grotesque shapes and sizes in order to
subvert the abstractions of the military’s mass ornament and seductive stereotypes of
heroic soldierly masculinity, Kirchner’s expressive, modernist realism confronted the
viewer with a potentially uncomfortable sense of crowding and closeness, flattening

8 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,

Soldiers’ Bath [Soldatenbad],
c. 1915. Pencil on light satin
chamois paper, 21 × 16 cm.
Wichtrach/Bern: Galerie
Henze & Ketterer. Photo:
Galerie Henze & Ketterer.

© Association for Art History 2020 904

James A. van Dyke

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9 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and homogeneity to which art historians have repeatedly responded with horror in
Soldiers’ Bath [Soldatenbad], c.
1914/15. Pen and ink on paper, their commentaries. This effect is indisputably crucial to the painting’s meaning,
18.7 × 25.3 cm. Halle (Saale): and, given what is known about Kirchner’s frustrations, fears, and failures, the
Kulturstiftung Sachsen-
Anhalt, Kunstmuseum prevalent assumption that Soldier’s Bath depicts its subject in a wholly negative way is
Moritzburg Halle. Photo:
Kulturstiftung Sachsen-
understandable, and not entirely implausible. However, a closer look reveals things that
Anhalt. have been downplayed or overlooked, and that need to be taken into account.
It would certainly be a mistake to underestimate the difference between this
singular painting and Kirchner’s numerous paintings, drawings, and prints of
bathers at the Moritzburg Ponds near Dresden or on the beaches of Fehmarn Island
on the Baltic Sea, which emphasized seemingly natural, spontaneous, uninhibited,
unsupervised heterosexual relationships and play in bohemian opposition to the
constraining moral codes and behaviours of the Imperial bourgeoisie.52 This painting
is not like them, to be sure, though Kirchner had not been averse on occasion to
depicting groups of nude figures in the crowded interior of his studio as well. Nor was
it like the triptych of 1915, in which he depicted a group of Grace-like female bathers
standing in and around a tub, or the murals of men and women at the seaside that he
was commissioned to paint in 1916 for the sanatorium where he sought to recover
from his military interlude.53
Yet even as Soldiers’ Bath primarily communicates a clone-like uniformity without
uniforms, one discerns marks of individual physical and psychological differences
and signs of pleasure, despite a pictorial structure that implies the rigorous discipline

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On Masculinity and Male Sexuality in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Soldiers’ Bath

and harsh demands of military life. There are slight physical variations between
Kirchner’s figures, despite the mask-like facial features shared by the young men. For
instance, most of their hair is dark brown (they were, after all, wet), but that of one
man in the rear seems to be red or blonde. In addition, the penis of the man at the
right of the central group of bathers is considerably larger in size and lighter in colour
that than of the man just to the right of the water boiler, who may be circumcised
and thus identified as Jewish. Furthermore, when one looks closely, one notices that
the figures are anything but clone-like, robotic, or rigid, despite the massing of the

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composition. The soldiers are not standing at attention in the perfect ranks and files
of the parade ground, but rather assume several positions, jostling and touching each
other. Most stand, one squats, one bends, one sits. Most face the viewer, but some are
pictured from the side or the rear. Hands are in a variety of places. The serpentine
middle figure in the front rank to the right of the water heater thrusts his buttocks
in the viewer’s direction as he washes, rubs, or slaps them. Others cup hot water in
their hands or stretch to enjoy it, as one would expect them to do before or after the
exertions, and perhaps dangers, of a long, gruelling day. Although of course set in the
highly structured context of military life, Soldiers’ Bath represents neither tedious drill
nor heroic action. It is not like Ferdinand Hodler’s mural The German Students Depart for
the War of Liberation, 1813 of 1908–09, which Kirchner might have seen when he visited
Jena in early 1914, before the picture was boarded up after Hodler signed a statement
protesting against the bombardment of Reims Cathedral. It is not like Bernhard
Winter’s Get Up, March, March! [Sprung auf, Marsch, Marsch!] of 1914 or Albert Egger-Lienz’s
To the Nameless of 1914 [Den Namenlosen 1914] of 1916, both of which showed homogeneous
soldiers charging into battle.
Registering such slight individual differences and signs of banal sensuous pleasure
helps to produce a more precise understanding of what the picture shows and does.
Yet that by no means exhausts what can be said. The naked bodies of the youthful
bathers standing at the centre of the picture, who are watched by both the uniformed
attendant and the seated soldier behind him, have to be seen as the lean, strong products
of calisthenics, marching, and military drills: the soldierly body that was at the heart
of the ideal of modern masculinity that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.54 Perhaps this is just Kirchner’s way of representing the young men who
patriotically volunteered in the euphoric first phase of the war, but there seems to be
more than that to these figures, which diverge distinctly from the hulking, Herculean
or Michelangelesque muscularity of Beckmann’s showering soldiers. Despite their
pronounced adult genitalia, large feet, and attenuated proportions, their slender bodies
and curving, twisting poses suggest an affinity with the ephebic physiques and graceful
contrapposto of the late classical Greek sculptures that were admired by Winckelmann
and other élite German men as homoerotic icons of ideal masculine beauty.55 They are
generically comparable to the groups of naked Sicilian boys, rows of idealized adolescent
nudes, and allegorical youths represented in the photographs, paintings, and sculptures
of artists such as Wilhelm von Gloeden and Sascha Schneider, who were closely
associated with the artistic culture and markets of Imperial Germany’s gay community.56
The typical, indeed almost exclusive, focus on the bathers’ vulnerability, and the
assumption that the critique of the military and war was the only thing that mattered
to Kirchner, has become a form of repression, apparently making it impossible for art
historians to perceive, to acknowledge, or to address the homoeroticism of the scene.
Just as important as the eight standing figures in the centre in this regard are the
four bathers to the left of the water heater, which constitutes a border that apparently
screens them from the disciplining and perhaps also desiring gaze of the attendant.

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James A. van Dyke

One immediately notices the differences that distinguish these four figures from their
comrades on the other side. Instead of being exposed to and potentially identifiable
by both the attendant and the viewer, their faces are hidden or visible only in profile.
Instead of constituting a block rhythmically articulated by a series of roughly parallel
curved lines, they move in a variety of ways. The closest figure arches backward to
catch the full force of the water. His upraised arms recall those of the figure of the
standing woman with arching back and upraised arms at the left of Ingres’ crowded
The Turkish Bath, as well as the arms of a figure, well known to Kirchner, that recurred

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in Cézanne’s depictions of male bathers.57 The next figure bends deeply at the hips. To
the rear, a pair of figures face each other, their arms extended. Viewing the painting,
one notices the way in which the genitals of the first figure are effaced. One is struck
by the resemblance between the pair in the background and a painting that Kirchner
had painted in 1914, showing a gay man bowing his head towards the youth that he
embraces.58 One is drawn to the legs, buttocks, and lower back of the man who bends
over, which stand out visually as a large fragment separated from the man’s upper
body and twisted impossibly to align – judging from the feet that just poke out from
behind the furnace – with the groin of the man standing behind him in profile. One
cannot be entirely sure, given the ambiguity of the spatial relationships between these
four figures, but this tight knot of bathers whose bodies tangent each other suggests
an at least potential slippage between the homosocial male-bonding cultivated by the
military, the illicit homoerotic desire encoded in those who gaze at the ephebic men
before them, and hints of embraces and the kind of sex act that Germany’s repressive
anti-sodomy law – the notorious Paragraph 175 – had made illegal since 1871. If that
is so, then one looks with redoubled interest at the vivid orange contour lines that
suggest the reflection of firelight on warm, wet skin in the cool, blue and green shower
room. One notices the carefully adjusted framing of the head of the bather who kneels
to tend the glowing fire, and asks if these things are coded references to the idiomatic
German expression for gay men, ‘warm brothers [warme Brüder]’, and the etymological
relationship between ‘schwül’, the German word for hot and humid, and ‘schwul’, which
began to be used in mid-nineteenth-century Berlin to refer to gay men and women.59
Whatever the answers to those questions may be, Soldiers’ Bath was not Kirchner’s
only depiction in 1915 of the male bather as an object of homoerotic desire. Two other
smaller pictures, both works on paper, were less equivocal treatments of the subject.
The first is an etching that shows Hugo Biallowons, an attractive forester to whom
Kirchner had been introduced in 1914 and who became a central figure in the artist’s
work until his death in combat at Verdun in 1916. Biallowons takes a bath in a tub that
is tipped upward with no regard for conventional perspective and shown filled with
only a little water, allowing the viewer to see his whole body (plate 10). Sitting very
close to him is a second figure, who watches Biallowons attentively and is partially
inscribed in a heart-shaped form that is centred on the dark point where the contours
of their bodies join, and defined by Biallowons’ left arm, the arch of the window
in the background, the head and left shoulder of the second figure, the neckline of
the second figure’s robe, and the especially thick line that crosses his lower torso
and ends under Biallowons’ thigh. In fact, the print shows Biallowons, who seems
to have been bisexual, with his partner, Botho Graef, who was frequently portrayed
by Kirchner between 1914 and 1917.60 Graef was a professor of classical archaeology
at the University of Jena, a leading figure in Jena’s contemporary art scene, and one
of Kirchner’s strongest critical proponents and most intimate friends between their
first meeting in 1914 and Graef’s sudden and surprising death in 1917, which, like
Biallowons’, devastated the painter emotionally.61

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On Masculinity and Male Sexuality in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Soldiers’ Bath

10 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,

Two Men in Bath [Zwei Männer
im Bade], 1915. Etching
printed in black ink on wove
paper, 42.07 × 36.83 cm
(sheet), 24.61 × 19.37 cm
(plate). Richmond, VA:
Ludwig and Rosy Fischer
Collection, Virginia Museum
of Fine Arts. Photo: Troy
Wilkinson.

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The situation described in this print is quite similar to a second small etching that
shows Graef, apparently lost in thought, sitting close to Biallowons while the latter naps
on a chair or divan (plate 11).62 That in turn recalls a painting and two further prints, all
of which show Biallowons stretched out on sofas or the like. Of particular interest here
is a lithograph that depicts him after a bath and puts the artist and viewer, in effect, in
Graef’s place (plate 12). Deeply relaxed, Biallowons sits heavily on a day bed and his head
droops toward his chest, suggesting that he is asleep, or about to doze off. Given the bold
decorative patterns of the pillows behind him and of the blanket or upholstery upon
which he rests, he could be in Kirchner’s studio. In any case, the robe that he wears almost
falls from his shoulder, revealing his nipples, lines indicating well-defined abdominal
muscles, and, at the very centre of the sheet of paper upon which the lithograph is
printed, his penis. Though it is not quite a pastiche of the Barberini Faun, this print, like
the others in the group, testifies both to Biallowons’ powerful yet languorous physical
presence and to Kirchner’s growing ‘sensitivity to the erotic appeal of this male body’.63

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James A. van Dyke

These prints make clear that Soldiers’ Bath was not an isolated, immediate expression
of the painter’s individual military experience, as it has almost invariably been treated.
Moreover, it was not only related to Kirchner’s other depictions of war and military
life in 1915. Instead, the painting has to be understood in conjunction with the deep
and lasting impact that Graef and Biallowons had on Kirchner, the evidence for which
goes significantly beyond the burst of portraits of gay and bisexual friends that he
produced at the same time. It is generally thought that Biallowons is the naked man
who appears in two well-known photographs, dancing or parodically marching before

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amused bohemian onlookers in Kirchner’s studio in 1915, while a German army
helmet rests atop a bookcase. If this is correct, then this image of his friend’s strong
and expressive body was the inspiration for several drawings, prints, paintings, and
one large sculpture over the next decade.64 Whether or not that is the case, Kirchner
expressed extraordinary admiration for Biallowons after his death in combat, grieving
for the loss of a ‘good honest friend’ and ‘a blossom of our young Germany, who was
to bear rich fruits’.65 In the years after Biallowons’ and Graef’s deaths, the painter

11 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,

Siesta – Botho Graef and Hugo
Biallowons [Siesta – Botho
Graef und Hugo Biallowons],
1914. Etching, 24 × 20.1 cm.
Basel: Kunstmuseum Basel.
Photo: Jonas Haenggi.

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On Masculinity and Male Sexuality in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Soldiers’ Bath

continued to admire the young men who Graef had mentored in Jena in a similar way,
seeing in them a vitality that was the only hope for the nation’s future.66 And in 1929
or 1930 Kirchner read Max René Hesse’s novel Partenau, which told the tragic story of
a heroic lieutenant who had survived the war but committed suicide after his love for
an aristocratic officer-cadet was not requited. After he finished the book, Kirchner told
an acquaintance that it had caused him ‘to think much about my time in Jena with
Graef’.67 This is an ambiguous statement that raises several questions. Was Kirchner
thinking in 1930 about Graef and Biallowons, although their love had been mutual?

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Had there been tension between the men? Did Kirchner think that the heartbroken
Graef’s unexpected death in a sanatorium, just a few months after Biallowons had
been killed, had in reality been suicide? Does this suggest that the artist himself had
12 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, rebuffed advances? The answers to these questions are unknown, but Kirchner’s work
Hugo after the Bath [Hugo
nach dem Bade], 1915. and letters, on one hand, and Graef’s curatorial work and critical writings, on the
Lithograph, 52.5 × 66.2 cm. other, suggest that the classical archaeologist and modernist aesthete was not simply an
Hamburg: Hamburger
Kunsthalle. Photo: bpk extraordinarily engaged supporter of Kirchner’s work, whose vocal public enthusiasm
Bildagentur/Hamburger the artist valued. Graef and his homosocial, homoerotic circle in Jena evidently offered
Kunsthalle/Christoph Irrgang/
Art Resource, NY. the painter something more, a powerful affective bond, that he seems to have lacked

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James A. van Dyke

elsewhere, whether in his heterosexual partnership with Erna Schilling or in Berlin’s

competitive, commercial, modern artistic culture.

Gender Trouble
Soldiers’ Bath is related to Kirchner’s depictions of his friends Graef and Biallowons in
its focus on the young and beautiful male body, male gazing, and homoerotic desire.
Yet it was also unlike them. Most importantly and obviously, aside from material and
technical differences, Kirchner’s portraits of Graef and Biallowons represent moments

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of private intimacy and erotic contemplation in surroundings that could not have been
more unlike the communal shower room at an army barracks, which was primarily
occupied by large groups of ordinary soldiers. That said, communal showers may have
been devised and spread in the nineteenth century as modern, rational, enlightened
spaces for efficient mass public hygiene, but they too served as spaces in which the
discipline of ordinary life, whether civilian or military, was necessarily relaxed to
some degree. They and their antechambers – as shown by the occasional illustrated
postcard and Paul Cadmus’s YMCA Locker Room of 1934 – can become boisterous and
unregimented spaces, despite efforts by authorities to impose order and control.
After their labours, young men sing and yell, look at and tease each other, and engage
in horseplay – except for shy individuals, perhaps like the man who looks on while
sitting in the back corner of the shower room in Kirchner’s painting.68 They are spaces
in which naked, clean, shining bodies come together, can be seen and touched and
desired. Hence, such spaces, like the public bathhouses to which they are related, serve
for many as a site of camaraderie, pleasure, and fantasy, as a sensuous haven from the
travails of the outside world. Indeed, the homoerotic possibilities of the bathhouse in
an early modern context had already been thematized in central Europe by that most
canonical of German artists, Albrecht Dürer.69 The function of the bathhouse as a
relatively safe space for gay communities in many places was well established by 1915.70
In 1904, for instance, the sexologist and gay-rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld noted
that some served as meeting points for gay men in Berlin.71 On the other hand, public
bathhouses, and communal showers, have also long been the focus of social anxieties,
moral panics, and police raids.72
The sexuality of men in the modern homosocial institution of the army, in
which men were continually exposed to each other and subjected to the gazes of
their superiors, was another site of frequent, if not constant, commentary, anxiety,
and panic in Germany since the mid-nineteenth century. In 1852, the forensic
scientist Johann Ludwig Casper described the room of a gay man in Berlin, filled with
Greek statues of hermaphrodites, images that emphasized buttocks, and ‘pictures
of pretty young men from the local garrison’.73 In the 1880s, a Social Democratic
politician recalled same-sex intimacies witnessed during his time in the barracks.74
The prevalence of male prostitution among soldiers was a topic of great concern in
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century studies of urban crime.75 In the same
book of 1904 in which he mentioned the role that bathhouses played in Berlin’s gay
community, Hirschfeld also discussed in detail the patterns and institutions of gay life
that developed extensively around urban army barracks, emphasizing their healthy,
loving, and useful domesticity.76 In the years immediately before the outbreak of
the war in 1914, the presence of homosexuality in the army’s ranks was recognized
by scientists, activists, writers, and visual artists, despite the deployment of a wide
variety of measures to, as Berlin’s police chief put it, ‘combat the pederasty among
[…] soldiers’.77 In 1913, Marsden Hartley moved to Berlin to continue his affair with
a Prussian officer that had begun in Paris, and began to paint his pictures of Imperial

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On Masculinity and Male Sexuality in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Soldiers’ Bath

military insignia and pageantry; Kirchner might have seen Hartley’s work in an
exhibition organized in the centrally located rooms of Otto Haas-Haye’s Graphik
Verlag in the autumn of 1915.78 In 1914, D. H. Lawrence wrote ‘The Prussian Officer’,
a story of ambivalent homoerotic feelings between an army officer and his orderly
that ultimately led to violence.79 During the war, Hirschfeld published excerpts from
thousands of letters and reports received from gay men at the front.80 On the basis of
surviving evidence it may never be possible to determine how prevalent homosexuality
was in the German army in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but there

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can be no doubt that public interest in the subject was widespread and strong.
The highest profile episode in this long history took place largely between
1907 and 1909. These were the years of the so-called Eulenburg Affair, a series of
virulent intrigues and explosive public revelations named after Philipp Prince of
Eulenburg-Hertefeld, an old friend and close confidante of Emperor Wilhelm II
who was outed as a gay man by his political foes. In the press, a series of courts
martial, and five civil trials, numerous members of the officer corps of élite Prussian
regiments and prominent individuals in the Imperial cabinet and entourage were
accused of homosexuality, which, as has already been noted, was subject to criminal
prosecution.81 Sometimes considered to be the Wilhelmine Empire’s biggest domestic
scandal, the exposure of so many aristocratic military commanders and political
leaders as gay men prompted widespread ridicule of the German ruling élite both
domestically and internationally, much of it focused on the army. Scores of caricatures
appeared in the German and European press in response, lampooning effeminate
courtiers and officers propositioning enlisted men working as prostitutes, ogling
soldiers in parade formations, or lecherously reviewing men asleep in their barracks.82
One worth noting in the context of this essay is a drawing that appeared in the
Social Democratic satirical journal The Truthful Jacob [Der Wahre Jakob] in 1907 (plate 13).
The drawing, which is a rare example of the depiction of naked soldiers in the Imperial
German mass media, does not show a group of recruits in a communal shower, but
rather being examined by a pair of medical officers. The Social Democratic illustrator,
employing the easily legible quasi-naturalistic style of much satirical art at the time,
humorously individuated the men he represented and also carefully obscured their
genitalia, presumably to avoid shocking readers too much and to stay clear of anti-
pornography laws and government censors.83 Furthermore, the caption, written as
an exchange between a working-class recruit – defined as such by his accent – and
an elegant officer who is shown to be particularly interested in his pronounced
buttocks, unequivocally makes the point of the image to the reading viewer, namely
the homophobic characterization of élite officers as sexual predators.84 Kirchner never
painted such a scene, but in 1915 did make a lithograph of new recruits undergoing a
physical examination, along with the lithographic version of Soldiers’ Bath. Both must
have struck him as being a particularly distinctive, especially memorable parts of a new
recruit’s experience (plate 14, and see plate 5).85
Neither Kirchner’s painting of 1915 nor his related prints are like this earlier
satirical drawing, stylistically or ideologically. Soldiers’ Bath does not fully or
straightforwardly employ the codes needed to ensure automatic legibility to a broad
or mass audience. It neither amuses viewers with conventional caricaturesque
exaggeration nor confidently instructs them with its brief, purely denotative title. It
graphically breaks taboos about representing the soldier’s body but avoids ridiculing
anyone’s sexuality. Soldiers’ Bath is, in other words, not a politically engaged illustration
in a leftist satirical vehicle critiquing Imperial authority with a crude and overtly
homophobic joke. It is, rather, a modernist work of art that is both frank and opaque as

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James A. van Dyke

13 Paul Singer, ‘Bei der

Rekrutenaushebung’,
published in Der Wahre Jacob,
10 December 1907.

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it seeks to register, at least in part, something akin to the visual experience of fleeting,
illicit gestures and encounters only half-glimpsed around corners, in the steam
and shadows. This powerfully expressive yet non-didactic approach to an intensely
charged, potentially erotic, subject is precisely what one might expect from an artist
like Kirchner. His two best male friends at that time were lovers, and his portraits of
them show that Kirchner was capable of rendering their relationship with considerable
tenderness. Furthermore, his anti-bourgeois avant-garde identity had long been
defined by his pictorial exploration of non-normative, stigmatized, or impermissible
objects of desire, sex workers, and sexual acts: paedophilic portraits of pre-pubescent
girls, monumentalizing paintings of prostitutes and their clients in the streets of

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On Masculinity and Male Sexuality in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Soldiers’ Bath

14 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,

Soldiers’ Physical Examination
[Soldatenmusterung], 1915.
Lithograph on satin yellow
paper, 60 × 43 cm (sheet),
36 × 31.5 cm (image).
Wichtrach/Bern: Galerie
Henze & Ketterer. Photo:
Galerie Henze & Ketterer.

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Berlin,86 pornographic print portfolios, photographs of a naked friend dancing in his
studio to the delight of several other watching men and women, explicit drawings of
heterosexual sex acts found in a few of his sketchbooks, and a pair of sketches of two
naked men in an embrace.87
Nothing in Kirchner’s published letters ever indicates any awareness of the
Eulenburg Affair. Nonetheless, one suspects that he would have heard something about
the scandal, would have been attuned to the presence of gay men in the military and
the challenges that they faced, and would not have responded to them in a particularly
reactionary, homophobic way. We have already seen how close he was to Graef and
Biallowons, who had met in the army and returned to active duty during the war.
In one painting, Kirchner showed Graef in a suit and Biallowons in army uniform,
entwining their legs and holding hands as the younger man bids his lover farewell
before reporting to duty.88 In addition, Kirchner seems to have been acquainted to
some degree with the aforementioned Otto Haas-Haye, who was not only a supporter
of modern art and fashion in Berlin but also Eulenburg-Hertefeld’s son-in-law.89 And of
course there is the composition of Soldiers’ Bath, which establishes an opposition between
hints of illicit sexuality on the left and the uniformed figure representing repressive

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James A. van Dyke

authority on the right. Yet a number of things in the picture and elsewhere suggest that
something nonetheless made Kirchner, like so many early twentieth-century Germans,
uneasy or anxious about his encounter with male sexuality in the military.
Kirchner’s only known remark on the subject is found in a letter of September
1915, meaning it was written as or just before he was working on Soldiers’ Bath. It appears
in the context of a broader social critique about the philistine cultural insensitivity of
most Germans, specifically the problems posed by the materiality of sculpture given
the aesthetic bruteness of most modern, Imperial Germans. ‘I see this every day’, he

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continued in an abrupt shift that borders on non-sequitur, ‘among the soldiers whose
life, which is so wild for good citizens, is in most cases just repulsively primitive,
purely physically sexual, and indiscriminately grasping’.90 He did not specify the
objects of his comrades’ ostensibly repulsive and indiscriminate sexuality in this letter,
but the etching Café Syphilis, which shows uniformed men with naked women in what
appears to be a brothel, suggests that he could well have been thinking above all about
their taste for and in female prostitutes.91 Such a critique may seem odd, given the
highly erotic, sexually driven, heterosexual nature of Kirchner’s work of the 1900s.
Yet it accorded with his view of prostitutes and prostitution as unnatural, abject, urban
phenomena, which he compared on two occasions in 1915 and 1916 to his desperate
and unbearable situation in the army.92 The attitudes and behaviour of his comrades
perhaps reminded him of the men, mostly labelled as clients who engage in a variety
of sexual acts and fetishisms with women in the pornographic prints and drawings
Kirchner made in 1913, at the same time that he was painting his Berlin street scenes.93
Furthermore, Kirchner’s critique of the sexual excess of his comrades corresponded
to the apparent ‘de-eroticization’ of his relationship with women, about which he
wrote to Graef in a letter of 1916.94 In any case, this criticism of the sexuality of most of
his comrades was unique, but the letter was one of several that testified to Kirchner’s
growing alienation from military life and from those men who, unlike him, were able
to function within it.95 Such feelings, and hopes for a quick end to the war, developed
by the summer of 1916 into more drastic, albeit private expressions of opposition.96 In
this regard, Kirchner was not at all unusual.97
Kirchner’s letter makes unmistakably clear his dislike for many of his enlisted
comrades, but it is ambiguous in one important respect. We might make inferences
about the object of its critique based on the print Café Syphilis, but the letter does
not specify or limit the orientation or objects of the ‘purely physically sexual,
and indiscriminately grasping’ men whom Kirchner found to be so degraded.
This is significant inasmuch as Soldiers’ Bath itself contains a number of details that
problematize the pleasures it describes and ideals it invokes, that interfere with
an interpretation of the painting as a sensitive rendering of male homoeroticism
and sexuality akin to his depictions of Graef and Biallowons, or as a sympathetic
critical response to the way in which gay men in the army were marginalized and
criminalized. The long-legged figure on the right edge of the central group of bathers,
for instance, re-inscribes a potentially homoerotic ideal of ephebic masculine beauty,
yet at the same time displays the attenuated and mannered rather than classical
proportions that are characteristic of all the figures in the picture. Furthermore, the
dribble of yellow paint that extends from his large, quite unephebic penis – the only
such mark of that size in the painting – may not simply be an aleatory, modernist trace
of the painter’s process (plate 15). It unavoidably elicits the thought of urination and
thus may double as a sign of the ‘repulsively primitive’ behaviours to which Kirchner
referred in September 1915. The sense of dissonance and disruption is even stronger
in the left third of the painting. The spatial and iconographic ambiguity there may be

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On Masculinity and Male Sexuality in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Soldiers’ Bath

the product of hesitation or function as a form of self-censorship – there is nothing

here as explicit as in Kirchner’s heterosexual pornography of 1913. At the same time,
it is conjoined to some of the most vivid, memorable, and troublesome details in the
entire picture. The figure that raises its arms up in the foreground here is oddly effaced
or disfigured (plate 16). The figure of the person who bends over is, like no other in the
picture, inexplicably and disconcertingly distended and dislocated, reminding one of
the impossibly torqued woman in the right foreground of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon.
In his portraits of Graef and Biallowons, which focus on homosocial cultivation and

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homoerotic affection rather than sex acts, Kirchner never employed this kind of
wrenching violence or rendered his sitters as incoherently. One is hence compelled
to ask if this was meant to signify something ostensibly ‘unnatural’, the word used in
Paragraph 175 for forbidden sexual behaviours between men, and between men and
animals. The suspicion arises that at certain points the traces of modernism become
symptomatic. One must consider if sex in the shower between ordinary, lower-class
enlisted men, not just visits to women in brothels, constituted for Kirchner one form
of ‘purely physically sexual, and indiscriminately grasping’ behaviour. He almost
certainly encountered a plebeian roughness there distinct from the apparently more
restrained, cultivated homoerotic reveries of his sophisticated, educated friends in the
modern art world in whose company he found so much comfort.

Kirchner was an avid photographer, and Soldiers’ Bath appears in two pictures that he
took in 1915. One documents the unframed painting after it was finished (plate 17).98
15 Detail of Ernst Ludwig The second is a self-portrait of the painter, presumably in his Berlin studio in the
Kirchner, Soldiers’ Bath, autumn of that year (plate 18). Kirchner appears in the foreground, wearing his
showing the third figure from
the right. artilleryman’s uniform and traditional leather helmet. He is slightly hunched, looks
up at the camera, and sits in a tightly framed space that
is defined behind and above him by Soldiers’ Bath, in
what appears to be an incomplete state. Carefully filling
the negative space defined by Kirchner’s left shoulder,
ear, and helmet is the figure in the painting of the man
who kneels to tend the stove that heats water. One is
immediately reminded of the compositions of two
important works of that year. The first is the coloured
woodcut Conflicts – Love’s Agonies, from the woodcut
portfolio illustrating Peter Schlemihl, in which a suffering
nude woman occupies a similar position vis-à-vis the
protagonist as the kneeling man in Soldiers’ Bath does in the
photograph (plate 19).99 The second is Kirchner’s iconic
Self-Portrait as Soldier (see plate 2), in which a short-haired,
androgynous female nude is found in the same spot,
ignored by the painter yet seeming to emerge from and
to be tied to his grievously injured imaginary body. The
echoes between these three pictures may be coincidental
or the product of a compositional convention, rather
than constituting some implicit, extended commentary
on sexual desire, self-alienation, emotional pain, and
feelings of physical incapacitation. What is indisputable,
however, is that this photograph is part of an array of
self-portraits that Kirchner produced in 1914 and 1915
that suggest a disruption in the incessantly repeated

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James A. van Dyke

performance of robust heterosexual masculinity that had

defined his earlier public and private artistic self-image.100
Before being overwhelmed by the realities of military
service and disgusted by what he perceived to be the
primitive, vulgarly unspiritual, and indiscriminately
sexual soldiers in his regiment, Kirchner was not
immune to the patriotic fervour that gripped so many
German artists and intellectuals in the first months of

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the war. Or, if he was opposed to the war, he carefully
hid it when he wrote to patrons who supported it. In his
letters, Kirchner envisioned that the war would lead to a
cultural renewal, sweeping away the ossified structures
and traditional values of the Wilhelmine Empire. In
November 1914, for instance, he wrote that he now could
work with ‘especial intensity […] since we now live in
a time of great things’.101 In early 1915, he believed that
those who had experienced war would become more
human and thus be better able to appreciate artistic
expression.102 Furthermore, he expressed admiration
for a different kind of warrior in two letters to one of
his important patrons, whose son had apparently just
completed a tour of duty. In December 1914 and January
1915, Kirchner praised élite German troops returning
from victory in Belgium as ‘wonderfully free people’,
16 Detail of Ernst Ludwig transfigured men who were like great children and artists committed to a transcendent
Kirchner, Soldiers’ Bath,
showing the second figure task, and hence unlike ‘infantry cripples who build trenches somewhere’.103 These
from the left. were the only two times he wrote in such terms before 1929, when he distinguished
between people who had sickened him far from the fighting and ‘our best and
strongest’, who had sacrificed themselves on the battlefield. In their company, he
thought, ‘[i]t must be happiness to overcome danger or to die’.104 Yet many of Kirchner’s
pictures of 1915 and 1916 also imply this kind of admiration for an élite soldierly
masculinity. In one wartime sketchbook, he made a series of seven elegant, idealizing
pencil drawings of individual, handsome, and contemplative soldiers of indeterminate
rank.105 In 1915, he produced two paintings, two woodcuts, eight lithographs, and at
least two photographs of officers on horseback, traditionally associated with high social
status.106 In one of those paintings, two brightly uniformed Hussars in a yellow and
violet landscape ride past five civilian pedestrians dressed in dull black. In the other,
which was almost as large as Soldiers’ Bath and which Kirchner had also suggested for
inclusion in the exhibition ‘Art in War’ in early 1916, three artillerymen in blue and
red uniforms ride spirited white chargers under blue skies in a purple, green, and pink
landscape, sitting in their pink and brown saddles with assurance.107 Like Marsden
Hartley, Kirchner seems to have been drawn to the visual appeal of the dashing
uniform, so unlike the sober attire of bourgeois civilians even after being toned down
in the aftermath of the Eulenburg Affair.
Before enlisting, Kirchner had differentiated between the artillery, which he
characterized as a ‘distinguished club’, and the ‘cripples’ of the infantry.108 His decision
in the spring of 1915 to join an artillery regiment thus appears not only to have been
an effort to avoid conscription into a unit he associated with crippling hard labour and
the trenches, but also to align himself with such impressive men.109 He certainly seems
to have emulated them in two more, almost identical photographic self-portraits in

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On Masculinity and Male Sexuality in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Soldiers’ Bath

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17 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,
Soldiers’ Bath [Das
uniform that he made sometime that year in Berlin.110 In the larger, better exposed
Soldatenbad], 1915. Glass of the two (plate 20), Kirchner stands in his full artilleryman’s uniform and helmet,
negative, 18 x 24 cm. Davos:
Kirchner Museum (Donation carries a sword, and wears long, supple riding boots that are distinct both from the
of the Estate of Ernst Ludwig civilian shoes with relatively high heels that are visible on the floor and the short, stout,
Kirchner, 1992). Photo:
Kirchner Museum, Davos. far less elegant boots worn by infantrymen. Looking down at the camera, he strikes a
relaxed yet imperious pose, with his chest thrown out and shoulders back. He turns
and extends his right leg in order to provide his body with a wide base, to occupy
space, and to show off the boot to maximum effect. Kirchner appears as a clothes horse
who exudes, to an unusual degree, resolute strength and sophisticated self-assurance.
In these twin photographs, Kirchner struck a pose that has nothing to do with the
letters of late 1915 in which he wrote of his frustrating inability to perform his duties,
of the suffering that they caused him, and of his fear of uniforms and being forced
to return to his unit. Yet even the confident masculinity performed for the camera
in these two images is problematized in several ways, aside from the photographs’
technical imperfections. In his right hand, Kirchner nonchalantly holds a cigarette,
a cheap, modern form of smoking that became common among soldiers during the
war but had previously often served, unlike the securely masculine cigar and pipe,
as a signifier of groups associated with deviance: the working class, New Women,
bohemian artists, and cosmopolitan sophisticates.111 In addition, these photographs
emulate the conventional poses used in wartime studio portraits of soldiers standing

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James A. van Dyke

before backdrops of idyllic landscapes, yet are distinguished both by their exaggeration
of those conventions and their incongruous setting.112 The viewer sees behind the
heroic Kirchner not an idyllic backdrop, but rather the clutter of the impoverished
bohemian’s urban studio and a depiction of the industrial fringes of Berlin that he had
painted in 1912. Even here, in self-images of Kirchner as the insouciant warrior, one
can detect a troubling of masculinity that was much more pronounced in several other
pictures that he made the same year.
Kirchner painted Soldiers’ Bath as he self-consciously faced a gendered identity

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crisis that may have begun to develop as early as 1910, was exacerbated by intense
professional pressures in a metropolis that he did not like between 1912 and 1914, and
became one of the main themes of his work in 1915.113 He represented himself that year
in these two photographs as an imperious warrior, possibly with an ironic twist. Yet he
also appeared in The Drinker as a decadent, absinthe-consuming aesthete in extravagant

18 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,

self-portrait as a soldier in
the Berlin-Friedenau atelier,
Körnerstrasse 45, 1915. Glass
negative, 18 × 13 cm. Davos:
Kirchner Museum (Donation
of the Estate of Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner, 1992). Photo:
Kirchner Museum, Davos.

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On Masculinity and Male Sexuality in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Soldiers’ Bath

attire and the same heeled shoes that appear in the photographs.114 He envisioned
himself as an outcast, traumatized subject in several of the woodcuts illustrating Peter
Schlemihl as well as the Self-Portrait as Soldier (although he later contested the idea that he
had suffered from or simulated a ‘war neurosis’).115 In the photographic self-portrait
with which this concluding discussion began, and in which the viewer sees Soldiers’ Bath,
Kirchner no longer exudes the aura of expansive, confident authority projected by his

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19 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,

Struggles – Love’s Agonies
[Kämpfe – Qualen der Liebe],
illustration for Adalbert von
Chamisso, Peter Schlemihl
[Peter Schlemihls wundersame
Geschichte], 1915. Colour
woodcut, 33.3 × 21.2 cm.
Basel: Kunstmuseum Basel.
Photo: G. Dagli Orti/De
Agostini Picture Library/Art
Resource, NY.

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James A. van Dyke

20 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,

self-portrait as a soldier in
the Berlin-Friedenau atelier,
Körnerstrasse 45, 1915. Glass
negative, 18 × 13 cm. Davos:
Kirchner Museum (Donation
of the Estate of Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner, 1992). Photo:
Kirchner Museum, Davos.

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assumes the guise of an heroic, monumental figure to which the camera or viewer
must look up. One is reminded of the contrast between the two contrary Cézannes –
one confident and vigorously painting in his tall hat, standing and looking down at the
camera, the other sitting bareheaded and balding, ‘shrunken, shrivelled’ and looking
up, ‘in some senses dominated by’ the Large Bathers behind him – photographed by Ker
Xavier Roussel and Émile Bernard a decade earlier.116 Furthermore, as his friendships
with Graef and Biallowons grew more intimate, Kirchner turned his attention from
the figures of young women that had always preoccupied him to men’s bodies and
relationships. At the same time, he was confronted not only with his inability to meet
the strenuous demands of military service and the looming danger of grave injury or
death in combat, but also with the discrepancy between his vision of the ideal soldier

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On Masculinity and Male Sexuality in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Soldiers’ Bath

and the realities of military homosociality. He may have caught a glimpse of a form of
homosexuality that differed starkly from what he had experienced in Graef’s house
in Jena and his own studio in Berlin. As a result, Kirchner was ultimately unable or
unwilling to maintain a consistent posture or performance of normative masculinity,
of strength, virility and domination. Unable to fit in and twice claiming to be as or
more abject than a fashionable female prostitute, he experienced an almost total
physical collapse and profound psychological crisis.117
Soldiers’ Bath is organized around the dissonances and tensions between military

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discipline and its evasion, between signs of pleasure and discordant details. Given such
tensions, Kirchner’s biography, and the determining historical forces and discourses
that exerted a powerful pressure on the individual, it is hard to see in this painting a
deliberate, unambiguous affirmation of some monolithically imagined gay identity,
despite its re-inscription of some elements of homoerotic iconography and suggestive
acknowledgement of the continued, though illicit, shadowy presence of homosexuality
in the German army. Despite the homoeroticism of his work in 1915, Kirchner neither
came out that year nor ever defined himself in terms of gay identity. He maintained
his relationship with Erna Schilling until his death in 1938 (although he refused to
marry her, as she wished).118 He worked to reduce the powerful effect of Biallowons’
dance of 1915 by framing him in several works with two female nudes. In the
1920s, the female nude in nature reclaimed a central place in his artistic production.
Hence, when thinking about Kirchner it is worth keeping in mind warnings against
the overextension of the term ‘queer’ and the concomitant vitiation of its critical
power.119 Yet ‘queer’, the term for a transgressive, unstable and destabilizing, parodic,
mischievous, flexible, and heterogeneous positionality and possibility vis-à-vis
normative conceptions of normalcy, ‘queer’ as the term for the instability of all
identities (sexual and otherwise), may nonetheless be the best way to characterize
Soldiers’ Bath, a product of Germany’s political and Kirchner’s identity crises of 1915. In
any case, one can say with certainty that this painting is a monumental, remarkable,
beautiful modernist picture of an unusual, challenging modern subject. It is not only
a depiction of the army as a terribly, catastrophically repressive institution designed to
destroy, but also a representation of military life as an ambivalent social, sensuous, and
erotic experience.

Notes 2 Günther Gerken, ‘Die Krisenjahre 1914–1918 im Spiegel der Graphik’,

Work on this essay was facilitated by grants and fellowships from in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen und Druckgraphik, ed.
the DAAD and the National Humanities Center. For their very Magdalena M. Moeller and Roland Scotti, Munich, 1998, 49–60, 50.
helpful critique of my work on this material during the last five 3 This was Bathing Women, which measured 196 × 203 cm. Earlier
years, I would like to thank the members of audiences who heard paintings of bathers that are notable for their dimensions are:
short versions of this paper at the annual conferences of the Fünf Badende am See [Five Bathers at the Lake] (1911), which measures
German Studies Association and the College Art Association in 151 × 197 cm, and Ins Meer Schreitende [Walking into the Sea] (1912), which
2016 and 2017, and at the University of Missouri. I am especially measures 200 × 150 cm. The only other oil paintings of comparable
grateful to Paul Jaskot, Thomas Röske, Michael Yonan, and the size before 1916 were Potsdamer Platz, Berlin (200 × 150 cm) and Zirkusreiter
two anonymous peer reviewers, who read drafts of the entire [Circus Rider] (200 × 150 cm), both of which Kirchner painted in 1914.
manuscript in its more-or-less fully developed state. They have In 1916, he returned to the subject of nude bathing in nature in a group
helped me to make this much better than it would have otherwise of murals that he was commissioned to complete for the stairwell of
been. Of course, I am solely responsible for its flaws and limits. the sanatorium at which he was a patient. See Meike Hoffmann, ‘Ernst
Ludwig Kirchners Wandmalereien im Sanatorium Kohnstamm’, in
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: ‘Kirchner in Königstein’ – Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, Druckgrafik,
1 Leo Steinberg, ‘The Philosophical Brothel’, October, 44, Spring 1988, Fotografien, ed. Herbert Meyer-Eilinger, Frankfurt am Main, 1999, 33–50.
7–74, 73. This picture has been on my mind for a long time and the 4 See, for example, Peter Springer, Hand and Head: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s
origin of this article dates to the autumn of 1988, when in a seminar Self-Portrait as Soldier, Berkeley, 2002; and Uwe M. Schneede, ‘In der
on the Brücke in the First World War led by O. K. Werckmeister Krise, gegen die Krise. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in Zeiten des Ersten
during my first term in graduate school, I collected information on the Weltkriegs’, in Großstadtrausch – Naturidyll: Kirchner – Die Berliner Jahre, ed.
relationship between Kirchner, Botho Graef, and Hugo Biallowons. Sandra Gianfreda and Magdalena M. Moeller, Munich, 2017, 64–73.

© Association for Art History 2020 922

James A. van Dyke

5 In 1988, it was part of a swap with the Solomon R. Guggenheim 12 Hal Foster, ‘Primitive Scenes’, Critical Inquiry, 20: 1, 1993, 69–102,
Museum in New York. The correspondence is found in the painting’s 95–102. I refer here to the ground-breaking and important essay
object file, which I read at the Guggenheim prior to its restitution in by Carol Duncan, ‘Virility and Domination in Early 20th Century
October 2018 to the heirs of Alfred Flechtheim, the important Jewish Vanguard Painting’, Artforum, 12: 4, December 1973, 30–39, reprinted
German art dealer who acquired the picture in 1919 and later left it in The Aesthetics of Power: Essays in the Critical History of Art, Cambridge, 1993,
in the care of his niece when he emigrated from Germany in 1933. It 81–108.
was acquired in 1938 by the art collector and Nazi Party member Kurt 13 Thomas Röske, ‘Dokumente einer Freundschaft – Both Graef and
Feldhäusser, passed to Feldhäusser’s mother in 1945, and finally to Hugo Biallowons auf Bildern Ernst Ludwig Kirchners’, in Kirchner: Von
the Erhard Weyhe Gallery in New York, which sold it to May in 1952. Jena nach Davos, ed. Ehrmann and Wahl, 40–48; Thomas Röske, Kirchner:
Almost immediately after its restitution in 2018, it was sold at auction Tanz zwischen den Frauen, Frankfurt am Main, 1993; and Thomas Röske,
for just under 22 million dollars, and now is in a private collection. See ‘Der Lebenskamerad – Das Verhältnis Ernst Ludwig Kirchners zu Erna
https://www.guggenheim.org/press-release/solomon-r-guggenheim- Schilling’, in Frauen in Kunst und Leben der ‘Brücke’, ed. Hermann Gerlinger

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foundation-restitutes-ernst-ludwig-kirchners-artillerymen-to-heirs- and Herwig Guratz, Schleswig, 2000, 61–79.
of-alfred-flechtheim and http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ 14 Hansdieter Erbsmehl, ‘“Wir stürzten uns auf die Natur in den
ecatalogue/2018/impressionist-modern-art-evening-sale-n09930/ Mädchen”. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner und die “Kindermodelle” der
lot.22.html (last accessed 24 February 2020). Künstlergruppe “Brücke”’, Georges-Bloch-Jahrbuch, 9–10, 2002/03,
6 See, for instance: Lucius Grisebach, Annette Meyer zu Eissen, and 112–149.
Ulrich Luckhardt, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1880–1938, Berlin, 1979, 15 Aruna D’Souza, Cézanne’s Bathers: Biography and the Erotics of Paint, University
219; Wolfgang Henze, ‘Die Kunst Ernst Ludwig Kirchners in den Park, 2008.
Krisenjahren 1913–1917’, in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Von Jena nach Davos, ed. 16 For a French example, which includes an oven to heat the water,
Anna-Maria Ehrmann and Volker Wahl, Jena, 1993, 57; Gercken, ‘Die see: https://www.akpool.de/ansichtskarten/27989349-kuenstler-
Krisenjahre 1914–1918’, 50; Thomas Röske, ‘“Vielleicht kann ich aber ansichtskarte-postkarte-gabard-le-bain-douche-franzoesische-
doch neues sehen und gestalten”: Kirchner in Königstein’, in Ernst soldaten-dusche-ofen (last accessed 5 May 2020).
Ludwig Kirchner: ‘Kirchner in Königstein’ – Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, Druckgrafik, 17 This claim is based on a survey of such journals as Kriegszeit and
Fotografien, ed. Herbert Meyer-Ellinger, Frankfurt am Main, 1999, 13; Simplicissimus, as well as a reading of the chronicle of the regiment in
Bettina Gockel, ‘Der Künstler als Objekt psychiatrischer Theorie und which Kirchner briefly served. Günther Berr, Das Königlich-Preußische
Praxis’, Georges-Bloch-Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Instituts der Universität Mansfelder Feldartillerie-Regiment Nr. 75 zu Halle a.d.S. im Weltkriege 1914/18,
Zürich, 2002/03, 171; Norman Rosenthal, ‘Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Gräfenhainichen, 1934. I am grateful to Sherwin Simmons for making
Expressionist’, in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1880–1938: The Dresden and Berlin me aware of this volume.
Years, ed. Jill Lloyd and Magdalena M. Moeller, London, 2003, 12. 18 Reproduced in the Berlin Illustrierte Zeitung, 28: 28, 13 July 1919, 262.
7 Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea, New Haven, 1987, 154; 19 For discussions of pornography, debates about immorality, and
Anna-Maria Ehrmann and Volker Wahl, eds, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Von censorship in Imperial Germany, see Gary D. Stark, ‘Pornography,
Jena nach Davos, Jena, 1993, 224; Richard Cork, A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Society, and the Law in Imperial Germany’, Central European History, 14:
Art and the Great War, New Haven, 1994, 106–107; Nancy Spector, ed., 3, 1981, 200–229; Sherwin Simmons, ‘Ernst Kirchner’s Streetwalkers:
Guggenheim Museum Collection A to Z, New York, 2001, 166; Thomas Krens, Art, Luxury, and Immorality in Berlin, 1913–16’, Art Bulletin, 82: 1,
ed., Art through the Ages: Masterpieces of Painting from Titian to Picasso, New York, 2000, 117–148; Gary D. Stark, Banned in Berlin: Literary Censorship in Imperial
2002, 158; Frank Tipton, A History of Modern Germany since 1815, Berkeley, Germany, 1871–1918, New York, 2009.
2003, 299; Javier Arnaldo, ‘Krieg und Zusammenbruch’, in Ernst Ludwig 20 It was shown in a mid-career retrospective of Kirchner’s work at
Kirchner: Retrospektive, ed. Felix Krämer, Ostfildern, 2010, 154; David M. Ludwig Schames’ gallery in Frankfurt am Main. See Donald E. Gordon,
Lubin, Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War, Oxford, 2016, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Cambridge, MA, 1968, 329, 450.
121–122. 21 Kathrin Renken, ‘“Die Kunst im Kriege”: Eine Wanderausstellung
8 Michael Gill, Image of the Body: Aspects of the Nude, New York, 1989, des Deutschen Museums’, in Das Schöne und der Alltag: Die Anfänge modernen
355–356; Melanie Damm in Krämer, ed., Kirchner, 266. Designs 1900–1914, ed. Michael Fehr, Sabine Röder, and Gerhard Storck,
9 This refers in particular to Kirchner’s production in the autumn of Cologne, 1997, 400–408; Tita Hoffmeister, ‘1915–1917. Die Jahre der
1915 of a model for a patriotic wooden ‘Man of Nails’ to raise funds Krise’, in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ed. Rudy Chiappini, Milan, 2000, 94, 108;
for the war effort, his work in early 1916 on the model for a stone war Gudrun König, Konsumkultur: Inszenierte Warenwelt um 1900, Vienna, 2009,
memorial, and his design the same year for a submarine-themed iron 286–301.
cooking pot. See Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Der gesamte Briefwechsel, ed. Hans 22 Kirchner to Karl Ernst Osthaus, 10 January 1916; Osthaus to Kirchner,
Delfs, vol. 1, Zürich, 2010, 105–109, 113, 122–135, 142–143; Michael 12 January 1916, in Kirchner, Briefwechsel, vol. 1, 121–122.
Diers, Schlagbilder: Zur politischen Ikonographie der Gegenwart, Frankfurt am 23 See fst. [Fritz Stahl], ‘Die Ausstellung “Kunst und Krieg”’, Berliner
Main, 1997, 78–100; Sherwin Simmons, ‘Men of Nails: Monuments, Tageblatt, 105, 26 February 1916; ‘Eine Wanderausstellung’, Berliner
Expressionism, Fetishes, Dadaism’, Res, 40, 2001, 211–238; Springer, Börsen-Courier, 96, 26 February 1916; K.E., ‘Die Kunst im Kriege’, Berliner
Hand and Head, 43–49. Morgenpost, 58, 27 February 1916; v. Kh., ‘Die Kunst im Kriege’, Neue
10 The quotation is from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies, Durham, NC, Preußische Zeitung, 116, 4 March 1916; Jul. Elias, ‘Kriegsausstellungen’,
1993, 8. It is quoted in Tom Folland, ‘Robert Rauschenberg’s Queer Kunst und Künstler, 14: 7, April 1916, 364; and ‘Kriegsbilderausstellung in
Modernism: The Early Combines and Decoration’, Art Bulletin 92: 4, Berlin’, Kunst für Alle, 31, 1 May 1916, 315.
December 2010, 348–365, and Christoph Lorey and John L. Plews, eds, 24 Charles Nagel to Alfred Barr, 20 February 1956, Guggenheim Museum,
Queering the Canon: Defying Sights in German Literature and Culture, Columbia, SC, Object File (prior to the restitution of the picture). For Barr’s account of
1998, xiii. For a characterization of the difference between queerness his response to ‘this amazing picture’, which he saw for the first time
and gay identity, see David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay in Germany sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, see his letter to Morton D.
Hagiography, New York, 1995, 62. ‘Buster’ May of 27 February 1956.
11 Annegret Jürgens-Kirchhoff, Schreckensbilder: Krieg und Kunst im 20. 25 Hervé Dajon, ‘La douche, une invention d’un médecin des prisons,
Jahrhundert, Berlin, 1993, 110–111. Her discussion is referred to by Peter le docteur Merry Delabost’, criminocorpus: Carnet de l’histoire de la justice, des
Springer, who finds ‘neither criticism nor accusation’ in Kirchner’s crimes et des peines, 26 January 2013, https://journals.openedition.org/
painting. See Springer, Hand and Head, 32. One might also mention here criminocorpus/2006#text (last consulted 21 May 2018); Jennifer Reed
Aya Soika’s brief characterization of the picture and its reception. While Dillon, ‘Modernity, Sanitation and the Public Bath: Berlin, 1896–1930,
she suggests that the picture is ‘disturbing [verstörend]’, Soika correctly as Archetype’, PhD dissertation, Duke University, 2007, 152–164.
notes the range of Kirchner’s response to military culture and that the 26 David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany,
current art-historical consensus does not necessarily ‘correspond to the 1780–1918, Oxford, 1997, 378. See also E. A. L. Hempel, Handbuch der
perception of contemporaries’. See Aya Soika, Weltenbruch: Die Künstler der Kriegshygiene, Göttingen, 1822, 154ff., quoted in Hans-Jürgen Pilster,
Brücke im Ersten Weltkrieg, 1914–1918, Munich, 2014, 68. ‘Militärhygiene im 19. Jahrhundert’, PhD dissertation, Universität

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On Masculinity and Male Sexuality in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Soldiers’ Bath

München, Munich, 1981, 33–34; Carl Kirchner, Lehrbuch der Militär- regarded with pity by civilians to an impressive specimen of German
Hygiene, Erlangen, 1869, 256. soldierly masculinity in the course of a day of R&R well behind the
27 Dillon, ‘Modernity, Sanitation and the Public Bath’, 153–155. front lines in France. Among other things, the soldier soaks in a tub,
28 Detlef Hoffmann, ed., Ein Krieg wird dargestellt: Die Weltkriegssammlung des exclaiming how good it feels. The artist, to be sure, was very discrete in
Historischen Museums (1914–1918): Themen einer Ausstellung, Inventarkatalog, that panel, showing only the tips of the man’s toes emerging from the
Frankfurt am Main, 1976, 217, 436. The occasional presence of a deep water. See ‘Rasttag in Lille’, Simplicissimus, 20: 17, 27 July 1915, 203.
‘Badezug’ is mentioned in Berr, Feldartillerie-Regiment Nr. 75, 258. 42 Walter Flex, Der Wanderer zwischen beiden Welten: Ein Kriegserlebnis, 40–42nd
29 It is difficult to discern, but an example may be illustrated in ed., Munich, 1918, 22–25. ‘Feucht von den Wassern und von Sonne
Hoffmann, Ein Krieg wird dargestellt, 467. und Jugend über und über glänzend stand der Zwanzigjährige in
30 See note 16. seiner schlanken Reinheit da, und die Worte des Ganymed kamen ihm
31 A second example, called ‘Hinter der Front: Ein Brausebad’, shows schlicht und schön und mit einer fast schmerzlich hellen Sehnsucht
a more formal structure of barrels and poles nailed together. This von den Lippen.’

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postcard can be found for sale on the website www.delcampe.net (last 43 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford, 2013 [1975],
accessed 5 May 2020). 325–335.
32 On the relationship of modern art and mass culture, see Thomas Crow, 44 Fussell, The Great War, 329–332. On Eakins and Whitman in the context
‘Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts’, in Modern Art in the of the former’s painting, The Swimming Hole, see Whitney Davis, ‘Erotic
Common Culture, New Haven, 1996, 3–37. Later examples of paintings Revision in Thomas Eakins’s Narratives of Male Nudity’, Art History, 17:
and drawings depicting soldiers under the shower include Ronald 3, September 1994, 301–341.
Searle, Soldiers in Shower Bath, USSM Mount Vernon, December 1941 (1941); 45 Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin, New York, 2014, 111–112.
Alfred Deineka, After the Battle (1942); Donald Friend, Showering in a Ruin 46 Kirchner to Eugen Diederichs, 1 November 1914, in Kirchner, Briefe,
(1945); and Alexander Dudin, Soldiers’ Bath (1988). 96. For a summary of Kirchner’s interest in Whitman, see Röske, ‘Das
33 This painting is illustrated, in the context of a discussion of swimming, Lebenskamerad’, 64–65.
the nineteenth-century culture of physical fitness, military hygiene, 47 Kirchner to Elfriede Dümmler and Hansgeorg Knoblauch, 14 February
and preparation for war, in Ernst Gerhard Eder, Bade- und Schwimmkultur 1929, in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Briefwechsel mit einem jungen Ehepaar,
in Wien: Sozialhistorische und kulturanthropologische Untersuchungen, Cologne, 1927–1937: Elfriede Dümmler und Hansgeorg Knoblauch, Bern, 1989, 51.
1995, 161–190. 48 Ute Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription, and
34 On the belief that these paintings were of soldiers that Cézanne had Civil Society, Oxford, 2004, 182.
witnessed in his youth, see D’Souza, Cézanne’s Bathers, 96. The fact that 49 Frevert, A Nation in Barracks, 183.
the German art dealer Alfred Flechtheim had owned Baigneurs au repos 50 Remarque, Im Westen nichts Neues, 11.
II (1875–76), but was forced to sell it during the First World War, may 51 Frevert, A Nation in Barracks, 75, 171–173, 182–183.
help to explain why he acquired Kirchner’s picture from the Schames 52 Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity, New Haven, 1991,
exhibition in early 1919. 102–129; Reinhold Heller, ‘Bridge to Utopia: The Brücke as Utopian
35 See https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/50.130.48/ (last Experiment’, in Expressionist Utopias: Paradise – Metropolis – Architectural
accessed 22 May 2018). Fantasy, ed. Timothy O. Benson, Berkeley, 1993, 62–83.
36 In 1910, Eugene Jansson painted himself in a white suit, standing 53 See note 3.
before a mass of male nudes. The figures of the beautiful young 54 George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity, Oxford,
men, who represent sailors in the Swedish navy, are not shown in 1996, 40–55; Jason Crouthamel, An Intimate History of the Front: Masculinity,
a landscape but rather in the outdoor pool of a bathhouse, beneath Sexuality, and German Soldiers in the First World War, New York, 2014, 16–20.
a bright blue sky. See Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer, Art & Queer 55 Mosse, The Image of Man, 28–35; Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann
Culture, London, 2013, 62–63. and the Origins of Art History, New Haven, 1994, 118–132, 146–155, 163–
37 Examples of such work are: Charles William Jefferys, Polish Soldiers 173; Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation, New
Bathing (1914–18); Major L. F. S. Hore, Bathing Party (1915); and George York, 1997, 142–147; Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics
Lambert, Anzacs Bathing (1916). from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond, New York, 2010, 24.
38 Many examples of these ephemera can be found on numerous websites, 56 On Schneider, see Robert Corwegh, ‘Sascha Schneider – Florenz’,
commercial and otherwise. Several good snapshots, printed during Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, 31: III/2, October 1912–March 1913,
the war as postcards, are located at: https://davidderrick.wordpress. 225–244; Christopher Reed, Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas, New
com/2014/08/20/soldiers-bathing/ (last accessed 16 July 2018). York, 2011, 97; and Silke Opitz, ed., Sascha Schneider: Visualizing Ideas through
Further examples, including several pasted onto the page of a private the Human Body, Weimar, 2013. On Gloeden, see Jason Goldman, ‘“The
photo album, are reproduced in Hoffmann, Ein Krieg wird dargestellt, 133, Golden Age of Gay Porn”: Nostalgia and the Photography of Wilhelm
and Bodo von Dewitz, ‘German Snapshots from World War I: Personal von Gloeden’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 12: 2, 2006, 237–258.
Pictures, Political Implications’, in War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict 57 On Kirchner’s knowledge of and interest in Cézanne’s bathers, see
and Its Aftermath, ed. Anne Wilkes Tucker, Will Michels, and Natalie Zelt, Christian Geelhaar, ‘Die richtigen Augen der Maler: Zur Rezeption
New Haven, 2012, 152–160. von Cézannes Badenden’, in Paul Cézanne: Die Badenden, ed. Mary Louise
39 A brief but detailed textual description of such an episode is found in Krumrine, Zurich, 1989, 275–303.
the chronicle of Kirchner’s erstwhile regiment, as it recounts the unit’s 58 E. L. Kirchner, Graef and Friend [Graef und Freund], 1914. Oil on canvas,
movements through Belgium in 1914: ‘A nice, clear, and wide stream 125 × 90 cm. Private collection.
ran right through the pleasantly shaded horse bivouac. It did not take 59 Friedrich Christian Benedict Avé-Lallemant, Das deutsche Gaunerthum-
long for the entire unit to be sitting in the water without a shred of in seiner social-politischen, literarischen und linguistischen Ausbildung zu seinem
clothing on, rinsing off the dust from the country road. [Quer durch heutigen Bestande – Vierter Theil, Leipzig, 1862, 607; Albert Moll, Die Conträre
die angenehm schattigen Pferdebiwaks zog sich ein schöner, klarer Sexualempfindung, Berlin, 1891, 252; Paul Derks, Die Schande der heiligen
und breiter Bach. Es dauerte nicht lange, so saß die ganze Abteilung Päderastie. Homosexualität und Öffentlichkeit in der deutschen Literatur 1750–1850,
splitterfasernackt im Wasser und spülte den Staub der Landstraßen Berlin, 1990, 60; Robert Tobin, Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of
wieder ab (Offz. Stellv. Forberg)].’ See Berr, Feldartillerie-Regiment Nr. 75, 88. Goethe, Philadelphia, 2000, 15, 27; Beachy, Gay Berlin, xi.
40 Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel, trans. Michael Hofmann, New York, 2004 60 Röske, Tanz zwischen den Frauen, 74.
[1920], 20, 142, 159, and Ernst Jünger, Der Kampf als Inneres Erlebnis, 2nd 61 In addition to Röske, Tanz zwischen den Frauen, see Volker Wahl, Jena als
edn., Berlin, 1926, 67; Erich Maria Remarque, Im Westen nichts Neues, 41st Kunststadt: Begegnungen mit der modernen Kunst in der thüringischen Universitätsstadt
ed., Frankfurt am Main, 1991 [1928], 27, 105–110. zwischen 1900 und 1933, Leipzig, 1988, and Röske, ‘Dokumente einer
41 Arnold Zweig, Erziehung vor Verdun, Amsterdam, 1935, 407, quoted in Freundschaft’.
Jürgens-Kirchhoff, Schreckensbilder, 111. This sense of luxury was likewise 62 Two versions of another composition focused on a same-sex couple are
conveyed in a comic strip published in Germany in July 1915. It showed found in a sketchbook dated between 1913 and 1919. The ink drawings,
the transformation of a combat soldier from a grimy, unkempt being located on facing pages, show two naked men sitting side-by-side and

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James A. van Dyke

embracing (while one holds a glass) in the foreground of an interior 76 Hirschfeld, Berlins Drittes Geschlecht, 46–52; David James Prickett, ‘Body
space of some kind. Other couples dance and lie together in the Crisis, Identity Crisis: Homosexuality and Aesthetics in Wilhelmine-
background. Perhaps this shows Graef and Biallowons enjoying a visit and Weimar Germany’, PhD dissertation, University of Cincinnati,
to Kirchner’s bohemian studio; Kirchner made at least one photograph 2003, 101–107.
of the two men in a related pose, though facing the camera and fully 77 Jeffrey Schneider, ‘“The Pleasure of the Uniform”: Masculinity,
dressed. The drawings are in Sketchbook 35, Kirchner Museum, Davos. Transvestism, and Militarism in Heinrich Mann’s Der Untertan
The photograph is reproduced in Kirchner. Von Jena nach Davos, 55. and Magnus Hirschfeld’s Die Transvestiten’, Germanic Review, 76: 2,
63 Röske, Tanz zwischen den Frauen, 74. 2001, 183–200; Marcus Funck, ‘Ready for War? Conceptions of
64 Röske, Tanz zwischen den Frauen, 35–46. Later, Röske makes a persuasive Military Manliness in the Prusso-German Officer Corps before
case for this prevalent identification of the naked man as Biallowons, the First World War’, in Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in
based on his physiognomy, robust physique and the absence of a Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-
cable for a shutter release. However, the photograph is not entirely Springorum, Oxford, 2002, 43–67, 55; Crouthamel, An Intimate

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unambiguous. See Röske, Tanz zwischen den Frauen, 69. History, 17, 124–128.
65 Kirchner to Gustav Schiefler, 17 August 1916, quoted in Röske, Tanz 78 Kirchner wrote a letter to Karl Ernst Osthaus in September 1915
zwischen den Frauen, 70. in which he assessed a different exhibition at the same gallery. See
66 Kirchner to Irene Eucken, 6 January 1918 and Kirchner to Hugo Sherwin Simmons, ‘Expressionism in the Discourse of Fashion’, Fashion
Hertwig, 26 January 1918 and 30 March 1918, in Kirchner, Briefe, Theory, 4: 1, 2000, 49–88. On Hartley in Berlin, see Patricia McDonnell,
226, 239, 273; Kirchner to Gustav Schiefler, 21 January 1918, in Ernst ‘“Essentially Masculine”: Marsden Hartley, Gay Identity, and the
Ludwig Kirchner and Gustav Schiefler, Briefwechsel, 1910–1935/1938, ed. Wilhelmine German Military’, Art Journal, 56: 2, 1997, 62–68; Dieter
Wolfgang Henze, Stuttgart, 1990, 98. Scholz, ed., Marsden Hartley: Die deutschen Bilder 1913–1915, Cologne, 2014.
67 Kirchner to Elfriede Dümmler and Hansgeorg Knoblauch, 8 June 1930, For an extremely unsympathetic review of the Hartley exhibition at the
quoted in Röske, ‘Dokumente einer Freundschaft’, 41. For a summary Graphik Verlag, which does not deign to name ‘the American pseudo-
of Partenau, which was published in 1929, in the context of the ideology artist’ by name, see Curt Glaser, ‘Berliner Ausstellungen’, Kunstchronik,
of the Männerbund movement promoted by Hans Blüher, who in 1913 27: 5, 29 October 29 1915, 55.
provoked a scandal over homosexuality in the German youth movement 79 D. H. Lawrence, The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, London, 1914.
with his book, Die deutsche Wandervogelbewegung als ein erotisches Phänomen, see 80 Crouthamel, An Intimate History, 128–130.
Peter Morgan, ‘Coming out in Weimar: Crisis and Homosexuality in the 81 James M. Saslow, Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the
Weimar Republic’, Thesis Eleven 3, 2012, 48–65. On the scandal of 1913, Visual Arts, New York, 1999, 213–216; Wolfgang J. Mommsen,
see John Alexander Williams, ‘Ecstasies of the Young: Sexuality, the ‘Homosexualität, aristokratische Kultur und Weltpolitik: Die
Youth Movement, and Moral Panic in Germany on the Eve of the First Herausforderung des wilhelminischen Establishments durch
World War’, Central European History, 34: 2, 2001, 163–189. Maximilian Harden 1906–1908’, in Große Prozesse: Recht und Gerechtigkeit in
68 For an example of an undated French postcard showing high spirits in the der Geschichte, ed. Uwe Schultz, Munich, 2001, 279–288; Funck, ‘Ready
military bathhouse, see: https://www.akpool.co.uk/postcards/24516849- for War?’; Beachy, Gay Berlin, 120–139; Norman Domeier, The Eulenburg
kuenstler-ak-militaire-la-douche-franz-soldaten-dusche (last Affair: A Cultural History of Politics in the German Empire, Rochester, 2015.
accessed 5 May 2020). An example of a German photographic picture 82 James D. Steakley, ‘Iconography of a Scandal: Political Cartoons and
postcard showing men diving wildly from a dock into a river, with the Eulenburg Affair’, Studies in Visual Communication, 9: 2, 1983, 20–51,
uniformed supervisors looking on, can be found at: https://oldthing. reprinted in revised form in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and
ch/Ansichtskarte-Erster-Weltkrieg-Soldaten-beim-Baden-Flussbad- Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George
Kriegshilfe-Karte-0035693223 (last accessed 5 May 2020). Chauncey, Jr., New York, 1989, 233–257.
69 Robert Mills, Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages, Chicago, 2015, 173–175; 83 For discussions of pornography, debates about immorality, and
Bradley J. Cavallo, ‘Albrecht Dürer’s The Men’s Bathhouse of 1496–97: censorship in Imperial Germany that mostly focused on the
Problems of Sexual Signification’, Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, 16: representation of women, see Gary D. Stark, ‘Pornography, Society,
4, 2016, 9–37. and the Law in Imperial Germany’, Central European History, 14: 3, 1981,
70 Wolfgang Theis and Andreas Sternweiler, ‘Alltag im Kaiserreich und in 200–229; Sherwin Simmons, ‘Ernst Kirchner’s Streetwalkers: Art,
der Weimarer Republik’, in Eldorado: Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin Luxury, and Immorality in Berlin, 1913–16’, Art Bulletin, 82: 1, 2000,
1850–1950: Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur, ed. Michael Bollé and Rolf Bothe, 117–148; and Gary D. Stark, Banned in Berlin: Literary Censorship in Imperial
Berlin, 1984, 48–73; George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, Germany, 1871–1918, New York, 2009.
and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940, New York, 1994, 207–225; 84 The caption reads: ‘Wonderful lad! Fit for the Garde du Corps!’ ‘I don’t
Andreas Sternweiler and Hans Gerhard Hannesen, eds, Goodbye to Berlin? think so! I have an internal imperfection.’ ‘Huh? What’s your problem?’
100 Jahre Schwulenbewegung, Berlin, 1997, 71, 74; Dianne Chisholm, Queer ‘Hemorrhoids!’ [‘Famoser Kerl! Tauglich für Garde du Corps!’ ‘Dat
Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City, Minneapolis, 2005, 63– geiht woll nich! Ick hew’n innerlichen Fehler.’ ‘Nanu, was hast du
70; Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, denn?’ ‘Haemorrhoiden!’]
1918–1957, Chicago, 2005, 94–97; David James Prickett, ‘Defining 85 Only two copies of Kirchner’s lithograph Soldiers’ Physical
Identity via Homosexual Spaces: Locating the Male Homosexual in [Soldatenmusterung] (1915) are known. Both are in private collections.
Weimar Berlin’, Women in German Yearbook, 21, 2005, 134–162; Beachy, 86 The usual assumption is that only the women in these paintings are
Gay Berlin, 52. prostitutes. However, it is worth considering if at least some of the
71 Magnus Hirschfeld, Berlins Drittes Geschlecht, 6th edn., Berlin, 1905, 37, men could be as well. Berlin had a ‘notorious reputation’ for male
58. prostitution. Thousands worked there, and at least one photograph of
72 On one example from the early 1990s, relating to concerns about a man who sought clients in the Friedrichstrasse closely resembles the
gay men in the United States military, see Richard Meyer, Outlaw male figure in the right foreground of Berlin Street Scene, who perhaps
Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art, turns to solicit the viewer and whose facial features resemble those of
Boston, 2002, 19–21. the two women behind him. Just as women who worked as prostitutes
73 Reed, Art and Homosexuality, 70. mimicked bourgeois women, and even widows, to avoid apprehension
74 Frevert, A Nation in Barracks, 176–177. by the police, some male prostitutes appear to have assumed the
75 Gustav Otto, Die Verbrecherwelt von Berlin, Berlin, 1886, 173–176; Hans guise of respectable bourgeois men. For brief discussions of male
Ostwald, Männliche Prostitution im kaiserlichen Berlin, Leipzig, 1906, 85ff. See prostitution in Berlin, see Beachy, Gay Berlin, 64–70; Bruce Robertson,
also Beachy, Gay Berlin, 64–65; Jeffrey Schneider, ‘Soliciting Fantasies: ‘Hartley und das homosexuelle Berlin’, in Hartley, 141–146, 142. For a
Knowing and Not Knowing about Male Prostitution by Soldiers in photograph of a male prostitute who bears a striking resemblance to
Imperial Germany’, in After The History of Sexuality: German Genealogies the men in Kirchner’s paintings, see Georg Back, Sexuelle Verirrungen des
With and Beyond Foucault, ed. Scott Spector, Helmut Puff, and Dagmar Menschen und der Natur, Berlin, 1911, 667, reprinted in Magnus Hirschfeld,
Herzog, New York, 2012, 124–138. Berlins Drittes Geschlecht, ed. Manfred Herzer, Berlin, 1991, 144.

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On Masculinity and Male Sexuality in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Soldiers’ Bath

87 Sketchbooks 45 and 47, Kirchner Museum, Davos. In 1989 or 1990, 99 The woodcut is the fourth of seven illustrating Peter Schlemihl’s Strange
I was told by a prominent scholar in the field of the existence of a Story [Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte], an early nineteenth-century
sketchbook, which had recently been for sale, that contained pederastic tale by Adalbert von Chamisso of self-alienation, social ostracism, and
drawings. However, I have been unable to locate that object and to eventual redemption.
confirm the nature of its contents. 100 I am obviously referring broadly to the argument in Judith Butler,
88 Röske relates that Biallowons was an ‘Offiziers-Stellvertreter’ Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York, 1990.
in a ‘Reserve-Infanterie-Regiment’ at the time of his death, and 101 Kirchner to Eugen Diederichs, 1 November 1914, quoted in Uwe M.
describes the uniform he wears in Kirchner’s painting as that of a Schneede, ‘In der Krise, gegen die Krise. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in Zeiten
‘Gardeschützen’. See Röske, Tanz zwischen den Frauen, 69–70. des Ersten Weltkriegs’, in Großstadtrausch – Naturidyll: Kirchner – Die Berliner Jahre,
89 Simmons, ‘Expressionism in the Discourse of Fashion’. ed. Sandra Gianfreda and Magdalena M. Moeller, Munich, 2017, 64.
90 Kirchner to Karl Ernst Osthaus, 24 September 1915, in Kirchner, Briefe, 102 Kirchner to Schiefler, 27 January 2015, quoted in Schneede, ‘In der
115. ‘[…] Es ist furchtbar schwer, denn das eigentliche verstehen gerade Krise’, 64.

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an der Plastik so furchtbar wenig Menschen. Je mehr Materie um so 103 Kirchner to Schiefler, 28 December 1914 and 27 January 1915, in
schwerer kommt das sinnliche Verständnis, da die meisten heute keine Kirchner and Schiefler, Briefwechsel, 68, 71.
Sinnlichkeit mehr haben. Ich sehe das täglich an den Soldaten deren für 104 Kirchner to Elfried Knoblauch, 23 January 1929, in Kirchner,
den Bürger so wüstes Leben doch bei den meisten entsetzlich primitiv, Briefwechsel mit einem jungen Ehepaar, 40.
rein physisch sexuell und wahllos zugreifend ist.’ 105 Sketchbook 47, Kirchner Museum Davos.
91 Café Syphilis (1915). Etching, 24.5 × 32 cm (Dube R205 III). The 106 For the photographs, see Roland Scotti, ed., Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: The
situation is less clear in Soldat und Mädchen zwischen bunten Vorhängen Photographic Work, Göttingen, 2006, 72.
(1916). Oil on canvas, 100 × 75 cm. The soldier wears a sword and 107 Husarenritt (Die Reiter) (1915). Oil on canvas, 60.5 × 70 cm, private
may have a ‘75’ inscribed on his epaulette. That, the green skin collection; Reitende Artilleristen (1915). Oil on canvas 115 × 115 cm,
tone of the soldier, and the boldly patterned, possibly figurative private collection; Artillerist, ein Pferd besteigend (1915). Woodcut,
curtains, might suggest that this is a self-portrait of Kirchner with 26.2 × 17.5 cm; Artilleriereitplatz (1915). Woodcut, 31 × 46 cm; Reitender
Erna Schilling or some other woman in his studio. (On at least Artillerist (Meldereiter) (1915). Lithograph, 26.8 × 21.5 cm; Flussübergang
one website, the painting is listed as Soldat und Mädchen zwischen bunten der Reiter (1915). Lithograph, 26.8 × 21.4 cm; Patrouillenritt am Abend
Vorhängen [Selbstbildnis als Soldat im Ersten Weltkrieg]. See https://www. (1915). Lithograph, 50.5 × 59.1 cm; Reiter durch eine Schlucht Reitend (1915).
akg-images.de/archive/Soldat-und-Madchen-zwischen-bunten- Lithograph, 21.5 × 26.8 cm; Zwei reitende Artilleristen (1915). Lithograph,
Vorhangen-2UMDHU8NJ17L.html [last accessed 22 July 2018].) 59.2 × 50.3 cm; Zwei Reiter auf dem Hof (1915). Lithograph, 27 × 21.5;
However, in Kirchner’s Self-Portrait as Soldier, he of course wears a blue, Steigendes Pferd mit Reiter (1915). Lithograph, 59.4 × 50.3 cm; Zwei reitende
not green, uniform. In any case, the gesture of the man’s raised hand Artilleristen (1916). Lithograph, 26.8 × 21.4 cm.
is ambiguous. He may reach up to touch the woman’s breast, or he 108 Quoted in Springer, Hand and Head, 25. See also Kirchner to Schiefler,
may seek to stop her advances. 28 December 1914 and 29 April 1915, in Kirchner and Schiefler,
92 See Kirchner to Hagemann, 3 December 1915, in Hans Delfs, Mario- Briefwechsel, 68, 71.
Andreas von Lüttichau, and Roland Scotti, eds, Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, 109 For an extended account of Kirchner’s military service, see Springer,
Nolde, Nay … Briefe an den Sammler und Mäzen Carl Hagemann 1906–1940, Hand and Head, 22–42.
Ostfildern-Ruit, 2004, 45, and Kirchner to Schiefler, 12 November 110 It is possible that he made these two photographs in the same session,
1916, in Kirchner and Schiefler, Briefwechsel, 83. In 1910, Kirchner also or at approximately the same time, as the previous photograph, despite
expressed disgust with a prostitute with whom he spent time. See the different angle and direction of the camera. It is also possible that
Erbsmehl, ‘Kindermodelle’, 129. he could have made the photographs much earlier, just after acquiring
93 Annemarie und Wolf-Dieter Dube, E.L. Kirchner: Das Graphische Werk, his new gear and before actually reporting to the barracks in Halle.
2 vols, Munich, 1967, 2–268 (Lithographs 266–274). Dube dates the Given the contrast between the confidence and even haughtiness
prints to 1915, but Kirchner offered a series of erotic lithographs, conveyed by these photographs and Kirchner’s collapse as a recruit, the
presumably these prints, to Schiefler in 1913. See Kirchner to Schiefler, latter timeline seems plausible.
19 December 1913, in Kirchner, Briefe, 66–67. 111 Dolores Mitchell, ‘“The New Woman” as Prometheus: Women Artists
94 Kirchner to Graef, 21 September 1916, in Kirchner, Briefe, 144–145. On Depict Women Smoking’, Women’s Art Journal, 12, 1991, 3–9; Patricia
Graef’s ridicule of the young men in his circle when they expressed Berman, ‘Edvard Munch’s Self-Portrait with Cigarette: Smoking and
attraction to women, and on the ‘Enterotisierung’ of Kirchner’s work the Bohemian Persona’, Art Bulletin, 75: 4, 1993, 627–646; and the essays
in the 1910s, see Röske, ‘Dokumente einer Freundschaft’, 41, and ‘Der by Benno Tempel, Dolores Mitchell, and Robyn L. Schiffmann on
Lebenskamerad’, 66–68. smoking in art, women and smoking, and a queer history of smoking
95 Kirchner to Gustav Schiefler, 9 December 1915 and 15 December in Sander L. Gilman and Zhou Xun, eds, Smoke: A Global History of Smoking,
1915, in Kirchner and Schiefler, Briefwechsel, 72–73. Hans Fehr, a friend London, 2004, 206–217, 294–303, 304–308. One of Kirchner’s
of Emil Nolde’s who was an officer in Kirchner’s regiment and was portraits of soldiers in pencil, and a portrait of Biallowons in uniform
instrumental in obtaining medical leave for him, later reported that show them smoking cigarettes, as does Max Beckmann’s drypoint of
Kirchner had told him, in response to a question about whether the two supercilious officers of 1915.
camaraderie of military service offered him some pleasure, that he had 112 Niki Conley, ‘The Ambiguous Uniformed-Body: Ernst Ludwig
a much stronger bond with the horse he groomed than with his fellow Kirchner’s Self Portrait as Soldier Photographs’, unpublished paper,
soldiers. See Springer, Hand and Head, 26. University of Missouri, 2010.
96 Kirchner to Schiefler, 17 August, 19 October, and 12 November 1916, 113 Erbsmehl, ‘Kindermodelle’, 140–141.
in Kirchner and Schiefler, Briefwechsel, 79–80, 82–83; Kirchner to 114 The Drinker (Self-Portrait) [Der Trinker (Selbst-Portrait)] (1915). Oil on canvas,
Carl Hagemann, 11 September 1916 and 25 February 1917, in Delfs, 118.5 × 88.5 cm. Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg.
Lüttichau, and Scotti, eds, Carl Hagemann, 65, 81; Kirchner to Graef, 10 115 Kirchner to Lucius and Helene Spengler, 28 November 1918; Kirchner
February 1917, in Kirchner, Briefe, 158; Kirchner to Hansgeorg and to Helene Spengler, 3 December 1918, in Kirchner, Briefe, 306, 308.
Elfriede Knoblauch, 14 February, 2 March, and 27 March 1929, in 116 D’Souza, Cézanne’s Bathers, 1–4.
Kirchner, Briefwechsel mit einem jungen Ehepaar, 49–51, 60, 76. 117 See note 92. On the degree to which Kirchner’s breakdown conformed
97 O. K. Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914–1920, Chicago, to influential expectations about the ‘pathological’ modern artist, see
1989, 36–85; Joan Weinstein, The End of Expressionism: Art and the November Bettina Gockel, Die Pathologisierung des Künsters. Künstlerlegenden der Moderne,
Revolution in Germany, 1918–19, Chicago, 1990, 19–22. Berlin, 2010.
98 The glass negative of the photograph is in the collection of the Kirchner 118 Röske, ‘Der Lebenskamerad’, 62, 70–72.
Museum Davos. A print was recently included in the exhibition Ernst 119 Sharon Marcus, ‘Queer Theory for Everyone: A Review Essay’, Signs, 31:
Ludwig Kirchner: Der Maler als Fotograf, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, 2 1, 2005, 191–218; Lord and Meyer, Art & Queer Culture, 30, 43.
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