Ink brush, white gouache

37 x 26 inches

"Nobody but the dead know whether all these things people talk about are worth dying for or not. And the dead can´t talk. So the words about noble deaths and sacred blood and honor and such are all put into dead lips by grave robbers and fakes who have no right to speak about the dead. If a man says death before dishonor he is a fool or a liar because he doesn´t know what death is. He isn´t able to judge. He only knows about living.“

(From: "Johnny got his gun“, Kensington Publishing Corp.) 

War-hungry industrialists, frenzied democrats and monarchs who were happy to leave the risk to life and limb to others, dancing and lightly dressed girls serving to cheer them up. As I drew them, as a native German, Kaiser Wilhelm, consumed by complexes, and the two generals Ludendorff and Hindenburg came to mind, also the later Nobel Prize winner, chemist and inventor of poison gas Fritz Haber, who feared punishment for his deadly invention at the end of the war, which was never carried out. 130,000 tons of poison were fired between 1915 and 1918, 80.000 soldiers suffocated from it and in some places the country was contaminated for decades.