“Everything, I have to see everything. All the lowlands of life, I have to experience them myself.

That's why I went to war. I also had to see how a guy next to me suddenly fell backwards and ended up being shot head-on.

I had to see it all exactly as it is.

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I wanted it, so I'm not a pacifist… To see yourself, to experience things yourself, to be yourself crucified, that's what counts. So experience! Lived reality! You must be everything, yourself! Yourself everything! Otherwise, you're just a theoretician. »

Otto Dix

"Return to Berlin" has as its starting point the difficult return to the country of thedemobilized German soldiers.

The latter endured a “triple punishment”: first crippled, smashed, mutilated, or “broken jaws”; then defeated; finally humiliated by the indifference, contempt and rejection of civil society. All this contributed to the idea of a defeat that was more political than military and strongly fed Nazi propaganda through “the stab in the back” which weakened the young Weimar Republic.

Our project is to focus on certain works byexpressionist mastersof the time (Dix, Grosz, Beckmann…), to follow the intuitions, the feelings, the flashes of these painters marked in their flesh by

The Great War and its atrocities, in order to better understand this political, social, economic and cultural whirlwind of the 1920s, and the country's irremediable slide into Nazi chaos.

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