On account of a technological and material deployment beyond all human scope, the First World War ranks as the »seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century,« a century which would reach its moral nadir in the Nazi’s political programme of total war and extermination. But the worlds that collapsed in 1914 in a conflict involving seventy million soldiers in Europe, Africa and Asia and which would cost the lives of seventeen million people, had already become fragile in the years before; a number of writers, musicians and artists had long since become weary of these worlds and, like many of their ­fellow countrymen, positively ­celebrated the outbreak of hostil­ities.

Franz Marc, in keeping with countless statements by his contemporaries, summed up this spirit as follows: »In our era of great struggle for new art, we do not fight as the organised, but as ›wild ones‹ against an old, established power. The battle seems unequal, yet in spiritual matters, it is not the sheer number but the strength of ideas that prevails.«

The exhibition in the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn and the catalogue, meticulously edited by the curator, Uwe M. Schneede, do not merely gather the known sources and protagonists, but go that decisive step further by examining the processes of transmission between the international art movements of the time.