On June 28, 1914, Gavri­lo Prin­cip assas­si­nat­ed Arch­duke Franz Fer­di­nand of Aus­tria. Most of us know this — or at least if we don’t know the exact date, we know it hap­pened in 1914, 100 years ago. We also know that the spark of the killing ignit­ed the inter­na­tion­al geopo­lit­i­cal tin­der­box just wait­ing to flame into the First World War. Yet as mil­i­tary his­to­ri­ans often remind us, no one event can real­ly start a con­flict of that unprece­dent­ed scale any more than one event can stop it. The sec­ond half of the year 1914 saw a series of inter­re­lat­ed crises, respons­es, counter-crises, and counter respons­es that, these hun­dred years on, few of us could cite off the top of our heads.

We can com­pen­sate for the cen­tu­ry between us and the Great War by read­ing up on it, of course. Of the count­less vol­umes avail­able, I per­son­al­ly rec­om­mend Geoff Dyer’s The Miss­ing of the Somme. But noth­ing brings home the detailed real­i­ty of this ever-more-dis­tant “huge mur­der­ous pub­lic fol­ly,” in the words of J.B. Priest­ly, like look­ing at col­or pho­tos from the front.

That col­or pho­tog­ra­phy exists of any­thing in mid-1910s Europe, much less as momen­tous and dis­as­trous a peri­od as World War I, still sur­pris­es some peo­ple. We owe these shots to the efforts of Ger­man pho­tog­ra­ph­er Hans Hilde­brand, as well as to his coun­try’s already-estab­lished appre­ci­a­tion for the art and adept­ness in engi­neer­ing its tools. “In 1914, Ger­many was the world tech­ni­cal leader in pho­tog­ra­phy and had the best grasp of its pro­pa­gan­da val­ue,” writes R.G. Grant in World War I: The Defin­i­tive Visu­al His­to­ry. “Some 50 pho­tog­ra­phers were embed­ded with its forces, com­pared with 35 for the French. The British mil­i­tary author­i­ties lagged behind. It was not until 1916 that a British pho­tog­ra­ph­er was allowed on the West­ern Front.” But among his coun­try­men, only Hilde­brand took pic­tures in col­or.

“The over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of pho­tos tak­en dur­ing World War I were black and white,” writes Spiegel Online, where you can browse a gallery of eigh­teen of his pho­tos, “lend­ing the con­flict a stark aes­thet­ic which dom­i­nates our visu­al mem­o­ry of the war.” Hilde­brand’s images thus stand out with their almost unre­al-look­ing vivid­ness, a result achieved not sim­ply by his use of col­or film, but by his rel­a­tive­ly long expe­ri­ence with a still fair­ly new medi­um. He’d already found­ed a col­or film soci­ety in his native Stuttgart three years before the Arch­duke’s assas­si­na­tion, and had tried his hand at autochrome print­ing as ear­ly as 1909.

Though not him­self a dyed-in-the-wool pro­pa­gan­dist, he did need to pose the sol­diers for these pho­tos, due to the lack of a film sen­si­tive enough to cap­ture actu­al action. Still, they give us a clear­er idea of the sit­u­a­tion than do most con­tem­po­rary images. Hard­ly a glo­ri­fi­ca­tion, Hilde­brand’s work seems to speak to what those of us now, one hun­dred years in the future, would come to see in World War I: its mis­ery, its oppres­sive sense of futil­i­ty, and the haunt­ing destruc­tion it left behind.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch World War I Unfold in a 6 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1914 to 1918

British Actors Read Poignant Poet­ry from World War I

Frank W. Buck­les, The Last U.S. Vet­er­an of World War I

World War I Remem­bered in Sec­ond Life

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

In 1960, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beau­voir ven­tured to Cuba dur­ing, as he wrote, the “hon­ey­moon of the rev­o­lu­tion.” Mil­i­tary strong­man Ful­gen­cio Batista’s regime had fall­en to Fidel Cas­tro’s gueril­la army and the whole coun­try was alight with rev­o­lu­tion­ary zeal. As Beau­voir wrote, “after Paris, the gai­ety of the place explod­ed like a mir­a­cle under the blue sky.”

At the time, Sartre and de Beau­voir were inter­na­tion­al­ly renown, the intel­lec­tu­al pow­er cou­ple of the 20th cen­tu­ry. Beauvoir’s book, The Sec­ond Sex (1949), laid the ground­work for the fem­i­nism move­ment, and her book The Man­darins won France’s high­est lit­er­ary award in 1954. Sartre’s name had become a house­hold word. The phi­los­o­phy he cham­pi­oned – Exis­ten­tial­ism – was being read and debat­ed around the world. And his polit­i­cal activism — loud­ly con­demn­ing France’s war in Alge­ria, for instance — had giv­en him real moral author­i­ty. When Sartre was arrest­ed in 1968 for civ­il dis­obe­di­ence, Charles de Gaulle par­doned him, not­ing, “You don’t arrest Voltaire.” As Deirdre Bair notes in her biog­ra­phy of Beau­voir, “Sartre became the one intel­lec­tu­al whose pres­ence and com­men­tary emerg­ing gov­ern­ments clam­ored for, as if he alone could val­i­date their rev­o­lu­tions.” So it’s not ter­ri­bly sur­pris­ing that Fidel Cas­tro wined and dined the two dur­ing their month in Cuba.

Cuban pho­tog­ra­ph­er Alber­to Kor­da cap­tured the cou­ple as they met with Cas­tro, Che Gue­vara and oth­er lead­ers of the rev­o­lu­tion. One pic­ture (above) is of Gue­vara in his com­bat boots and trade­mark beret, light­ing a cig­ar for the French philoso­pher. Sartre looks small and unhealthy com­pared to the strap­ping, mag­net­ic rev­o­lu­tion­ary. Sartre was appar­ent­ly impressed by the time he spent with the gueril­la leader. When Che died in Bolivia sev­en years lat­er, Sartre famous­ly wrote that Gue­vara was “not only an intel­lec­tu­al but also the most com­plete human being of our age.”

Lat­er, Kor­da caught them as they were guid­ed through the streets of Havana. And as you can see (below), that icon­ic image of Gue­vara, lat­er plas­tered on T‑shirts and Rage Against the Machine album cov­ers, is on that same role of film.

When the cou­ple returned to Paris, Sartre wrote arti­cle after arti­cle extolling the rev­o­lu­tion. Beau­voir, who was equal­ly impressed, wrote, “For the first time in our lives, we were wit­ness­ing hap­pi­ness that had been attained by vio­lence.”

Yet their enthu­si­asm for the regime cooled when they returned to Cuba a year lat­er. The streets of Havana had lit­tle of the joy as the pre­vi­ous year. When they talked to fac­to­ry work­ers, they heard lit­tle but par­rot­ing of the offi­cial par­ty line. Beau­voir and Sartre ulti­mate­ly denounced Cas­tro (along with a bunch of oth­er intel­lec­tu­al lumi­nar­ies like Gabriel Gar­cia Mar­quez and Octavio Paz) in an open let­ter that crit­i­cized him for the arrest of Cuban poet Her­ber­to Padil­lo.

You can read more about the life and pho­tog­ra­phy of Alber­to Kor­da in the 2006 book, Cuba: by Kor­da.

Pho­tos above by Alber­to Kor­da.

via Crit­i­cal The­o­ry

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Philosophy’s Pow­er Cou­ple, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beau­voir, Fea­tured in 1967 TV Inter­view

Jean-Paul Sartre Breaks Down the Bad Faith of Intel­lec­tu­als

Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Clas­sic Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing one new draw­ing of a vice pres­i­dent with an octo­pus on his head dai­ly.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.