opposite directions to him. A smiling dog is urinating on one of his stumps, gleefully adding
to the figure’s misery and abandonment by those walking past him. He is wearing a German
army cap of a lower-ranked soldier and sporting a military style of moustache; these
elements mark him out as a veteran of the great war. The stretched legs of the people
passing him emphasises the soundness of their bodies in comparison to the match seller’s
missing limbs. His head is facing towards the right of the painting, rather than at the dog
urinating on him, his expression is blank and unfocussed. Implying that he has become
accustomed to these indignities in the post-war world.
However, this is a somewhat dramatic profile of the treatment of veterans in
Weimar Germany and the truth of their treatment after the war was little different. Almost
three-million men (sixty-seven thousand of them being amputees) were left permanently
disabled in Germany after the signing of the armistice in 1918. 6 In the dire economic reality
of Weimar Germany, the reintegration of these men into the economy was a top priority.
These men would have otherwise been of prime working age and their permanent removal
from the economy – to become dependent on the state – would have been a great burden
for the burgeoning society of Weimar.
The subject of the etching is one of these men being ‘reintegrated’ into the
economy. The Law for the Employment of the Severely Disabled, enacted in 1920, required
for two percent of the workers in a company employing twenty-five or more to be severely
disabled. 7 This reintegration of veterans into the peacetime economy is being directly
6 Gearóid Barry, Demobilization (2018), <https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/demobilization> [accessed 5 January 2024] (para. 9 of 32).
7 Waine, A.-L. (2019) Object in focus: Otto Dix, Match Seller, 1920 and Leicester’s German Expressionist Collection , University of Birmingham . Available at: <https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/lcahm/departments/historyofart/research/projects/map/issue3/wai ne-match-seller.aspx#n15> [accessed 5 January 2024] (para. 4 of 9).
54
Made with FlippingBook HTML5