Visualizing Peace

The assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, lit the fuse that ignited the First World War. One week earlier, Bertha von Suttner, a native of Prague and the first woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, had died in Vienna. Pacifists around the world grieved the loss of the woman heralded as the mother of the international peace movement.

Women had for years been at the forefront of that movement, during a time when their opportunities to participate in public discourse were otherwise limited. Leading the way in the United States was the pioneer social worker, feminist, and future Nobel Peace Prize-recipient Jane Addams. Although most feminist leaders supported President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter the United States into the war, in April 1917, a small group of prominent women, Addams among them, persisted in their pacifism.

In 1969, the Hoover Institution acquired the first materials for the New Left Collection, which documents the radical movements for political and social change in the United States during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. Topics covered in the collection include the movement against the Vietnam War, student radicalism, the civil rights movement, revolutionary organizations, the women’s liberation movement, and the counterculture. There is a special emphasis in the collection on protest movements that emerged on college campuses in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Hoover Institution's growing interest in domestic policy studies influenced its acquisition of this collection.

Wolfgang Janisch (1940– ) is a German photo-collage artist and peace activist. Janisch’s early years were defined by the turmoil of life in wartime and postwar Berlin. A resident of East Berlin, Janisch was often ideologically at odds with the Soviet authorities, and his nonconformist views are very much in evidence across his large body of work. Janisch created hundreds of posters that satirically conveyed his critical view of the communist government. Janisch has also been active in several organizations promoting the peace movement in Germany.

Janisch’s critique of the power of the state to stifle any form of dissent had to be cloaked in terms that would not arouse the wrath of the leadership of the GDR (German Democratic Republic, aka East Germany).  When asked by the authorities about the content of the above poster, Janisch could always point out in his defense that the peace demonstrators in the picture were actually from “over there,” meaning West Germany.  However, both Janisch and most of his audience knew against which state this protest was really aimed.

The above poster juxtaposes an image of the masses who uncritically followed Hitler during the Nazi era with the destruction of Dresden that, among other things, was the outcome of such blind obedience. Forty years after the end of WWII, Janisch felt it necessary to still challenge such “group-think” in the contemporary setting of the GDR.

The logo in the center of the above poster invokes a passage in the Hebrew Bible as well as the name of a widespread East German peace moment in the 1980s, when patches depicting this image were worn by activists. Janisch superimposed this image on a contemporary photograph of warriors in the Middle East to stress that the goals of the peace protesters of the 1980s are more relevant than ever.