Playing Children, Broad Format

Though Beckmann had experience as a medical orderly in the First World War, and much of his experience is explored graphically in other prints, in the Gesichter portfolio many of the images are of how war has affected those away from the front. This is perhaps no more clearly evidenced than in ‘Playing Children’, in which small children run around in mock battle in the streets. In this scene Beckmann must have in mind the influence of the First World War on children, perhaps the ease with which young men would put themselves forward for battle (and the number of very young men who would then lose their lives in the trenches): in the midst of the conflict, one boy wears a bobble-hat that closely resembles the spiked helms of german soldiers on the front lines, while another in the foreground, with shaved head, cap and knee-high boots, appears as if in uniform.