103420 | GERMANY. "Theater of War" uniface cast bronze Medal.

103420  |  GERMANY. "Theater of War" uniface cast bronze Medal. Issued circa 1914. "Kriegsschauplatz" (78mm, 121.17 g). By Ludwig Gies for Carl Poellath in Schrobenhausen.

 

Garlanded platform bearing the sign "KRIEGS-SCHAUPLATZ" (theater of war); on the left, a man stands left, beating upon a drum toward a captivated crowd; on the right, a monkey crouches right, drawing down a curtain, concealing soldiers being sent off to war // Blank. Edge: C. POELLATH SCHROBENHAUSEN.

 

Klose –; The Art of Devastation –; Frankenhuis 1352; The Dance of Death 9; Ernsting 55; The Medal 13 (Autumn 1988) pp. 65-66 (fig. 19). Essentially as Cast. Warm brown surfaces.

 

In The Medal, Ernsting writes about this iconography that "...for it is only behind the scenes that the brutal reality of war begins. Put into uniforms which could be those of any nation, those who just now were curious onlookers are thrust off the stage with its make-believe into the appalling reality down below to become combatants and cannon-fodder. Undeterred by the fact that, on the strength of these medals, he was already a defeatist in the eyes of authority, Gies consistently refused to draw his art from the emotional depiction of heroes fighting and dying in fictitious theaters of war in a patriotic spirit of sacrifice." Even extrapolated into our current times, it is easy to see how Gies, at least from an American perspective, would receive just as much flack—if not more—from the jingoistic aggrandizement pitifully championed by the "America First" crowd.

 

Upload: 20 July 2026.