Art and Culture Behind the Wire
Confinement was meant to be empty time. In both wars the internees filled it, with an astonishing amount of art, craft, music and learning.
The reason for it
The Swiss doctor Adolf Vischer, who inspected internment camps during the First World War, gave a name to what he saw in the men held in them: barbed wire disease, the slow depression that came from confinement, overcrowding, and never knowing when it would end. The camp authorities came to understand that idle men grew ill, and that occupation was not a luxury but a defence.
So the camps filled with activity. Much of what the internees made was practical, much of it was beautiful, and a good deal of it was both. For many of the people behind the wire, making things was how they stayed themselves.
Knockaloe: bone, basket and workshop
At Knockaloe the sheer scale of the problem, more than twenty thousand men with little to do, produced an equally large response. The Quaker craftsman James Baily was sent to the camp and organised handwork and small industries on a considerable scale, arranging for tools and materials to be brought in so the men could work. Baskets, furniture, inlaid boxes, toys and models came out of the workshops in great numbers.
The internees carved with what they had. Beef bone left over from the camp kitchens, boiled and cleaned, became the material for finely carved ornaments, many of them marked with the camp's name. Dining halls were given over, at the internees' own request, to workshops, theatres and classrooms. The craftwork was sold well beyond the wire, in Britain, Germany, Scandinavia and America, letting the men earn a little for the camp shop or to send home to their families.
The camp also produced its own printed culture. Each of the four sub-camps ran one or more newspapers, every issue passed by the censor and, by his regulations, printed in Peel rather than inside the wire. Camp 4's monthly Lager-Zeitung reached a circulation of around 2,500, and roughly seventeen hundred of those copies were sent off the Island. Postcards, journals and photographs make up the rest of a material record that has long outlived the temporary town that produced it.
Hutchinson: the artists' camp
When internment returned, one camp gathered such a concentration of talent that it earned two nicknames: the artists' camp, and the barbed wire university. Hutchinson Square in Douglas held painters, sculptors, writers, musicians and scholars, many of them refugees from Nazi Germany, and within days of the gates closing they had organised lectures, concerts, language classes and a camp university. The archaeologist Gerhard Bersu, interned on the Island, turned his own confinement into fieldwork that reshaped the understanding of Manx prehistory.
Materials were scarce, so the artists improvised. They mixed brick dust with the oil from sardine tins to make paint, dug clay on supervised walks, and cut linoleum from the floors to print with, pressing the blocks through a laundry mangle. The naive painter Fred Uhlman turned a laundry room into an Artists' Café and produced work at a rate of nearly a piece a day. The sympathetic commandant, Major Daniel, found art supplies and musical instruments, and set aside studio space where the leading artists took on students.
The most famous of them was Kurt Schwitters, the Dadaist, who made more than two hundred works during sixteen months of internment, painted more portraits than at any other time in his life, built a sculpture from leftover porridge, and performed his forty-minute sound poem, the Ursonate, until parts of it were being used around the camp as greetings. The camp's cultural life was documented at the time by Klaus Hinrichsen, who ran its arts department, and whose papers survive in the Tate archive.
Beneath the surface
It would be easy to turn this into a story of plucky good cheer, and the internees themselves sometimes encouraged that reading. The truth beneath it was harder. The artist Helmuth Weissenborn later said plainly that internment was a continuous torment. Schwitters, whom many took to be having the time of his life, confided a deep depression to his son in private, and an epileptic condition he had not suffered since childhood returned.
The art was not evidence that internment was benign. It was what resilience looked like inside an injustice. The work and the suffering belong to the same story, and the site keeps them together.