Fritz Gareis Artwork

“The twentieth century – Be embraced, you millions!”

“The twentieth century – Be embraced, you millions!” — Cover of the Austrian Die Muskete Magazine (1916) showing the machine of war smothering the masses. The illustration is by Fritz Gareis, a prominent illustrator of political publications in Vienna at the time, and the quote comes from Ode to Joy by Friedrich Schiller. From the very beginning of the war, Die Muskete had agreed to follow a ‘patriotic line’, publishing articles and illustration denouncing enemy nations, though as the war progressed it began publishing a considerable amount of slightly more critical material, often illustrating its covers with striking anti-war imagery.