Painted in 1915, immediately following Kirchner’s release from military service, Das Soldatenbad is one of the greatest painted representations of the psychological realities of war. Executed in his fully developed Expressionist pictorial style, Das Soldatenbad daringly explores the anxieties occasioned by modernization in the early twentieth century, while continuing to develop his preoccupation with the human body held since his earliest days as a member of Die Brücke.

In 1911 Kirchner moved from Dresden to Berlin, drawn to the dynamism of city life in the vibrant metropolis. He joined in the avant-garde pictorial experimentation of the moment, exploring the social and psychological fragmentation inherent in industrial modernity, as well as the era’s whirlwind energy. With the outbreak of the World War I in the summer of 1914, his artistic explorations assumed greater personal urgency. From the outset Kirchner viewed the war with a tragic sense of foreboding. The immense upheaval ushered in by the First World War was marked by the brutal dislocation of everyday life in Germany. For Kirchner, the prospect of forced induction into the army and the impossibility of avoiding military service left him in a state of nervous anxiety. To avoid conscription into the infantry Kirchner enlisted, in the spring of 1915, in the Germany army as an artillery driver. After his billeting at Halle and throughout his basic training, it became apparent that Kirchner lacked the mental and physical fortitude necessary to continue and serve at the front. By September Kirchner suffered a nervous breakdown and was temporarily exempted from military service and permitted to return to Berlin on medical leave.

While Kirchner was spared an assignment at the front and a first-hand engagement with the horrors and atrocities that accompanied war, what had seriously affected his constitution—never particularly strong to begin with—was his experience of the hardship and coercion of military life. Following his discharge from service in November 1915, he was filled with an overwhelming sense of loss of identity. It is in this state of anguish that Kirchner paints his military experience in a series of two canvases: Self-Portrait as a Soldier and Das Soldatenbad. While Self-Portrait as a Soldier is a more symbolic and explicitly autobiographical portrait that depicts the artist in uniform, Das Soldatenbad provides a rare glimpse into the experienced trauma that would shape Kirchner’s remaining work and life. This monumental painting depicts a group of young military recruits herded together and confined within a low-ceilinged chamber under the oppressive gaze of a uniformed superior.  Literally and figuratively exposed, the attenuated men have been stripped of an individualistic quality: the identical yellow pallor of their skin, short cropped hair and dark eyes are all executed in a highly stylized manner that removes any distinctive characteristics. Within the collective corporeality of the group the erratic and angular gestures of the individual figures provide contrast to the homogeneity of their physical appearance, generating a feeling of nervousness that is no doubt in response to the powerlessness of their mobilization and constant-supervision at the hands of their superiors. So powerful was the imposing figure of his commanding officers, recorded within Das Soldatenbad, that in a letter written not long after he was discharged from the service Kirchner confessed: “I am still haunted by the fear of uniforms to this day” (quoted in Vibrant Metropolois, Idyllic Nature: Kircher—The Berlin Years (exhibition catalogue), Kunsthaus, Zurich, 2017, p. 69). A photographic self-portrait of the artist in his studio, donning his military uniform, shows Kirchner with a rigid posture that echoes that of the uniformed officer in Das Soldatenbad.  It has been suggested that the drawing that appears behind Kirchner in the photograph is possibly an earlier version of Das Soldatenbad, which was later re-worked into the canvas as we see it today.

Having himself been subjected to the de-humanizing discipline imparted by his superiors, in painting Das Soldatenbad Kirchner reflects on the anguish he felt during his enlistment and the frightening anonymity of life as a solider. In the thin, emaciated bodies—some accented with boldly hatched ribs—crushed together in the limited space, the assembly of soldiers behaves as if entirely alone in spite of their close physical proximity. No gesture or eye contact is exchanged between them, further isolating them from one another. By distorting the perspectival lines of the composition, particularly in the upper register, Kirchner successful communicates the cramped physical space of the composition, providing an impression of the claustrophobic environment of the shower hall as he experienced it.

In a letter to Gustave Schiefler from December 9, 1915 Kirchner describes his emotional state shortly after returning to Berlin: “I’m no longer fit for heavy military work and plan to enter a sanatorium in a few days to heal my nerves and my lungs. I have become half mad, and physical human feelings are still foreign to me even today… war takes hold of me more and more. You now see almost nothing but masks, no faces any longer, it would be a good thing and necessary if an end were to come soon” (quoted in ibid., p. 64). The alienation, despair and loss of identity which consumed Kirchner during his time in the military was exacerbated by the uncertainty and overwhelming vulnerability of the possibility of being re-conscripted which continued to weigh heavily upon him.

Since his early Die Brücke years, the human body fascinated Kirchner. Like Max Pechstein, Erich Heckel and other group members, the simple, expressive rendering of shapes and forms of African and other indigenous sculptures drew his attention. The aesthetic of the geometric modeling of tribal masks was adopted by artists in Paris at the turn of the century, most notably Picasso in his ground-breaking 1907 masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and incorporated into their own aesthetics. In the foreground of

Das Soldatenbad one of the soldiers appears, crouched down, to be stoking the fire that heats the shower water. He, as well as the left most standing figure in the composition both appear to have been directly influenced by the poses in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. By the time he was painting Das Soldatenbad in 1915, Kirchner’s primary concern was the representation of the human form in its most nascent, uninhibited state. The mask-like faces of the soldiers, nudity, and angular gestures in Das Soldatenbad reveal the artist’s preference for spontaneous, unmediated depictions of the body, divorced from the rigorous constraints of academic painting.

Despite his commitment to the avant-garde however, Kirchner did not abandon the Western canon, instead deploying references to canonical artworks with rhetorical, almost ironic, intent. In Das Soldatenbad the compressed spatial arrangement of the figures evokes that used in Roman frieze reliefs, thereby linking his painting to an age-old meditation on the tribulations of war. By selecting the setting of Das Soldatenbad within the context of bathing, Kirchner has also tied the work to the grand series of bathers so crucial to the development of twentieth-century art. The ground-breaking works of Cézanne addressing bathers would have lasting effects within the pantheon of representation through the solidity of his figures and the distortion of perspective. Expanded further in the bold palette and innovative compositions of the bathers of Edgar Degas, so admired by post-Impressionists van Gogh and Gaugin, Kirchner takes up the subject with his characteristic affecting realism. Later German artists, particularly Georg Baselitz, absorbed the expressive painterly realism which was so fundamental to the strength of Kirchner’s art in a revitalized movement in the 1970s referred to as Neo-Expressionism. Baselitz overtly referenced Kirchner and his Die Brücke colleagues in his seminal composition Der Brückechor through the emphasis of both color and gesture, executed with characteristically dramatic brushwork.

As one of the few depictions Kirchner made to document his experience during his brief time as an artilleryman Das Soldatenbad has been widely exhibited and included in numerous publications to discuss this crucial episode. Following his breakdown which directly resulted from this experience, Kirchner never fully recovered. His life was overshadowed by mental crisis, feelings of isolation, despair and poor health. Retreating to the mountains of Switzerland, Kirchner would eventually commit suicide in 1938, as the specter of yet another world war loomed over Europe.

Kirchner's Das Soldatenbad came to be owned by Jewish dealer and collector Alfred Flectheim shortly after it was completed. As the Nazi party rose to power in Germany, Flectheim, who acquired the Das Soldatenbad for a second time in 1930, fled to London, where he would die in 1937. Most of his collection, including the present work, remained in the custody of his niece Rosi Hulisch in Berlin. Das Soldatenbad was acquired in 1938 by Kurt Feldhäusser, a member of the Nazi party. Upon Feldhäusser's death in 1945, the ownership of his collection passed to his mother, who brought the work to the United States and consigned it to the Weyhe Gallery in New York in 1949.

Das Soldatenbad was then purchased by American philanthropist and collector Morton D. May of Saint Louis in 1952. May amassed one of the largest collections of German Expressionist art in America and donated over one thousand works from his collection to various institutions; Das Soldatenbad was donated to The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1956. In an exchange in 1988, the work became part of the collection of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. In 2018 Das Soldatenbad was restituted to the heirs of Alfred Flechtheim by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation after an extensive examination of the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the painting's history.