German President Frank-Walker Steinmeier joined French President Emmanuel Macron Sunday at a ceremony in Strasbourg's cathedral to observe a century since the end of World War I.

The commemoration began with a concert in the eastern border city — featuring German composer Ludwig van Beethoven and France's Claude Debussy — to celebrate the friendship between the two countries that were once wartime enemies.

Around 1.4 million French soldiers and 2 million German troops perished between 1914 and 1918. Many of the Great War's battles took place on French soil, and the remains of trench lines can still be seen in some areas along France's frontier with Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium.

Read more: How World War I ended: 100 years later

Lessons from history

Although he was born long after the war, 40-year-old Macron has warned against forgetting the lessons of the major conflicts of the 20th century.

"I am struck by similarities between the times we live in and those of between the two world wars," he told a French newspaper last week, adding that nationalism was a "leprosy" spreading worldwide.

Read more: Crowdfunded archaeology: 'Dig Hill 80' explores the WWI Ypres Salient battlefield

100 years later

Sunday's concert in Strasbourg began a week of commemorative events and intense diplomacy for Macron. Over the next week, he is set to travel across northern and eastern France to former Western Front battlefields.

On Friday, Macron will lay wreaths with British Prime Minister Theresa May in the town of Albert to honor British soldiers who died at the Battle of the Somme.

On Saturday, he is set to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the village of Rethondes for a ceremony at the train carriage where the armistice was signed in 1918.

Read more: Reconciliation at Hartmannswillerkopf in Alsace

Some 60 heads of state and government, including US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, are expected to attend the culminating ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on Sunday, November 11 — the actual date of the centenary. World leaders are then due to attend a three-day peace forum to be opened by Merkel.

While German leaders will be attending events in France and Britain, no armistice ceremonies have been planned in Germany, which had a vastly different experience than that of the Allies after 1918.

Instead of peace, the end of the war gave rise to revolution and unrest between the far left and far right. It was followed by years of economic hardship, widespread poverty and hunger, and helped create the conditions that brought the Nazis to power in the 1930s.

'Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One' reflects on the brutality of the Great War Ypres After the First Bombardment: Christopher R. W. Nevinson, 1916 The British landscape painter presents an aerial view of the Belgian city of Ypres after it was first bombed in 1915, employing the abstract motifs used by cubists and futurists. Nevinson, a devotee of Italian futurism, initially believed the conflict was a sign of progress in the machine age. But after serving as an official war artist in France, he became ardently anti-war.

'Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One' reflects on the brutality of the Great War The Rock Drill: Jacob Epstein, 1913-1914 This "machine-like robot, visored, menacing and carrying within itself its progeny" was initially a futurist symbol of progress, but Epstein decided to rework his sculpture after he became aware of the scale of death as the war unfolded. A drill was removed, and the figure was cut off at the waist, a symbol of modern man suddenly neutered and made impotent by a war that it also started.

'Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One' reflects on the brutality of the Great War Wire: Paul Nash, 1918-1919 Having served on the Western Front in France, the British surrealist artist extensively documented life and death amid the trenches in his paintings. As he wrote to his wife in 1917: "Imagine a wide landscape flat and scantily wooded and what trees remain blasted and torn, naked and scarred and riddled. The ground for miles around furrowed into trenches, pitted with yawning holes."

'Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One' reflects on the brutality of the Great War Arise, you dead!: Georges Rouault, 1922-1927 Part of the French artist's War series of Expressionist engravings, Arise, You Dead! appropriates the skeleton, a representation of death in medieval mythology, to reflect on the inevitable futility of battle on the front during the Great War. A Catholic who worked extensively with religious motifs, Rouault was perhaps also commenting on the essential immorality of war.

'Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One' reflects on the brutality of the Great War Paths of Glory: Christopher R. W. Nevinson, 1917 This oil painting epitomized Nevinson's hardening view of the ignominy of trench warfare with its portrayal of anonymous dead soldiers laying facedown in the dirt among endless barbed wire. His unwillingness to portray the glories of war meant the work was nearly censored, but before that happened he hung the painting in London and affixed a piece of paper over the bodies that read "Censored."

'Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One' reflects on the brutality of the Great War Dada Rundschau: Hannah Höch, 1919 Hannah Höch was a pioneer of the photomontage technique that became synonymous with dada, a highly political art that mocked the elites who had plunged the world into war. The kaleidoscope of images and newspaper headlines refers to "gigantic world folly" as epitomized by German leader Friedrich Ebert in bathers, while American President Woodrow Wilson hovers as a "peace angel" above.

'Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One' reflects on the brutality of the Great War The Petit Bourgeois Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild Electro Mechanical Tatlin: George Grosz and John Heartfield, 1920 After the war, German artists like Heartfield and Grosz commonly depicted broken bodies with prosthetic limbs, a feature of war survivors who brought home the physical and psychological scars of the "war to end all wars." As a dada sculptural montage, the work also parodies the arrogance of technology and militarism, the lost head simply replaced with a light bulb, a mark of bright ideas.

'Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One' reflects on the brutality of the Great War War: Skull: Otto Dix, 1924 This etching was part of Otto Dix's war cycle created in the 1920s that imitated Francisco Goya's famous The Disasters of War prints from a century earlier. Like Goya, Dix, who also served on the front line on the losing side in World War I, darkly evoked the gruesome horror of war with a rotting skull infested with vermin and maggots. His series aimed to "exorcise the experience of war."

'Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One' reflects on the brutality of the Great War To the Unknown British Soldier in France: William Orpen, 1921-1928 This controversial painting by the Irish war artist shows a soldier's coffin in a mausoleum draped in a British flag, an army helmet atop. It was modified in 1927 after initially showing two semi-nude soldiers guarding a tomb. One of three commissions to commemorate the Paris Peace Conference, Orpen portrayed "the ragged unemployed soldier and the dead" instead of politicians and diplomats. Author: Stuart Braun





nm/jm (Reuters, AFP, dpa)

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