"Bitter Witness" is an intensive, factual study of Otto Dix's war-related art. It is the first book to place Dix's etching cycle, "Der Krieg," alongside numerous paintings and drawings in the perspective of his war experience on two fronts from mid-1915 to 1918's finale. It includes a full history of the war, the Weimar Republic's socio-political upheavals, and the Nazi years, following Dix and his colleagues, including Kaethe Kollwitz, through the artistic movements and events in the first half of Germany's most turbulent century.