German Literature and the First World War: The Anti-War Tradition

Collected Essays by Brian Murdoch

Brian Murdoch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317128434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The period immediately following the end of the First World War witnessed an outpouring of artistic and literary creativity, as those that had lived through the war years sought to communicate their experiences and opinions. In Germany this manifested itself broadly into two camps, one condemning the war outright; the other condemning the defeat. Of the former, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front remains the archetypal example of an anti-war novel, and one that has become synonymous with the Great War. Yet the tremendous and enduring popularity of Remarque's work has to some extent eclipsed a plethora of other German anti-war writers, such as Hans Chlumberg, Ernst Johannsen and Adrienne Thomas. In order to provide a more rounded view of German anti-war literature, this volume offers a selection of essays published by Brian Murdoch over the past twenty years. Beginning with a newly written introduction, providing the context for the volume and surveying recent developments in the subject, the essays that follow range broadly over the German anti-war literary tradition, telling us much about the shifting and contested nature of the war. The volume also touches upon subjects such as responsibility, victimhood, the problem of historical hiatus in the production and reception of novels, drama, poetry, film and other literature written during the war, in the Weimar Republic, and in the Third Reich. The collection also underlines the potential dangers of using novels as historical sources even when they look like diaries. One essay was previously unpublished, two have been augmented, and three are translated into English for the first time. Taken together they offer a fascinating insight into the cultural memory and literary legacy of the First World War and German anti-war texts.

Chapter 1
From the Hymn of Hate to the Way of Sacrifice: German Writing in the First World War

If this survey had been on German writing in general about the First World War it would have been much easier. It could have drawn upon a great deal of material which is either historically significant or is of world rank as literature. Into the first category might fall, for example, the voluminous ramblings of an erstwhile corporal who was much exercised by what he saw as the shame of Versailles; but Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925–27) is clearly a post-war production. In the second category, the best-known German novel of all time is about the First World War, but although it has an undeniable immediacy, Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) is a novel of 1929, not a memoir of 1918 by an author who was actually killed in the war, something which it took critics some time to spot.

Assessing German writing in the war, however, is more difficult, and here the aim is threefold: to try and give some kind of idea of what there actually was; to indicate how most kinds of writing had successors in the Weimar Republic and indeed in the Third Reich; and to indicate that the situation in Germany was similar to that in the English-speaking world. The focus is of necessity on prose and verse, rather than on drama, because the drama of the war is limited in any case, and especially so during the conflict as such. One important dramatic work in German does date from 1917 – Reinhard Goering’s expressionist play Seeschlacht (Naval Encounter)¹ – but otherwise, as with most other countries, we have to wait for some time before the war is really dealt with on stage, and it is a difficult genre in any case. When, in the late 1920s, writers like R. C. Sherriff, Paul Raynal and Hans Chlumberg all produced fine but different works, another and especially important genre, film, was making its mark, and the advent of the soundtrack (with films such as Pabst’s Westfront 1918 and Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front) gave a new dimension. But during the war that was well into the future.²

Even the best-known German war novelist, Remarque, was not, as far as we know, consciously making notes for Im Westen nichts Neues during the war, in which he served in the latter part, having had the misfortune to reach the age of 18 in 1916. To be sure, his own first novel, called Die Traumbude (‘Den of Dreams’), which has (mercifully) never been translated into English, appeared as early as 1920, but one important critic suggested later that even to mention the thing merited being slapped down. That critic was Remarque himself, and he was right, since it is an overly precious artist-novel significant in our context for having absolutely nothing to do with the war, and clinging desperately to a hugely outdated pre-war bohemianism. It would be ten years or so before Remarque and others could write serious and great novels on the war.³

Finding work written during the war can be problematic, and doing so after the event and in respect of Germany can be politically sensitive. There have been relatively few genuinely broad studies of the theme,⁴ and concentration is usually only on a few writers, almost always those clearly on the side of the angels. We have become familiar with the assumption that ‘war novel’ or ‘war poetry’ are respectable designations only when they really mean ‘anti-war’. Morally this is acceptable; in literary-historical terms it is restrictive, and in a study of my own called Fighting Songs and Warring Words I attempted to look at patriotic verse, songs and all kinds of other writing outside that circle of respectability for as many of the fighting forces as I could manage linguistically. It was, after all, a world war.⁵ However international the literature was, though, it is only relatively recently that English-language anthologies of war poetry acknowledged that Germans actually produced even anti-war poetry. A milestone here was the trilingual anthology No Hatred and No Flag, a triple-language text published in Germany in 1959, and twenty years after that came Jon Silkin’s Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. Gavin Ewart’s review of the latter was sub-headed ‘Both sides of the trenches’ and made much of the point that German and Italian texts were included.⁶ Silkin did, on the other hand, stigmatise poetry he thought morally acceptable, but not very good, with an asterisk.⁷ A concrete parallel to the national selectivity, incidentally, is the fact that the war memorial in Magdalen College, Oxford, excluded the eminent expressionist poet Ernst Stadler, who had been a member of the college and fell in the war, because he did so on the German side. A separate memorial was erected to him in the college in 1994.⁸

The German poets who combined anti-war sentiment with aesthetic quality were discussed by Patrick Bridgwater in his study in 1985 of what he saw as ‘the most interesting poems by the best German poets’, defining the best as those ‘in which poetry and morality are fused together’.⁹ Reading Bridgwater’s book, one feels that, although there are major and sometimes still unrecognised poets here, such as Anton Schnack, there were not really quite enough to go around, and he discusses also the early, sometimes patriotic, pieces by Heinrich Lersch and Karl Bröger, worker-poets much applauded later by the Nazis, who moved from patriotism to an anti-war view, while stressing comradeship, however.¹⁰ Even Jon Silkin includes Schnack, whose long, free-verse evocations of, for example, the threatening wartime nightscape, remain in the mind, but it is not entirely clear how much of his material was written during the war, and the best was certainly published afterwards.¹¹ But equally approved was the stylistically far more concise expressionist August Stramm, born in 1874, called up as a reservist captain in 1914 and killed on the Eastern Front in September 1915. He is very difficult to translate, but his poetry encapsulates individual aspects of the war with far-reaching brilliance. I chose two because they are very short illustrations of the expressionist telegrammatic style:

Patrouille

Die Steine feinden

Fenster grinst Verrat

Äste würgen

Berge Sträucher blättern raschlig

gellen

Tod

(Patrol The stones threaten/ Window grins treason/ branches throttle/ Mountains bushes rattle leaves/ to yell/ death)

The syntax is difficult, even if the conciseness needs no comment. Berge seems to be used – perhaps – as an (odd) adjective here, but it is the noun plural ‘mountains’, which it presumably means (since it is capitalised), though the verb bergen means ‘to shelter’. Other words are used equally unusually, just as the unnatural state of war distorts language. The whole of nature, indeed of everything, even the windows, becomes dangerous during the patrol, the enemy is the war, or rather, what the war does to things, although the attributes of menace are human, and the poem ends with a scream and then the monosyllable: death. So too:

Kriegsgrab

Stäbe flehen kreuze Arme

Schrift zagt blasses Unbekannt

Blumen frechen Staube schüchtern

Flimmer

tränet

glast

Vergessen

(War Grave Staves implore, cross arms,/ Writing hesitates pale unknown/ Flowers mock dusts intimidate/ Flicker/ weeps/ glazes/ Forgetting)

Once again the normal rules of parsing become virtually impossible, and close consideration of capitalisation (there is no other punctuation at all) is vital to see whether a verb or a noun or an adjective is implied (as with kreuze, which probably means ‘like a cross’, so that the graves implore with outstretched cross-arms). The syntactical confusion again makes a point about the war.¹²

Where there has been a tradition in Britain of thinking of war poetry as being only the best anti-war poetry, some modern German anthologies have been wider in their scope. That by Thomas Anz and Joseph Vogl, entitled on the cover, at least, if not on the title page, simply Krieg (War) in 1982 had the programmatic aim of documenting a period which produced, in Germany as in Britain, a massive amount of poetic outpouring. The editors remain aware, however, that ‘von dieser Kriegslyrik ist indes heute nur noch wenig bekannt, manches sogar systematisch verschwiegen worden’ (Of this war poetry, much is nowadays barely known, and much has even been systematically suppressed). The collection is a particularly good one, and one of those systematically suppressed poems was, at one time, very well known indeed:¹³ in the section on patriotic poems is Ernst Lissauer’s ‘Haßgesang gegen England’ (Hymn of Hate towards England), which was taken up ironically by the British forces and apparently chanted with emphasis on the final word: ‘England!’ It was much singled out as a reference marker,¹⁴ and it sometimes drew rather odd responses, such as R. A. Kennedy’s The New ‘Benedicite’ or Song of Nations, a twelve-page pamphlet that sold for two pence in 1915 and it was even reprinted, which invokes all nations of the world (duly enumerated) and invites them all, even the Germans, to praise the Lord in unity. It was billed as ‘The True Answer to the Hymn of Hate’.¹⁵

Lissauer was a Jew, who died in 1937, having tried and failed to dissociate himself from his celebrated outburst of October 1914. He was by no means incompetent, and the poem has an incremental force which draws on the vocabulary of invocation – calling for a legal oath to be sworn, an oath of iron, and ‘Einen Schwur für Kind und Kindeskind’ (an oath for our children and children’s children), with the repeated lines

Wir haben alle nur einen Haß,

Wir lieben vereint, wir hassen vereint,

Wir haben alle nur einen Feind:

England!

(We all have only one hatred,/ We love in unison, we hate in unison/ We all have just the one enemy:/ England!)

Repetition, accumulation, invocation are all part of the crescendo effect, and the stress on wir is the exclusive rather than the inclusive first person plural (we, but not you). Lissauer’s sole error was to end noisily on the one word he wanted to denigrate, and that excellent anthologist and soldier Field Marshall Viscount Wavell included Lissauer’s poem in partial translation in his Other Men’s Flowers anthology in 1944, with suitable comments on this very point. Hatred was taken as a positive emotion elsewhere in German writing, however, and the Anz-Vogl collection contains other hymns of hate. One, by Will Vesper, who remained a firm nationalist and was a great favourite of the Nazis, posed in 1914 the title question ‘Liebe oder Haß’ (Love or Hate) to Christ on a crucifix, and when told by Christ to love, and not to hate, points out rather firmly to Christ that his hatred outweighs love, because it is born of love for his country:

Weil dieser Haß, Herr Jesu Christ,

Die Frucht der höchsten Liebe ist.

Mein Vaterland in tiefer Not:

Haß allen Feinden bis in den Tod.

(Because this hatred, Lord Jesus Christ/ is the fruit of the highest love./ My fatherland in deepest peril:/ hatred to all enemies to death.)

The overtones of Christ dying for men and the elevation of hatred to a quasi-religious virtue are striking. Against this, poets like Armin Wegner, whose career was pretty well the opposite of Vesper’s, and who would be incarcerated in a concentration camp and then exiled, with his work banned, offered a poetically more competent parallel to Kennedy’s new Benedicite in his ‘Funkspruch in die Welt’ (Broadcast to the World), published in 1918, which calls the nations to peace rather than to hatred.¹⁶

Hate viewed as a virtue was extreme, but patriotic poetry was as normal in Germany as in Britain, even in the writings of the best possible poets. The celebrated publisher Insel-Verlag issued a Kriegs-Almanach, a war almanac, for 1915, which opened with a frontispiece of Dürer’s Ritter, Tod und Teufel, then three poems by the not unknown Rudolf Alexander Schröder, the first welcoming the war with a heartfelt Gottlob! (God be praised), and incidentally warning Germany (with an interesting linguistic irony) against the Eastern enemy, the Huns. Next to this came five hymns by an even more celebrated poet, Rilke, the first invoking the Kriegs-Gott, the god of war, and calling for a banner of jubilant suffering to be raised, idealising the glory of pain and pushing war aside, which at least showed a certain prescience of what would happen. Some more poems and a chunk of Tacitus’s Germania followed.¹⁷

Rupert Brooke’s similarly heartfelt thanking of the deity in 1914 in his sonnet ‘Peace’ is frequently cited – ‘Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour’,¹⁸ and it is hardly difficult to find expression of that sentiment lingering after the war in the memories of those involved. In German we may – perhaps a little maliciously – match it with a prose citation where the writer recalls how he, ‘überwältigt von stürmischer Begeisterung, in die Knie gesunken war und dem Himmel aus übervollem Herzen dankte, daß er mir das Glück geschenkt, in dieser Zeit leben zu dürfen’ (overcome with tempestuous enthusiasm, had fallen down and thanked heaven from the abundance of the heart for granting me the great good fortune to live in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 From the Hymn of Hate to the Way of Sacrifice: German Writing in the First World War
• On Erich Maria Remarque
• On Ernst Johannsen
• On Adrienne Thomas
• On Edlef Köppen
• On Leonhard Frank
• On Arnold Zweig
• On Hans Chlumberg
• Bibliographical Notes
• Index