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

Author:Brian Murdoch [Murdoch, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 20th Century, Literary Criticism, Comparative Literature
ISBN: 9781317128441
Google: k6y1CwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-03-09T01:26:47+00:00

1 First published in TEXT+KRITIK 149 (2001).

2 Friedrich Luft, ‘Das Profil. Gespräch mit Erich Maria Remarque’, TV interview on 3 February 1963, in: Erich Maria Remarque. Ein militanter Pazifist, ed. Thomas F. Schneider (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994), p. 120. The terms first or second novel in this chapter follow Remarque himself in referring to the two war novels. Quotations are from the two first editions under Ullstein’s Propyläen imprint, with page references: Erich Maria Remarque, Im Westen nichts Neues (Berlin: Ullstein, 1929) and Der Weg zurück (Berlin: Ullstein, 1931). [Note, 2015: the second novel was, like the first, translated by A. W. Wheen, The Road Back (London: Putnam, 1931); translations here of passages from both novels are mine, however; those of Im Westen nichts Neues from my published edition. Translations from other novels are also mine.]

3 Alfred Antkowiak, Erich Maria Remarque. Leben und Werk ([1965] Berlin: Das europäische Buch, 1983), p. 53; Jost Hermand, ‘Oedipus Lost’, in: Die sogenannten zwanziger Jahre, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Bad Homburg: Gehlen, 1970), p. 218; Hans Wagener, Understanding Erich Maria Remarque (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), p. 41. Contemporary American criticism did take the general view, however, that the second novel was better; see Christine R. Barker and R. W. Last, Erich Maria Remarque (London: Wolff, 1979), p. 69.

4 Hans-Harald Müller, ‘Politics and the War Novel’, in: German Writers and Politics 1918–39, ed. Richard Dove and Stephen Lamb (London: Macmillan, 1992), p. 112.

5 Erich Maria Remarque, Der schwarzer Obelisk. Roman einer verspäteten Jugend ([1956] Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1989), with an afterword by Tilman Westphalen. Citations with page references are from this edition. [Note, 2015: there is a translation by Denver Lindley, The Black Obelisk (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957).]

6 Rudolf Binding’s Aus dem Kriege ([1925] Frankfurt/M.: Rütten & Loening, 1927) does end, for example, with a very brief account of the confusions at the end of the war.

7 Antkowiak, Remarque, p. 52.

8 One of the characters in Der Weg zurück does actually surprise his friends when he turns up, having been reported dead (p. 134).

9 Remarque indicated in an interview as early as 1931 that Birkholz resembled both Bäumer and himself; see Harley U. Taylor, Erich Maria Remarque (New York and Berne: Lang, 1988), p. 88; also Richard A. Firda, Erich Maria Remarque (New York and Berne: Lang, 1988), p. 65.

10 Occasionally Remarque’s soldiers do appear in more than one work; see ‘Karl Broeger in Fleury’ [originally published in English as ‘Where Karl had Fought’ in an American magazine in 1930], in: Erich Maria Remarque, Der Feind, trans. into German by Barbara von Bechtolsheim (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1993), pp. 26–33; see Thomas Schneider’s afterword, pp. 69f.

11 In Wagener, Understanding … Remarque, p. 38 the ‘roaring twenties are in full swing’; and since there is a discussion of inflation in the epilogue, Mark Ward thinks of 1923: ‘The Structure of Der Weg zurück’, in: Remarque Against War, ed. Brian Murdoch, Mark Ward and Maggie Sargeant (Glasgow: SPIGS, 1998), p.

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