The fire (bar buses)
The fire. Corporal's diary. (French original title: Le Feu. journal d'une escouade. ) is a novel by Henri Barbusse from 1916, who in it processed his own experiences as a participant in the First World War.
History of origin
Barbusse volunteered for service in the French army when the war broke out in 1914. By the end of his service in 1916, he spent a total of eleven months at the front; According to his information, the first sketches for "The Fire" were made in the trenches. Because of an injury from the fight scene withdrawn, he began even during his service, the description of the trench warfare resign.
When it was published in France during the war (preprinted in L'Œuvre ; book published by Edition Flammarion in Paris at the end of November 1916), “Das Feuer” was the first literary work to provide an unadorned look at everyday life and the plight of soldiers in the modern world War beyond lying romanticism and the patriotic drunkenness that had gripped all of Europe at the beginning of the war. A first German translation by Leo von Meyenburg was published in 1918 by the Zurich Rascher Verlag ; an English-language edition was published by Penguin books the previous year. To date, “Das Feuer” has been broadcast in more than 60 languages.
content
The episodic plot of the book tells the story of a unit of French soldiers in the trenches of the Western Front in 24 chapters . The portrayal draws authenticity from the author's participation in the war and the associated testimony as well as from the narrative perspective of the first person, which suggests an identification of the narrative self with Barbusse himself. The reading as a “diary”, which the title already suggests, gains in plausibility through the dedication to the fallen comrades despite all the fictionalization of the material. At the beginning and the end of the novel, the seemingly realistic, sometimes drastic descriptions of suffering and death are contrasted by unreal impressions or visions.
effect
Even before the triumphant advance of the war novels in the early 1920s, “Das Feuer” became a widely read indictment against the horrors of the industrial annihilation of human life in the conflict of states, which was widely received as apt and defining the genre - with the prominent exception of the writer Jean Norton Cru , who accused Barbusse of a mixture of truth, half-truth and lies in his overall view of the world war novels in 1929. Barbusse received the Prix Goncourt for his work in the year the first edition was published . In 1933 the title, like Barbusse's other writings, was removed from the libraries of the “Third Reich” and publicly destroyed in book burns .
expenditure
- Henri Barbusse: Le Feu . Gallimard, Paris 2006, ISBN 978-2-07-034279-2 .
- Henri Barbusse: The Fire. Diary of a corporal body ("Le feu"). 2nd edition Schwarzkopff, Hamburg 2007, ISBN 3-937738-08-8 . (German language first edition: Rascher Verlag, Zurich 1918)
literature
- Jean Grimod: Le feu. Adaption radiophonique . Paris 1964 (premiere, Radio France 1965).
- Horst E. Müller: "The fire" . In: Ders .: Studies and mishaps on Henri Barbusse and his reception in Germany . Publishing house, Lang, Frankfurt / M. 2010, ISBN 978-3-631-59887-0 , pp. 51-100.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ cf. Jean Norton Cru: Where is the truth about the war? A critical study. Müller & Kiepenheuer, Potsdam 1932.