Education before Verdun

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Upbringing before Verdun is the title of a novel by Arnold Zweig that was published by Querido Verlag in 1935 . It is part of Zweig's unfinished novel cycle The Great White Men’s War .

action

The plot of the novel begins in July 1916 . The Armierungssoldat Werner Bertin learns during the Battle of Verdun in the area of Canton Damvillers the einjährigfreiwilligen Sergeant Christopher Kroysing know. Kroysing, who comes from Nuremberg in the Kingdom of Bavaria , is of bourgeois origin and has already been registered for the officers' course. He found a like-minded comrade in the academic Bertin and informed him of his hopeless situation: Several weeks ago he had no longer been able to accept the repeated embezzlement of the team's food by other NCOs in his company . His letter of complaint to an uncle who was active as a high officer in the Military Railway Directorate was intercepted by the letter censorship and sent back to the battalion with the request for a court martial against the author . As a result, he was transferred to a particularly endangered section of the front under the authority of Captain Niggl, as the company found little inclination in a closer investigation. The shipper Bertin promises to take a letter from the sergeant the next day so that he can pass it on to his uncle via detours. At the planned second meeting the following day, the dismayed Bertin learns that Christoph Kroysing was killed by artillery fire during the night.

At the coffin of the deceased he met his brother, the pioneer lieutenant Eberhard Kroysing. He had not maintained a close connection to his brother, but is now taking on the situation all the more resolutely. An investigation by the Jewish judge - martial in Montmédy , Carl Georg Mertens, begins. Furthermore, he arranges for a superior officer to move the company of Captain Niggl to Fort Douaumont and thus to the immediate front area. The fort had been in German hands since February 25, 1916, after German troops had started the Battle of Verdun four days earlier . Lieutenant Kroysing took care of the captain and had him sign a necessary confession shortly before that, when a massive offensive by the French troops began on October 24, 1916. The fort is cleared and Captain Niggl escapes the threatening situation.

Some time later, Lieutenant Eberhard Kroysing , who was now wounded, was killed in an air raid on his field hospital . Captain Niggl has thus escaped his pursuer. A comrade of Schipper Bertin, the trained typesetter and Social Democrat Wilhelm Pahl, is also killed in the attack. He had mutilated himself in order to escape the war in this way.

The armoring soldier Werner Bertin reached it some time later, after long resistance from his company, in the office of the judge-martial, Dr. Posnansky to be transferred. This is assigned to the Army Group of General Lychow, which is now in action on the Eastern Front in the territory of Upper East . Werner Bertin says goodbye to his company after almost two years of hardship.

On June 29, 1919 , a few months after the end of the First World War , Bertin went to Nuremberg to visit the parents of the Kroysing brothers. At the last moment he becomes discouraged because he is not yet ready to open the old wounds.

Emergence

This novel was announced by Zweig in the 1927 novel The Dispute over Sergeant Grischa . But in the course of the development of the novel Zweig came to the conviction that the plot had to be split into two novels - Young Woman from 1914 and just Education Before Verdun . Zweig worked on these two novels in parallel. After he had finished Young Woman from 1914 in 1931, however, he put work on the Verdun novel on hold. He did not resume work on it until 1934 in exile in Haifa .

filming

In 1973, the three-part television film Education before Verdun was made in the GDR under the direction of Egon Günther , which was based on the novel and also had the same title. This film adaptation received the Teleplay Award in 1974 at the Baden-Baden days of television play .

The current broadcast on MDR on 6./9. August 2014 showed a version shortened to 2 parts.

style

This novel is, as the title suggests, an educational novel (a subsidiary form of the development novel ). Werner Bertin, who at first went to war relatively enthusiastically, moved further and further away from this position in the course of the war. As a simple soldier, he learned the different interpretations of the reality of war by team soldiers, NCOs and officers. A central theme of the book is the transfer of the Wilhelmine class society to the German military during the First World War. Unlike the book on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque not focused branch specifically to the traumatic (front) war experiences of ordinary soldiers, but on the assessment of the war in terms of social, political and economic factors. He had already practiced this approach in the novels The Controversy over Sergeant Grischa and Young Woman from 1914 and continued it in the novel Installation of a King .

Secondary literature

Web links

Individual evidence

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