War (novel)
War is the title of a novel by Ludwig Renn ( Arnold Friedrich Vieth von Golßenau ). The novel was published in 1928 by the Frankfurt Societäts-Druckerei .
background
The novel is based on the author's personal notes from the 1920s about his experiences during the First World War . From 1924 to 1928 he looked in vain for a publisher for his manuscript. Before the novel could be published as a book in 1928, it appeared in 34 parts in the Frankfurter Zeitung . In the same year Arnold Zweig's novel " The dispute over Sergeant Grischa " was published. Both novels achieved worldwide success. While Ludwig Renn was presenting his first literary work with his " War ", Zweig was already one of the well-known authors. Ludwig Renn joins world war literature in a way that has not yet been written in Germany. In this way, all the nationalist phrases that lured the youth of Europe onto the battlefields are belied. Ludwig Renn admits in an epilogue to his books War and Post-War: "We had been told a lot in the family, in school and in the military: about the national duties of a man, about heroism and the uplifting effect of life in war. But when we got to the front it all turned out to be nothing but empty chatter. "¹ The outstanding thing about the novel is that it is not an officer, but a simple soldier in the form of private" Ludwig "who determines the plot. "It was not the officer whose actions impressed me at the front, but the nameless soldier, whose warmth and helpfulness I had witnessed so strongly in the dire need of the fighting", confesses Ludwig Renn in his novel. At the same time, his "hatred of the stupid idioms and illusions with which the people soon began to be fed again" emerged clearly. So "war" becomes a warning signal for what is to come. In the "post-war" this theme will be continued.
content
In this autobiographical novel, the author describes the First World War from the perspective of private (who rose to Vice Sergeant in the course of the war ) Ludwig Renn - this name was later adopted by the author himself. The experiences of this soldier of the Saxon body grenadier regiment 100 are linguistically very simple, unreflective and described in the manner of a diary. The novel begins with the regiment being transported by rail from Dresden to the Western Front . The war events are described from the border battles in Belgium and northern France and the Battle of the Marne (1914) with subsequent retreat in 1914 via the positional warfare of the following years with the Summer Battle of 1916, the Battle of the Aisne (1917) and the German Spring Offensive 1918 . The novel closes with the regiment marching back after the armistice in 1918 .
reception
Besides Remarque's In the West, War was the most successful anti-war novel in Germany and reached a circulation of 100,000 by 1929 and 155,000 by 1933. In contrast to Nothing New in the West or the Army Report , war was neither banned nor burned after 1933.
An English translation was published in 1929 under the title War in London. In total, the novel has been translated into 10 languages.
Individual evidence
- ^ Hans-Harald Müller: The war and the writers , Stuttgart 1986, ISBN 3-476-00603-4 , p. 186
- ↑ Kindler's literary dictionary . Volume 13. Stuttgart 2009. pp. 587f.
- ↑ David Midgley: Arnold Zweig: Poetics, Judaism and Politics . ISBN 3-261-03842-X . P. 40f.
- ↑ Volker Weidermann: The book of burned books . ISBN 978-3-462-03962-7 . P. 44.