War novel

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ernst Jünger
Erich Maria Remarque
Ernest Hemingway
Hans Hellmut Kirst
Harry Thürk
Kurt Vonnegut
Gustav Hasford
Joseph Heller
Tom Clancy
Karl Marlantes
Harvey Black

A war novel is a special form of literature that focuses on the depiction of combat operations, or the war forms the backdrop and, as an ominous event, influences the development history of the protagonist. Some works in this genre can also be viewed as a sub-form of the adventure novel . A special form of the war novel is the anti-war novel, which focuses on the senselessness and cruelty of war. Most war novels are historical novels . Emer O'Sullivan defines the war novel as follows:

"Not every text set in a time of war is a war story. The difference between a text having 'military war' as one of it's main themes only, and it's being classified as a war story is one degree. If the war is used as a background setting to a story which is not centrally connected with it, then the story is not a war story. If the story is concerned with the doings of war, if it is set where some action connected with the war taking place, then it's a war story. "

- Emer O'Sullivan in Dorothea Flothow: Told in Gallant Stories: Memories of the war in British children's and youth novels 1870–1939. S. 53. Königshausen u. Neumann, 2009, ISBN 978-3-8260-3497-8 .

The plot of a war novel can either take place on the battlefield or take place on the rear home front. What they have in common, however, is that, as a rule, it is originally purely men's literature. Only later do women deal with this topic.

features

"In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true."

- Tim O'Brien: "The Things They Carried". P. 88. Fourth Estate, 2015, ISBN 978-0-544-30976-0 .

The dramatic changes in the title character are often directly related to the events of the war. The language mostly follows the crude, crude, obscene and foul language of the combatants in order to provide a realistic picture of the military reality from the point of view of the common soldiers. The American poet Walt Whitman argued that the true face of war would never find its way into literature because of its inexpressibility. Rosenthal wrote about the horrors of war: “It is true that war's horrors, and their obvious counterparts in 'normal' civilian life, can still dismay us profoundly for a moment of clarifying awareness. But then they are quickly taken for granted, as though each separate instance were not a cry to us to set all other concerns aside and put things right. "Features of postmodern war novels are partly characterized by the dissolution of the temporal disorder (" temporal disorder "), Pastiche or persiflage , fragmentation, looseness of association, delusion (“paranoia”), schizophrenia (“schizophrenia”), experimental language (“language disorder”) and vicious circles "). For O'Brien, writing about the war means describing the maximum chaos with the right words in order to bring order and control into it and to make the experience approachable. Dealing with the war would mean processing impressions of visceral and emotional intensity and an overwhelming sensation.

history

One of the first works of this genre can be seen in ancient Greek poetry, especially Homer's Iliad , which deals with the tragic chainings of the Trojan War . Classical legends such as Beowulf or the Arthussage can also be grouped into the series of warlike heroic poetry .

This theme was taken up by Shakespeare in his drama Henry V , which is set against the backdrop of the Battle of Azincourt .

Around the 17th century, the war novel developed its realistic, modern form. During this period, von Grimmelshausen's Der adventurous Simplicissimus , a satirical picaresque novel from the Thirty Years' War, was created .

In 2002, John Cowper Powys immortalized the historical figure Owen Glendower in a novel of the same name.

In the 19th century, Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma ( Battle of Waterloo ), Tolstoy's War and Peace and Stephen Crane's The Red Medal for Courage were among the most noted works that shaped their time. In these novels the cruelty of war and the moral conscience question of bravery and cowardice find a large space. Émile Zola succeeded in 1892 with The Debacle from the time of the Franco-German War, a work that was much celebrated at the time.

Doctor Zhivago is a world-famous romance novel by Boris Pasternak , set during the First World War and the Russian Civil War . This book was completed in 1955 and three years later it was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature . In Homage to Catalonia from 1938, George Orwell describes his experiences during the Spanish Civil War.

The Civil War from 1861 to 1865 plays a central role for many American writers . The most important books on this historic event include Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels about the Battle of Gettysburg , which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, and John Jakes North and South (made into a film as torches in the storm ), the legendary Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind , Charles Fraziers Cold Mountain. A Novel , Allan Gurganus Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All , Stephen Cranes Red Badge of Courage , Shelby Footes Shiloh on the bloody battle of Shiloh , Geraldine Brooks ' March , Robert Hicks' The Widow of the South and EL Doctorows The March .

Some historical novels by Ken Follett also deal with detailed battle paintings , among other things. The Battle of Blanchetaque (1346) and the Battle of Crécy (1346) ( Hundred Years War ) in The Gates of the World . The naval battle of Gravelines (1588) against the Spanish Armada and the wars of religion of the 16th century take place in The Foundation of Eternity . The Battle of the Somme (1916) and the Battle of Tannenberg (1914) are about the fall of the titans , which were written in realistic language to describe the "contempt of warlords and the horror of material battles ". The volume Winter of the World deals with the events of the Second World War. It revolves around the Battle of Belchite (1937) in the Spanish Civil War , as well as the fighting on the western and eastern fronts . The band Kinder der Freiheit takes place in the Cold War era.

Patrick Rambaud tells about the madness of war in The Battle of Aspern in the coalition wars between the Austrians and the French in 1809, which with 40,000 dead became one of the first great bloodbaths of the modern war.

In Germany, this type of romance originated in the Weimar Republic after the traumatic experience of the First World War . The content of this prose was the experience at the front, the experience of the great material battles on the western front and the deaths of millions of soldiers. These works, some of which reached an audience of millions, were the cause of a controversial discussion in politics and society. This was the case not only in Germany, but also in other warring nations such as Great Britain, France and the USA. While a group of authors such as Hans Zöberlein ( The Faith in Germany - A War Experience from Verdun to the Overthrow . 1931), Ernst Jünger ( War Diary 1914–1918 , the autobiographical In Stahlgewittern. From the diary of a shock troop leader and fire and blood ) or Franz Schauwecker ( In the death throat. The German soul in the world war and So was the war. 200 battle shots from the front ) heroized the war pathetically as a "comradely male adventure" and attached the defeat to the stab in the back legend , another stood around writers like Erich Maria Remarque ( Im West nothing new ), Ludwig Renn ( War and In Front Line. From the Aisne-Champagne Battle of 1917 ) and Edlef Köppen ( Army Report ), who denounced the inhumanity and mass death of a modern war with their realistic and unadorned narrative. The main character in Army Report is the student Adolf Reisinger, who in the course of his insane experience at the front comes to the realization that war is "ordered murder". Köppen's expressionist novel is conceived with cruel objectivity as a war diary, which fades in documents of the time in the story. Köppen tells of dying for the sake of dying and of obedience to the dead . Other central themes in anti-war literature are the effects of post-traumatic stress disorders or the alienation from civil society from which the protagonists suffer.

Above all, Remarques Nothing New in the West developed into a classic of world literature due to the authentic description of the experiences of his protagonist Paul Bäumer and his pacifist attitude. This novel shows the horror of the trench war from the perspective of a young infantryman, with relentless openness in authentic scenes .

On the French side, Henri Barbusses novella Das Feuer continues. Diary of a corporal body (original title: Le Feu. Journal d'une Escouade ) openly deals with the national dogma and the military incompetence of his country. The pacifist Romain Rolland wrote Clérambault - History of a Free Spirit in War in 1920 . By John Dos Passos came three soldiers (Original title: Three Soldiers ), an American contribution of the lost generation to the war experience World War. The combatant and marine Laurence Stallings wrote his autobiographical title Plumes What Price Glory in 1924 . The life in the grave of the Greek author Stratis Myrivilis describes the brutality of the fighting on the western front, similar to Remarque.

The British writer Rebecca West wrote in 1918, the returnees drama The Return (original title: The Return of the Soldier ), which, suffering, concerned with the fate of a under a "grave shock" captain and his unsuccessful integration into the English civil society. Virginia Woolf's depressive book, Mrs Dalloway, Zum Leuchtturm , is about the madness and suicide of a war veteran.

Significant books also include: Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929), Richard Aldingtons Heldentod (Original title: Death of a Heroe ) (1929), Arnold Zweig's The Dispute over Sergeant Grischa (1927), Charles Yale Harrison's Generals Die in Bed (1930) and William Marchs Company K (1933).

In Johnny Got His Gun (1971), Dalton Trumbo tells of a young man who volunteers for military service and is badly wounded in France. It survives as a torso and can only make itself understood through Morse code. Parade's End is a tetralogy ( Some Do Not… (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926) and Last Post (1928)) by Ford Madox Ford and is set during the First World War. In 1994 John Harris wrote Covenant With Death about the experiences of a volunteer battalion on the western front of WW I. Later books such as Pat Barker's trilogy Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993) and The Ghost Road (1995), Sebastian Faulks ' Singing from the great fire (original title: Birdsong ) and Michael Goodspeed's Three to a Loaf deal critically with the problems from the time of the First World War.

A second boom arose in the period after the Second World War , when very similar experiences were processed by contemporary authors. The topics were expanded to include the problems of imprisonment , concentration camps , resistance to National Socialism and returning home from the front.

Gert Ledig's radical novel The Stalin Organ , which describes two days in 1942 near besieged Leningrad , became a great international success after its publication in 1955. "It is a world of foxholes and shell holes, tallow candles, rats, crusted blood and excrement, hunger and death". With his relentless and barbaric debut work, the author came "to the forefront of contemporary German literature".

Naval lieutenant and war correspondent Lothar-Günther Buchheim kidnaps the reader in Das Boot mit derber Sprache into the unknown world of the submarine war and thus achieved a worldwide success.

Andreas Engermann's (alias Walter Düpmann) depiction of a lesser-known theater of war in Karelia in You won't find a better one contains some very realistic battle scenes of the forest fight from the perspective of the “nameless countryman”.

Willi Heinrichs The patient meat is set "during a preventive straightening of the front on the southern section in 1943" and deals with the battle of Novorossisk and the dramatic experiences of sergeant and platoon leader Rolf Steiner.

Karlludwig Opitz describes in Der Barras a report with raw and explicitly pictorial language such as B. “They had looked at the men in the rubber aprons, the hospital nurses who looked as if they had been through the pounding from Sunday to Saturday. They had only toiled and wiped blood. Everywhere there was a horrible vomit in this purulent butcher's shop. ” The African campaign.

The well-known folk writer Heinz Konsalik , who celebrated his breakthrough in 1956 with The Doctor of Stalingrad , also gave a lot of space to his soldiers' memories from the Eastern Front.

Alexander Kluge encounters the myth of Stalingrad in his sensational novel Description of the Battle .

When processing WW II, the literature from the USA predominates, which deals with land , air and sea ​​warfare in various main theaters such as East Asia and the Pacific Ocean . Worth mentioning is the economically extremely successful novel The Caine was her fate by Herman Wouk , the bestseller by James Jones Damned in All Eternity (original title: From Here to Eternity ) and Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell tolls . Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Path through the hinterland (original title: The Narrow Road to the Deep North , 2013) tells of the Japanese captivity. In 1984 JG Ballard wrote Empire of the Sun , which among other things deals with the Japanese campaign on the British colony in Singapore .

Sonia Campbell-Gillies makes the fate of a child in the chaos of war her leitmotif in Ukraine - In the Time of War . The Russian occupation of Crimea recently made this book topical again. The French publicist Jean-Paul Sartre created Troubled Sleep / Iron in the Soul (original title: La mort dans l'âme ) about the French resistance, an important part of the trilogy The Paths of Freedom . Pierre Boulle won a literary prize with Die Brücke am Kwai . The Nobel laureate Claude Simon , who served as a cavalryman in the French campaign in 1940, wrote The Acacia (original title: L'Acacia ) in 1989 , which commemorates the murderous slaughter of the last two world wars. Before that, in 1960 he wrote The Road in Flanders (original title: La Route des Flandres ).

The 1940 bombing of London inspired a number of British books: Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear and The End of an Affair , James Hanley's No Directions, and Henry Greens Caught . Elisabeth Bowens' The Heat of the Day also addresses these events. In Fair Stood the Wind for France, Herbert Ernest Bates describes the fate of a downed bomber pilot in France. Ian McEwan leads the reader in Black Dogs and Atonement, among other things, to the British evacuation of Dunkirk .

Another setting, such as the Sitzkrieg, is the subject of Evelyn Waugh's Put Out More Flags . The trilogy also comes from the same author: Sword of Honor : Men At Arms , Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender .

The experimental works include Joseph Heller's satire Catch-22 and Thomas Pynchon's post-modern novel The Ends of the Parable . Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead , Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions and James Jones' Der Schmale Grat (original title: The Thin Red Line ) offer extremely tough and realistic descriptions of the battle. Michael Ondaatje won the Booker Prize in 1992 with The English Patient .

The Holocaust literature category includes AM Klein's The Second Scroll , Primo Levis If this is a Man and If Not Now When? , as well as William Styron's Sophie's decision . Richard Hooker wrote with MASH (original title: MASH - A Novel About Three Army Doctors ) a satirical anti-war novel about the Korean War. The Hunters , the debut work of USAF fighter pilot James Salter, also plays in the Korean War .

The British writer Graham Greene triggered a high phase of the war novel about the Vietnam War with his internationally acclaimed novel The Silent American , which deals with the French colonial war in Indochina .

The Short-Timers from the pen of the former marine infantryman and war correspondent Gustav Hasford describes in the three chapters "The Spirit of the Bayonet", "Body Count" and "Grunts" the bloody experiences of "Joker" during the Tet offensive and the battle around Huế in 1968.

Tim O'Brien's What They Wore contains 22 interwoven short stories about the Vietnam War, some of which deal with his own experiences. Denis Johnson denounces the depths of American warfare in A Straight Smoke .

With The Sorrows of War, Bao Ninh leads a generation of authors who explain the horrors of war (“half morgue and half mental hospital”) from their point of view.

Tim O'Brien was with The Things They Carried , which was counted among the most important literary works about the Vietnam War, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

In 2001, WG Sebald created an internationally recognized masterpiece with Austerlitz .

The Cold War , or the fictional Third World War , is the subject of Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October (original title: The Hunt for Red October ) and Im Sturm (original title: Red Storm Rising ), where it is described in detail and technocratic. The book Im Sturm contains scenes from a purely conventional war, with the first strike with tactical nuclear weapons only being considered towards the end of the story. The trilogy The Red Effect , The Black Effect and The Blue Effect by the British secret service officer and author Harvey Black, which describes a tank attack by the Warsaw Pact on the Federal Republic of Germany in the mid-1980s, has not yet been published in German. Harold Coyle assumes a similar scenario in Team Yankee from the perspective of a US tank company. Even John le Carré's spy novels as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold , a kind of hero , Glass War , The Russia House and The dragonfly fall into this era. Raymond Briggs When The Wind Blows is a comic that graphically shows the effects of a Soviet nuclear blow.

Kevin Powers takes on the American military experience of the Iraq War in The Sun Was All Heaven . The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini was created in 2003 , the story of a boy during the war in Afghanistan.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is a multi-award-winning anti-war novel by Ben Fountain from 2012, named number eight on the list of the best 20 novels of the early 21st century .

Tim LaHaye deals with apocalyptic end-time scenarios in Finale - The Last Days of the Earth and Chris Cleave in Incendiary with the war on terrorism.

Works (selection)

Secondary literature

  • Norman Ächtler: Generation in Kessel . The soldier's victim narrative in the West German war novel 1945–1960 . Wallstein, 2013, ISBN 978-3-8353-1277-7 .
  • Philip D. Beidler: American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam . U Georgia Press, 1982, ISBN 0-8203-0612-6 .
  • Bernard Bergonzi: Heroes' Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War . Coward-McCann, 1965
  • David Craig and Michael Egan: Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War to the Atom Bomb . Macmillan, ISBN 0-333-24579-2 .
  • Astrid Erll: memory novels. Literature on the First World War as a medium for English and German cultures of remembrance in the 1920s . Trier, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2003, ISBN 978-3-88476-610-1 .
  • Dorothea Flothow: Told in Gallant Stories: Memories of the war in British children's and youth novels 1870-1939 . (ZAA Monograph Series), Königshausen a. Neumann, 2006, ISBN 978-3-8260-3497-8 .
  • Gerrit Lungershausen: World War in words: war prose in the Third Reich 1933 to 1940 . JB Metzler, 2017, ISBN 978-3-658-16485-0 .
  • Madison and Schaefer (Eds.): Encyclopedia of American War Literature . Greenwood Press, ISBN 0-313-30648-6 .
  • Cordula Mahr: War literature by women ?: On the representation of the Second World War in autobiographies after 1960 (women in literary history) . Centaurus Verlag & Media, 2006, ISBN 978-3-8255-0622-3
  • Hans-Harald Müller: The war and the writers . The war novel of the Weimar Republic. Stuttgart, Metzler Verlag 1986, ISBN 978-3-476-00603-5 .
  • Monika Wolting: The new war novel. Representations of the war in Afghanistan in contemporary German literature . Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2019. ISBN 978-3-8253-6974-3 .

Notes and individual references

  1. ↑ War Genre Characteristics
  2. ↑ Michel Grunewald and Uwe Puschner: Perceptions of crises in Germany around 1900. Magazines as forums during the time of upheaval in the Wilhelmine Empire / Perceptions de la crise en Allemagne. Société allemande à l'époque wilhelmienne p. 144. Peter Lang AG, International Publishing House of Science, 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-743-7 .
  3. ↑ The real war will never get in the books. Unspeakable side of the war, no longer so considered by the modern mind . Bartleby
  4. ↑ ML Rosenthal. Foreword. War and the Novelist. by Peter G. Jones. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976.
  5. ^ The American War Novel. Dorian Maršálek, Thesis, Masaryk University Brno, 2006
  6. ^ Critical Essays "The Things They Carried" and Questions of Genre. CliffsNotes
  7. ^ 10 best novels about the US Civil War. The Christian Science Monitor, April 13, 2011
  8. ↑ Ken Follett: Fall of the Titans. The renaissance of the trenches. Frankfurter Allgemeine, December 16, 2010
  9. ↑ Patrick Rambaud: The battle. Roman, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2002, ISBN 978-3-518-39818-0 .
  10. ^ Army report by Edlef Köppen
  11. ^ Edlef Köppen: Army report on www.histo-couch.de
  12. ↑ “Nothing new in the West”. Testament of the Fallen. It is the anti-war novel par excellence, 20 million printed copies, and the book has been translated into 50 languages: 80 years ago, “Nothing New in the West” was published. Focus Online. January 31, 2009
  13. ↑ John Dos Passos: Three Soldiers (1921) in Burned Books
  14. ↑ Life in the grave. Stratis Myrivilis (Author); Ulf-Dieter Klemm (translator). About this book. Edition Romiosini
  15. ↑ Gert Ledig: The Stalin Organ on www.perlentaucher.de
  16. ↑ The War as Hermetic Space - Critical Edition
  17. ↑ Gert Ledig: The Stalin Organ on www.histo-couch.de
  18. ↑ The war from the sewing box. Time online. May 26, 1995
  19. ↑ Russian War : The patient paper. Der Spiegel, March 30, 1955
  20. ↑ Karl Ludwig Opitz: The Barras A report. Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle (Saale), 1954. Page unknown
  21. ^ Heinz G. Konsalik. DER SPIEGEL, December 31, 1990
  22. ↑ Stalingrad - Logical misfortune. DER SPIEGEL, May 20, 1964
  23. ↑ Alexander Kluge: Description of the battle . Suhrkamp, ​​2002, ISBN 978-3-518-11193-2 .
  24. ↑ Tim O'Brien: What they wore on www.literaturschock.de
  25. ↑ And about the inalienability of the immediate war experience: Tim O Brien tells, What they wore stories from the deployment of the ground troops. Berliner Zeitung, March 3, 1999
  26. ↑ At home in hell. A terrific hit: Denis Johnson's novel A straight smoke shines into the depths of American warfare. Zeit Online, October 30, 2008
  27. ↑ Denis Johnson's new novel. Whoever hits the myth destroys the country. Frankfurter Allgemeine, November 26, 2008
  28. ↑ War as a pipe dream and reality. Denis Johnson, born in 1949, usually seeks the personnel of his novels and short stories on the periphery of history and society. With his previous magnum opus, he is now circling a milestone in the history of the United States: the Vietnam War. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, October 4, 2008
  29. ↑ Much grass grew over hell. If literature from Vietnam is seldom translated into German anyway, literary representations of the war are even rarer. Three recent novels reveal a break in perspective. The New Zurich Times. March 20, 2015
  30. ↑ Tom Clancy: In the Storm on www.krimicouch
  31. ↑ Brief description on www.goodreads.com
  32. ↑ The Red Effect - An Amazon bestseller
  33. ↑ Harvey Black, Cold War, Military and Apocaplyptic Fiction
  34. ^ Harold Coyle: Team Yankee . Berkley, 1988, ISBN 978-0-425-11042-3 .
  35. ↑ Iraq novel. Nobody returns from this war unharmed. Die Welt, April 8, 2013
  36. ↑ War novel. Like straw in the wind. EL Doctorow is the least known of the well-known great American writers - his war novel "The March" is a philanthropic masterpiece. Zeit Online, November 7, 2007
  37. ↑ Best Selling Fiction War Military Books on alibris