Schlump (novel)
Schlump. Stories and adventures from the life of the unknown musketeer Emil Schulz, known as 'Schlump', told by himself is a novel by Hans Herbert Grimm , which depicts the inhumanity of the First World War from the perspective of a soldier. The work is characterized as a pacifist book. In order to protect his bourgeois existence, its author has kept his authorship a secret.
Schlump was published in the same year as the anti-war novel In the West Nothing New by Erich Maria Remarque in 1928 by Kurt Wolff in Berlin. There was an American and an English edition entitled Schlump - The Story of an Unknown Soldier .
The author, a teacher of French, Italian and Spanish in Altenburg , feared that he would lose his position if his authorship became known and therefore published the novel under a pseudonym that was only published about 80 years later by Volker Weidermann , author of the book 'Das Book of Burned Books' (2008) was revealed. During National Socialism he was no longer allowed to work as a teacher and was drafted after the beginning of the Second World War. After 1945 he worked briefly as a dramaturge on the municipal stage in Altenburg and committed suicide on June 7, 1950. The book was burned by the National Socialists in 1933 and is included in the list of books burned in 1933 .
classification
Grimm chose the title based on Grimmelshausen's picaresque novel Simplicissimus . The novel Schlump is classified as anti-nationalist, unheroic, philanthropic, pacifist, French-friendly , humanistic and European.
content
The book describes the protagonist's experiences in the First World War. As a seventeen-year-old war volunteer, Emil Schulz went to war in 1915. In this stage, as the commander of an occupied village, he first helps a boy who has trapped his head in a chamber pot and fraternizes with the French. Assigned to the front, he helps a superior to kick a shit heap. Grimm describes the fights in the barbed wire, the torn bodies and the dying realistically and drastically. But he describes in more detail the effects of military service and fighting on sexual morality.
reception
Despite the advertising expenditure that its publisher Kurt Wolff had carried out, the book had largely gone unnoticed because at the same time nothing new had appeared in the novel In the West .
Press
The English edition was reviewed by John Boynton Priestley : 'The best of German war books so far (excluding' Der Streit um den Sergeant Grischa ')'
expenditure
- Hans Herbert Grimm : Schlump Kiepenheuer & Witsch , Cologne 2014, ISBN 978-3-462-04609-0 .
- Emil Schulz ( pseudonym ): Schlump. Stories and adventures from the life of the unknown musketeer Emil Schulz, known as 'Schlump', told by himself . Kurt Wolff , Berlin 1928.
- Schlump: the story of an unknown soldier . Translation into English by Maurice Samuel . Secker, London 1929.
literature
- Eckhardt Momber: It 's war! it's war! Attempt on German literature on the war 1914–1933. Berlin: The Arsenal 1981 (also: Berlin, Freie Univ., Diss., 1980). Pp. 44-49.
- Volker Weidermann : The Riss - In 1928 a grandiose anti-war novel was published. Its author called himself Schlump, he never revealed the pseudonym. The Nazis burned the book, the author walled it up. A home visit, eighty years after the book burning , in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung of April 28, 2013, page 41.
- Frank Fischer: Stupid to the front - Hans Herbert Grimm's long-forgotten anti-war novel "Schlump" from 1928 , in: Die literary Welt , April 5, 2014.
Web links
- Schlump: Stories a. Adventure from d. Life d. unknown musketeer Emil Schulz, called "Schlump" / Erz. , at the German National Library
- Extract , accessed April 18, 2014.
- Feature for the novel Schlump on Deutschlandradio
Notes and sources
- ↑ a b c d Volker Weidermann : Der Riss: In 1928 a grandiose anti-war novel was published. Its author called himself Schlump, he never revealed the pseudonym. The Nazis burned the book, the author walled it up. A home visit, eighty years after the book burning , in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung of April 28, 2013, page 41.
- ↑ Volker Weidermann: The book of burned books . Publishing house Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 2008; ISBN 978-3-462-03962-7
- ↑ Christopher Schmidt : The Warrior's Kiss , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , April 12, 2014, p. 17