Unconditional surrender

Unconditional Surrender (translated into German  unconditional surrender ) is a novel by the English writer Evelyn Waugh , published in 1961. It was initially published under the title The End of the Battle . The story tells the story of a British nobleman in the British Army during World War II . Together with the novels Men At Arms (1952) and Officers and Gentlemen (1955), the book forms the trilogy Sword of Honor (German: Without fear and blame ), in which Waugh processed his own experiences in the service of the British Army.

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The protagonist Guy Crouchback, from whose perspective the story is told, comes from a Catholic English aristocratic family.

The plot follows on from the experiences that are described in the previous novels (and are briefly summarized for the reader at the beginning). After returning to England in 1941, Guy Crouchback was waiting in London for a meaningful assignment in the service of the British Army.

In his regiment, the Halberdiers , he worked as a training officer at various locations in Great Britain until 1943. He rises to major. An electronic device used to select candidates based on their qualifications is spat out by Crouchback as being suitable for a mission in Italy , which becomes a theater of war after the Allies landed and the fascists fell . However, the secret service raises objections - there Guy is considered unsuitable for service in Italy due to his pre-war ties to fascist Italy.

With the death of his father, Guy Crouchback unexpectedly inherits income that makes him financially independent. In a farewell letter, his father encourages him not to set the moral standards too high: "Quantitative judgments don't apply. If only one soul was saved that is full compensation for any amount of loss of 'face'." (German: quantitative judgments do not work. If only one soul has been saved, that is enough compensation for any degree of loss of face. )

For another mission, he went through parachute training from autumn 1943 , where he met Major Ludovic again, whom he had known since his assignment in Crete . Ludovic avoids any contact with Guy in an awkwardly funny way, which is why his subordinates fear that Ludovic has lost his mind. Guy sprains his knee during a jump and is allowed to cure it at his uncle Peregrine's apartment in London.

There his ex-wife Virginia meets him again. She is pregnant and abandoned by her lover Trimmer, broke and desperate. Her last hope, after several unsuccessful attempts to obtain an abortion , is that Guy will resume the marriage of the two, which the Catholic Church believes has been indissoluble anyway. Guy agrees - knowing Virginia's pregnancy; much to the incomprehension and displeasure of those around him.

After his remarriage and recovery, Crouchback found himself in February 1944 at the British headquarters for the Balkans in Bari, southern Italy . He is sent as a liaison officer to the communist partisans in Yugoslavia . There he collects their replenishment and material requirements, which - if they can be met - are then dropped by Allied aircraft over the partisan areas.

In June 1944, Virginia gives birth to her son, who is named Gervase in honor of the Crouchbacks .

In Yugoslavia, a group of about a hundred Jews turn to Guy for help; They were liberated from an Italian concentration camp , are now displaced persons and see no future with the communists and want to return to liberated Italy. Although your concern has the support of the British and the Americans, it meets with resistance from the Yugoslavs - the East-West conflict of the post-war order is already developing here at its core .

Guy at least manages to have two of the Jews flown out. With the machine that is supposed to bring the refugees to Italy, he receives a letter with the news that Virginia and his uncle Peregrine died in a V1 attack on London. The baby Gervase survived.

His regimental comrade de Souza is assigned to him as the chief liaison officer; he is an enthusiastic admirer of the partisans and their new order. Guy observes how the communists manage to establish themselves as contact persons for the Allies and pave the way for a takeover against the Chetniks under Dragoljub Draža Mihailović and the monarchical government in exile in London.

In January 1945 Crouchback was ordered and returned to Bari via Split and Dubrovnik . The Jewish group finds itself in a camp for displaced persons in Italy, but Guy's caregivers in Yugoslavia were brought to a "people's court" for counter-revolutionary activities.

Back in England, Guy took over the farm of his father's estate after the end of the war, he married Domenica Plessington, from a befriended, also Catholic family, and finally sold the Italian country castle of the Crouchbacks to Major Ludovic, whose novel sold splendidly in the USA.

background

Waugh also processed his own experiences during World War II in Unconditional Surrender . Like his hero Guy, he was Catholic, from the upper class, unmilitary in habit. Waugh also went through training as a parachutist and from the summer of 1944 was used as a liaison officer to communist partisans in Yugoslavia. In this function he also met their leader, the later Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito .

After he had completed the trilogy, he revised it and published it collectively under the title Sword of Honor .

Key characters

Waugh gave many of his characters traits of real people; therefore, his war trilogy was also read as a key novel. Waugh himself, however, resisted a simple 1: 1 assignment.

Waugh did not only portray himself in the character of the (anti) hero Guy Crouchback. The guilty and misplaced Major Ludovic with his literary ambitions, whom his subordinates consider crazy, also bears traits of his creator.

The figure of Sir Ralph Brompton, diplomat and political liaison of the Commandos , is modeled on the writer and politician Harold Nicolson ; Waugh sketched the literary critic and publicist Cyril Connolly in the eccentric publisher Everard Spruce - his fictional magazine Survival corresponds to Connolly's Horizon .

Waugh's Brigadier General in Yugoslavia, Fitzroy Maclean , who promoted British collaboration with the Communist Partisans, is depicted in the figures of Brigadier Cape and his aide Cattermole.

Waugh did not give a relatively well-known personality in his novel: Randolph Frederick Churchill , the son of Winston Churchill , was employed at Waugh's side in Yugoslavia, but to his chagrin does not appear in any of the characters in Unconditional Surrender .

Quotes

• Frank de Souza (an officer in Crouchbacks Regiment): "In my experience the more responsible posts in the army are largely filled by certifiable lunatics. They don't cause any more trouble than the sane ones." ( In my experience, the more responsible positions in the army are often occupied by proven lunatics. They cause no more trouble than the healthy. )

reception

Penelope Lively referred to the Sword of Honor novels in an article for The Atlantic as Waugh's masterpiece , also compared to the much better known reunion with Brideshead .

expenditure

• English: Unconditional Surrender , 1990, London: Penguin Classics, ISBN 978-0140182460
• German: Without fear and blame , German by Werner Peterich, 2016, Zurich: Diogenes, ISBN 978-3257069655

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See the entry on Goodreads.com
2. ↑ "Waugh hated it when readers tried to identify real people behind the masks of his fictional characters." (Byrne, 2008)
3. ^ "Corporal-Major Ludovic, saturnine and Faustian, achieves heroic status by murder and emerges post-war as author of a romantic bestseller dangerously like Brideshead . He is based on no one as far as I can discover, and I think is an alter -ego of Waugh himself. " (Johnson, 2012)
4. ^ Johnson, 2012
5. ^ Johnson, 2012
6. ↑ "Of the society toughs who made up the Commando colleagues, the most prominent was Randolph Churchill, who also went with him to Yugoslavia. But by a supreme effort of will Waugh refrained from a fictional caricature, Randolph later complaining that he had been hurt to find 'I had not been put in'. " (Johnson, 2012)

swell

• Penelope Lively, A Maverick Historian , in: The Atlantic February 2001, online
• Paul Johnson, Novelists at Arms , in: Standpoint Magazine , Jan / Feb 2012, online
• Paula Byrne, Alexander Waugh: Mad World - Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead , in: Literary Review August 2009, pp. 26-27