A war of words: the cultural meanings of the First World War in Britain and Germany

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between soldiers’ contemporaneous accounts of the First World War and writers’ later representations of combatants’ experiences in novels and other types of ‘war literature’. It argues that post-war literary depictions of such experiences closely resembled soldiers’ own testimony, serving to disseminate and legitimize combatants’ earlier, private revelations of the horrific reality of modern warfare. At the time and afterwards, these accounts of the fighting co-existed with patriotic and heroic descriptions of the war. Here, I investigate the transnational transfer and reception of literary works. Through a comparison of literary treatments of the conflict in Britain and Germany, the article highlights the significance of the outcome of the First World War for its longer-term cultural legacy. The war was described in similar terms in both countries, but criticism of the war effort proved much more divisive in Germany than in the United Kingdom, affecting the ways in which military conflict was remembered and understood.

Keywords:

• War literature
• novels
• plays
• memoirs
• diaries
• letters
• propaganda
• Germany
• Britain
• First World War

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the AHRC and the Leverhulme Trust for funding my research on the violence of war in Germany.

Notes

1. Kazin, Bright Book of Life, 84.

2. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 9. See also idem, Remembering War.

3. Barbusse, quoted in J. M. Winter, Sites of Memory, 185. On Remarque, see Krimmer, The Representation of War, 6, 88–106; on Hemingway, see Norris, “The Novel as War.” See also Bogacz, “‘A Tyranny of Words’.”

4. Natter, Literature at War.

5. For a recent interpretation, see McLoughlin, “War and Words.”

6. See Welke, “Gemeinsame Lektüre und frühe Formen von Gruppenbildungen;” idem, “Die Presse und ihre Leser;” Brophy, Popular Culture and the Public Sphere in the Rhineland. I have written about this in M. Hewitson, Absolute War, 76–86, and idem, The People’s Wars, 181–254.

7. Lambert and Badsey, The War Correspondents: The Crimean War; Becker, “Der ‘vorgeschobene Posten’ als ‘verlorener Posten’?”

8. Belgum, Popularizing the Nation; Paul, Bilder des Krieges, Krieg der Bilder.

9. Kühlich, Die deutschen Soldaten im Krieg von 1870/71.

10. Ulrich, Die Augenzeugen, 22.

11. Hamilton and Herwig, The Origins of World War I, 4; Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War, 135.

12. Didczuneit, Ebert, and Jander, Schreiben im Krieg – Schreiben vom Krieg; Ulrich, “Feldpostbriefe im Ersten Weltkrieg. Bedeutung und Zensur;” Latzel, “Kriegsbriefe und Kriegserfahrung.”

13. Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, 329, himself is anxious to caution that the “dynamic of destruction was not a law of nature; rather, despite the tremendous pressure of nature, technology, and mentalities, it was man-made, capable of infinite variation, and as we saw with the German decision to end the war, capable of being stopped before ultimate self-destruction.” On international relations and the collapse of the Concert of Europe, Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, is still the classic account. Christopher Clark’s Sleepwalkers, which is based on a much broader set of studies in German and English, seems to confirm the case – in the years before 1914 – about an unintended escalation in a multipolar world.

14. On the political contestation of ‘memory’, see Ziemann, Contested Commemorations. On memory and religion, see Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning; idem, The Experience of World War I; idem, “Forms of Kinship and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Great War.” On community and family, see Ziemann, Front und Heimat.

15. Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat; Reimann, “Semantiken der Kriegserfahrung und historische Diskursanalyse. Britische Soldaten an der Westfront des Ersten Weltkrieges;” Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime; Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age; Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars; Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory.

16. Wohl, The Generation of 1914, 42–121; Williams, “The Myth of the Lost Generation;” Winter, The Great War and the British People, 65–102.

17. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I.

18. Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture; Englander, “Soldiering and Identity: Reflections on the Great War.” McCartney, Citizen Soldiers.

19. Ziemann, Front und Heimat. From the other side, see Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany.

20. Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War; Levsen, “Constructing Elite Identities.”

21. Cohen, The War Come Home; Bond, The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History; Bracco, Merchants of Hope: Middlebrow Writers of the First World War; Cecil, The Flower of Battle.

22. See, for instance, Meyer, “The Tuition of Manhood: ‘Sapper’s’ War Stories and the Literature of War;” Cullen, “The Land of My Dreams.” ‘Genre’ here is used in the broad sense of an accepted category of literature with at least some shared content or stylistic conventions, not in the narrower sense of certain literary critics: see, for instance, Devitt, Writing Genres. For a broader use of the term, similar to that alluded to here, see Hüppauf, “War Literature,” and idem, Was ist Krieg? Zur Grundlegung einer Kulturgeschichte des Kriegs. See also Beaupré, “New Writers, New Literary Genres (1914–1918).”

23. Watson, Experience, Memory, and the First World War, 3.

24. On the significance of defeat, see especially Gerwarth, The Vanquished.

25. Givoni, “Witnesses in Public.” This is not to contend that letters and diaries, much less memoirs, were indistinguishable from each other, but merely to point out that there were common images and styles of writing in all three types of testimony: see Fulbrook and Rublack, “In Relation: The ‘Social Self’ and Ego Documents.”

26. On the similarities, see especially Reimann, Der groβe Krieg der Sprachen.

27. In general, see Stromberg, Redemption by War.

28. Mommsen, “German Artists, Writers and Intellectuals and the Meaning of War, 1914–1918.”

29. Roy, in Witkop, German Students’ War Letters, 69. See Schicht, diary entry, September 8, 1914, Häring, Ein Held der Garde, 16.

30. Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, 25.

31. Hynes, A War Imagined, 1–96.

32. A. D. Gillespie to his parents, October 1, 1914, in Laffin, Letters from the Front, 12.

33. On enemies within and atrocity stories in Britain, see de Groot, Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War, 187–94.

34. Marquis, “Words as Weapons: Propaganda in Britain and Germany.”

35. Stanley Baldwin, at the time the Joint Financial Secretary to the Treasury, speaking the House of Commons, in Messinger, British Propaganda and the State, 141.

36. Stark, “All Quiet on the Home Front;” Welch, Germany: Propaganda and Total War.

37. Ponsonby, Falsehood in War-Time. For a detailed examination of the actual atrocities, see Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914.

38. Schramm, Das Deutschlandbild in der britischen Presse 1912–1919, 413.

39. De Groot, Blighty, 187–91.

40. There were, of course, atrocities but much of the press reportage was false: see Wilson, “Lord Bryce's Investigation into Alleged German Atrocities.” For a recent analysis of the wider debate, see Keller, Schuldfragen. Belgischer Untergrundkrieg und deutsche Vergeltung, 17–42.

41. See especially Stibbe, German Anglophobia and the Great War.

42. Sombart, Händler und Helden.

43. See, for instance, Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War, 15–51.

44. The classic work is Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht.

45. On the debates about war and peace, see Mulligan, The Great War for Peace, 133–266.

46. Leed, No Man’s Land, 73–114.

47. J. Duncan to Rev. Duncan McArthur, September 5, 1918, in Housman, War Letters of Fallen Englishmen, 96.

48. Ibid., 97.

49. On Germany, see Lipp, Meinungslenkung im Krieg; on Britain, Bond, The Unquiet Western Front; Isherwood, “The British Publishing Industry and Commercial Memories of the First World War.”

50. Ludwig to Kätchen Weber, September 10, 1914, in Schöttler, 1914 in Briefen und Feldpostbriefen, 99.

51. Hirschfeld, Krumeich, and Ren, Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg, 857.

52. See also Winter, “Victimes de la guerre. Morts, blesses et invalides,” 1077.

53. For instance, Sparr, Feldpostbriefe 1914–1915, 276–7.

54. Wells, Mr Britling Sees It Through, 206.

55. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 184.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid.

58. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I, remains the seminal study of such expectations, though historians now accept that many combatants did not have such hopes.

59. Wolfram Wette, especially, has studied varying manifestations of such feelings: Wette, Der Krieg des kleinen Mannes.

60. Jünger, In Stahlgewittern, 107–10, showed that soldiers were usually subject to the overwhelming forces of a ‘mechanical war’ whilst also able to demonstrate their heroism during murderous and decisive interludes of hand-to-hand combat, for example. See especially Kiesel, Ernst Jünger. Kriegstagebuch 1914–1918, and idem, Ernst Jünger. Die Biographie.

61. The literature on this subject is large. For German troops’ responses and treatment, see Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry and the Politics of Trauma in Germany; Kaufmann, “Science as Cultural Practice;” Eckart, Man, Medicine, and the State, and idem, Medizin und Kolonialimperialismus. Deutschland 1884–1945; idem, “The Most Extensive Experiment that the Imagination Can Conceive,” 133–49; idem, “‘Eiskalt mit Würgen und Schlucken;’” idem, “Aesculap in the Trenches: Aspects of German Medicine in the First World War;” Ulrich, “Nerven und Krieg.” For further literature on British soldiers, see Loughran, Shell-Shock and Medical Culture in First World War Britain.

62. Häring, Ein Held der Garde, 39.

63. C. H. Sorley to A. Watts, October 5, 1915, in Housman, War Letters of Fallen Englishmen, 252.

64. H. Zschuppe, October 25, 1916, in Witkop, German Students’ War Letters, 365.

65. Tharann, Aus dem Kriegstagebuch eines Gefallenen, 10.

66. W. Wimmel to M. Groβbaum, November 29, 1914, in Böhme, Kriegsbriefe der Familie Wimmel, 169.

67. D. Vallendar to L. Wimmel, December 18, 1914, ibid., 209.

68. T. to E. Römer, October 27, 1914, in Schöttler, 1914 in Briefen und Feldpostbriefen, 120–1.

69. Ibid.

70. E. Boughton to C. Williams, March 27, 1916, in Housman, War Letters of Fallen Englishmen, 202.

71. See Hewitson, “German Soldiers and the Horror of War.”

72. A. Brochhaus, diary entry, July 26, 1918, in Schupp, Eines Freiburger Theologen Kreigstagebücher 1914/18, 97.

73. H. P. Mainwaring Jones, July 27, 1917, in Housman, War Letters of Fallen Englishmen, 159.

74. E. Hieber, April 14, 1915, in Witkop, German Students’ War Letters, 66. See also C. H. Sorley to A. Watts, August 26, 1915, in Housman, War Letters of Fallen Englishmen, 250.

75. Laffin, Letters from the Front, 88.

76. For instance, one lieutenant at the Battle of the Marne in September 1914 referred to a ‘Hexenkessel’: Förster, Wir Kämpfer im Weltkrieg, 83.

77. Ibid., 3.

78. Witkop, German Students’ War Letters, 2.

79. Ibid., 4.

80. A. Buchalski, October 28, 1914, ibid., 13.

81. F. G. Steinbrecher, March 13–17, 1916, ibid., 320–1.

82. Ibid., 322.

83. Ibid., 324–5.

84. E. Boughton to F. J. Page, August 20, 1915, in Housman, War Letters of Fallen Englishmen, 199.

85. P. R. Keightley, November 28, 1917, in Laffin, Letters from the Front, 86.

86. Ibid.

87. I have written about this at greater length in Hewitson, “I Witnesses: Soldiers, Selfhood and Testimony in Modern Wars.”

88. This does not mean that all soldiers wrote in such a fashion, of course. Many stuck to the formulae of the Field Service Postcard or attempted to spare the feelings of those at home. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 184.

89. F. C. Endres, Die Tragödie Deutschlands, 283.

90. Dix, Psychologische Beobachtungen über die Eindrucke des Krieges, quoted by B. Ulrich, Die Augenzeugen, 123.

91. Benjamin Ziemann, War Experiences in Rural Germany, 82–98, 137–54, rightly emphasizes persisting ties between soldiers, their families and localities, but he, too, shows the divisions which existed between the fighting front, ‘profiteers’, political parties, the army hierarchy and the government. Also, Nelson, German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War. On Britain, see Nelson, “Soldier Newspapers;” Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War; Bourne, Britain and the Great War; Tooley, The Great War; Monger, “Soldiers, Propaganda and Ideas of Home and Community in First World War Britain.”

92. Many historians contend that the gap between combatants and civilians, whether propped up by a feeling of ‘community’ in the trenches or not, has been exaggerated, but few deny altogether that it existed: Beckett, The Great War, 1914–1918, 218. Also, Hochschild, To End All Wars.

93. On Germany, see Bessel, Germany after the First World War. On Britain, see de Groot, Back in Blighty: The British at Home in World War One.

94. For opposing points of view, see Watson, Enduring the Great War; Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture; Rousseau, La Guerre censure: une histoire des combattants européens.

95. Pick, War Machine, 136–270.

96. Whalen, Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War.

97. For instance, Hawkes, Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns.

98. Blunden, Undertones of War, vii.

99. Wells, Mr Britling Sees It Through, 206.

100. Watson, Experience, Memory, and the First World War, 185–296.

101. Fraser, Robertshaw, and Roberts, Ghosts on the Somme; Reeves, “Cinema, Spectatorship and Propaganda;” Badsey, “Battle of the Somme: British War-Propaganda;” Reeves, Official British Film Propaganda during the First World War.

102. Crompton, Shaw the Dramatist.

103. Oesterle, “Das Kriegserlebnis im für und wider;” Firda, All Quiet on the Western Front; Rüter, Erich Maria Remarque. Im Westen nichts Neues. Schneider, “The Truth about the War Finally” (p. 458) gives a figure of 1.2 million sales in Germany by 1933.

104. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 78–116. Andrew Frayn, Writing Disenchantment, 22, 204, rightly points out ‘the contention cannot hold’ that ‘there was a ten-year gap [after 1918] to realist prose about the war’: nevertheless, ‘while the ten-year distance from the war should not be conceived as a gap, it was a significant milestone.’ Hugh Walpole had talked at the time – in a review of 1929 – of a ‘period of silence’ after the First World War.

105. Bruno Schultze, “Fiction and Truth: The Politics of the War Novel,” has argued that the silence or delay was, at least in part, political rather than psychological. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) is a good example of a novel which alludes indirectly to the effects of war. Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy (1924–8) is a classic historical saga. See Saunders, “Life Writing, Fiction and Modernism in British Narratives of the First World War.”

106. Frayn, Writing Disenchantment, 201–39; he pits his argument against that of Janet Watson, Fighting Different Wars, 186, who contends that it was ‘only the difficulties of the 1920s and after that created the disillusioned look back at war; it was not, for most people, a product of the war years themselves.’ Cyril Falls, War Books (London, 1930), records that 22 war novels were published in 1929 and 15 in 1930, declining in number after that. No more than eight to nine are listed yearly between 1919 and 1928.

107. Linden, “Beyond Repetition: Karl Kraus’s ‘Absolute Satire’;” Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches; Johnson, “Realism and Satire: Siegfried Sassoon,” 71–112.

108. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 3–35.

109. Isherwood, “The British Publishing Industry and Commercial Memories of the First World War,” 332.

110. Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, 471.

111. Ibid., 472.

112. Ibid., 229–30.

113. Ibid., 360–1.

114. Ibid., 425.

115. Mitchell, “Goodbye to All That: Robert Graves, Gerald Brenan and the Bloomsbury Set.” Some scholars have disputed this interpretation, seeing Graves’s post-war actions as a consequence of frustrations he experienced after 1918. To others, the final chapters seem deliberately desultory, emphasizing the drift of Graves’s life, presented as an appendix.

116. Graves, Goodbye to All That, 60, 151. On the differences between autobiographical and fictional accounts in this context, see Cobley, “History and Ideology in Autobiographical Literature of the First World War.”

117. Graves, Goodbye to All That, 95.

118. Ibid., 164.

119. Ibid., 238–79.

120. The aim was itself not universally accepted, of course, from its announcement by Wells, The War that Will End War (New York, 1914) onwards. See Hochschild, To End All Wars; Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War; Mulligan, The Great War for Peace, 48–222.

121. Some historians have argued that anti-war writers were unrepresentative of soldiers themselves or of the subsequent post-war generation: Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World War; Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory; Bond, The Unquiet Western Front.

122. Willis, Jr., “The Censored Language of War.”

123. Im Westen nichts Neues was treated variously by critics as pacifist, anti-war or, even, pro-war: Schneider, “The Truth about the War Finally.”

124. For the reactions of the ‘new right’, see Breuer, Anatomie der Konservativen Revolution, for further literature, which is extensive.

125. Eksteins, “All Quiet on the Western Front and the Fate of a War.”

126. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 8–9, 72, 158, 199.

127. Ibid., 97.

128. Figes, Crimea, 324–72; Hewitson, The People’s Wars, 339–52, 392–409, 456–72.

129. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 147.

130. Ibid., 205.

131. Ibid., 206.

132. Ibid., 207.

133. Schneider, “The Truth about the War Finally,” 494.

134. Ibid., 496.

135. Ibid., 499. Zöberlein stressed, in opposition to Ullstein’s publicity, that the archetype should not be an ‘unknown soldier’.

136. Jünger, The Storm of Steel, 9, 23, 25, 40, 250.

137. Ibid., 109.

138. Kiesel, Ernst Jünger. Kriegstagebuch and Ziemann, Violence and the German Soldier in the Great War.

139. Ibid., 316.

140. Ibid.

141. Ibid., 316–17.

142. This is the impression he gives in In Stahlgewittern. His diary is another matter: Ziemann, Violence and the German Soldier in the Great War, 88–90.

143. Reimann, Der groβe Krieg der Sprachen, 282, comes to this conclusion in respect of letters (and newspaper articles).

144. See Beaupré, “Soldier-Writers and Poets;” Schneider et al., Die Autoren und Bücher der deutschprachigen Literatur zum Ersten Weltkrieg.

145. Hardy, “Apology to Late Lyrics and Earlier” (1922), quoted in Frayn, Writing Disenchantment, 8–9.

146. D. H. Lawrence to J. B. Pinker, December 5, 1914, ibid., 9.

147. On cross-over and continuing distinctions between diaries, memoirs, journalism and literature, see Tate, “The First World War: British Writing.”

148. Isherwood, “The British Publishing Industry and Commercial Memories of the Great War,” 328, has compiled a database of 350 books published between 1918 and 1939 but he admits that this is a work in progress.

149. Cobley, “History and Ideology in Autobiographical Literature of the First World War,” 37.

150. Ibid., 46.

151. Ibid., 45.

152. Johnston, “Realism and Satire: Siegfried Sassoon,” in English Poetry of the First World War, 71–111.

153. Linden, “Beyond Repetition.”

154. Quoted in Frayn, Writing Disenchantment, 213–14.

155. Ibid., 213.

156. Ibid. Also, Willis, Jr., “The Censored Language of War.”

157. Frayn, Writing Disenchantment, 219.

158. Harari, The Ultimate Experience.

159. On Britain, see Monger, “Soldiers, Propaganda and Ideas of Home and Community in First World War Britain;” Englander, “Soldiering and Identity;” Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture; McCartney, Citizen Soldiers; Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War. On Germany, see Watson, Enduring the Great War, and Ring of Steel, 160–329.

160. Bond, The Unquiet Western Front; Meyer, “The Tuition of Manhood;” Cullen, “The Land of My Dreams: The Gendered Utopian Dreams and Disenchantment of British Literary Ex-Combatants of the Great War;” Isherwood, “The British Publishing Industry and Commercial Memories of the First World War;” Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War; J. S. K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars; R. M. Bracco, Merchants of Hope; Cecil, The Flower of Battle.

161. Quoted in Frayn, Writing Disenchantment, 219.

162. Dugdale, Langemarck and Cambrai, in Isherwood, “The British Publishing Industry,” 338.

163. Ibid., 340.

164. Ibid., 339–40.

165. Ibid., 336.

166. Ibid., 332. See also Eksteins, “All Quiet on the Western Front and the Fate of a War.”

167. Isherwood, “The British Publishing Industry,” 332.

168. Watson, Fighting Different Wars, 202.

169. Eksteins, “All Quiet on the Western Front and the Fate of a War,” 353.

170. Ibid.

171. Eksteins, “War, Memory, and Politics.”

172. Ibid., 72.

173. Ibid.

174. Ibid., 75–7.

175. Zuckmayer, Als wär’s ein Stück von mir, 359–60.

176. Kropp, Endlich Klarheit über Remarque und sein Buch ‘Im Westen nichts Neues’.

177. Eksteins, “All Quiet on the Western Front and the Fate of a War,” 348.

178. Ibid., 349.

179. Ibid., citing an interview given to Die literarische Welt on June 14, 1929. The argument here counters Eksteins’s assertion that Remarque was guided most by the frustrations of the late 1920s.

180. Schneider, “The Truth about the War Finally,” 497.