By Pianki Roy
Come 28 July 2014, the world would be commemorating the passage of a century since the beginning of the First World War (1914-18) with Austria-Hungary attacking Serbia – an action which would lead to a global confrontation culminating in the annihilation of 18 million people. With remembrances of different aspects of the Great War, war-writings and letters would also be vigorously shuffled and much credit and prominence given to the ‘Allied’ countries (like England, the U.S.A., France, and Russia) for ‘protecting humanity from the imperialistic designs of the Triple Alliance-nations’. In fact, the approaching centenary of the Great War has already found so wide a coverage that Simon Jenkins of The Guardian, in his 30 January 2014-article, already apologised to Germans for the “sickening avalanche of the First World War Worship”. Importantly, in the present hullabaloo of memory rekindling, facts like that the Germans were as willing participants in the 1914-18 belligerences as their English or American counterparts, that the Triple Alliance achieved some spectacular victories in western Europe and central Asia despite having been hopelessly outnumbered, and that several powerful literary voices eulogised the German causes for and right of participating in the 1914-18 combat, are once again being overlooked. If Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Thomas, McCrae, Seeger, Blok, and Thikonov have once again found a wide readership, Ernst Stadler (1883-1914), Gerrit Engelke (1890-1918), Kurd Adler (1892-1916), or Franz Janowitz (1892-1917) remain as relegated to margins as ever.
A hundred years after the First World War and after sixty-six years of Indian independence, it is high time that Indians abandoned the straitjacketing concept of the term “war literature” being indicative of only the “First World War-soldiers’ poetry” written in English by principally English, American, and Canadian combatants. In fact, collections of Great War-German poetry like Adler’s Wiederkehr: Gedichte (1918), Wilhelm Runge’s Das Denken träumt (1918), August Stramm’s Tropfblut (1919), Anton Schnack’s Tier rang gewaltig mit Tier (1920),and Engelke’sRhythmus des neuen Europa (1921) are as influential and efficiently composed as, for example, Thomas’s Six Poems (1916), Sassoon’s The Old Huntsman (1917), Seeger’s Poems (1917), or Ilya Ehrenburg’s On the Eve. If Owen had been wise enough to see through the machinations of military leaders and spoke about international camaraderie in his “Strange Meeting”, Adler, in “Betrachten”, laments about the progressive dehumanisation of commissioned soldiers deeply sensitive of natural beauties: “Ganz lauernd stehen wir auf hohem Berg / und sehen Deutschland links und Frankreich rechts; / und überall ist großes, stilles Land / mit weichen Wäldern und verblinkten Dörfern. / Tief eingegraben sind wir wie die Tiere, / die Beute bergen. Der Geschütze / blauschwarze Mäuler glotzen stumpf und stier” (that is: ‘Full lurking, we are on a high mountain / And see Germany and France left right; / And everywhere is great, silent country / With soft woods and beautiful villages. / We are like animals digging deep/ For hiding the loot; the gun’/ Blue-black mouths gape dull and like bull’s’). In “Ein Tag” (‘One Day’), a posthumously-published 1919 war-poem, Janowitz, who was killed at Monte Rombon two years before, is sorrowful about the lack of progression of combatants: “Ein Tag ist, ein Tag ist gegangen, / sieht niemand nach ihm sich um? / Die Welt war neu und nah wie je, / wir bleiben alt und stumm” (in English: One day is, one day has gone, / Does anyone see around it? / The world was new and closer than ever, / We remain old and dumb’), which, philosophically, is as poignant as Sassoon’s portrayal of futility and miseries of soldiers’ lives in “The Rank Stench of those Bodies…” (‘It was time to go: / He grabbed his coat; stood up, gulping some bread; / Then clutched his head and fell. / I found him there / In the grey morning when the place was held. / His face was in the mud; one arm flung out / As when he crumpled up; his sturdy legs / Were bent beneath his trunk; heels to the sky’). One can easily find similarities between Owen’s description of gassed soldiers suffering in Allied hospitals and the picture of a German army-hospital in field-surgeon Wilhelm Klemm’s “Clearing Station” (‘Straw rustling everywhere. / Candle-stumps solemnly stare. / Across the nocturnal vault of the church, / Moans and muffled words go drifting. / There is a stench of blood, filth, rot, sweat. / Dressings ooze under torn uniforms. / Clammy, trembling hands and ruined faces. / Bodies rest propped upright but their dead heads loll’). In spite of these excellences, and even a hundred years past the Great War, German war poetry is still a field much uncultivated or critically acclaimed. In his Hitler’s War Poets (2008), Jay Baird finds that the Second World War German poets like Rudolf Binding (1867-1938), Josef Wehner (1891-1973), Hans Zöberlein (1895-1964), Edwin Dwinger (1898-1981), and Kurt Eggers (1905-43) are as sparsely read as are, for example, Adolf Petrenz (1873-1915), Alfred Lichtenstein (1889-1914), or Anton Schnack (1892-1973).
One of the principal reasons for the comparative unpopularity of the Great War German war-poetry is the reluctance of international translators to market them. With Germany losing the Second World War, German war literature was shoved even more to the sidelines. Despite the fact that William Shirer, in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), recalls the ‘wild enthusiasm’ and ‘delirious demonstrations’ of Germans leaving for the front in 1914, and notwithstanding the mellifluousness and poignancy of lyrical publications in Der Sturm, Die Aktion and Simplicissimus, German war poetry is virtually an unexplored area mostly to Indian students who are mostly habituated with reading selections from Owen, Thomas, and Sassoon at school or graduation-level classes.
About the Author: Writer is an assistant professor of English at Malda college, Malda. He is a postdoctoral researcher in German and English writings of the two World Wars.