Outside Verdun

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As the historian David Reynolds emphasises at the beginning of his recent book, The Long Shadow,[1] it is chiefly through literature that we remember the First World War. That has a number of implications. The publication of literary depictions of the war has depended to a large degree on the readiness of the general public to read and think about the subject, and it is a remarkable fact that the best-known literary memoirs of the First World War in English, for example – those by Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon – only appeared some ten years after the war had ended. In the German-speaking world, following the defeat of 1918, inhibitions against literary accounts of wartime experiences seem to have been so strong in the 1920s that when the Ullstein publishing house launched Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front in 1928, its marketing strategy was built around the notion that some kind of taboo was being broken. The newspaper serialisation began precisely on the tenth anniversary of the armistice, and Remarque’s novel was presented as the work that finally told the truth about the war, the truth that had hitherto been denied to the reading public.

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