Round-up – First World War Classics
Ten World War classics not in the English language
Following Remembrance Sunday and Monday’s recommendation of Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, I have rounded up a selection of First World War classics.
I have restricted myself to classics that were not originally written in the English language.
This means, of course, that the list below doesn’t feature some of the more familiar WWI titles, such as Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford, Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden, Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway and Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain.
Le Feu (Under Fire) by Henri Barbusse (1916)
Under Fire follows the fortunes of a French battalion during the First World War. For this group of ordinary men, thrown together from all over France and longing for home, war is simply a matter of survival, and the arrival of their rations, a glimpse of a pretty girl or a brief reprieve in hospital is all they can hope for. Based on Henri Barbusse’s experience of the trenches, Under Fire is the most famous French novel of the First World War, starkly evoking the mud, stench and monotony of an eternal battlefield.
UK: Penguin Modern Classics | 352 pages | translated by Robin Buss (pictured)
US: Penguin Classics | 318 pages | translated by Robin Buss | introduced by Jay Winter
In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel) by Ernst Jünger (1920)
A memoir of astonishing power, savagery and ashen lyricism, Storm of Steel depicts Ernst Jünger’s experience of combat on the front line – leading raiding parties, defending trenches against murderous British incursions, and simply enduring as shells tore his comrades apart. One of the greatest books to emerge from the catastrophe of the First World War, it illuminates like no other book not only the horrors but also the fascination of a war that made men keep fighting for four long years.
UK: Penguin Modern Classics | 320 pages | translated by Michael Hofmann (pictured)
US: Penguin Classics | 320 pages | translated by Michael Hofmann
Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars (1926)
At once truly appalling and appallingly funny, Moravagine bears comparison with Naked Lunch – except that it’s a lot more entertaining to read. Heir to an immense aristocratic fortune, mental and physical mutant Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify his every desire. Released from a hospital for the criminally insane by his starstruck psychiatrist (the narrator of the book), who foresees a companionship in crime that will also be an unprecedented scientific collaboration, Moravagine travels from Moscow to San Antonio to deepest Amazonia, engaged in schemes and scams as, among other things, terrorist, speculator, gold prospector, and pilot. He also enjoys a busy sideline in rape and murder. At last, the two friends return to Europe – just in time for World War I, when “the whole world was doing a Moravagine.”
UK / US: NYRB Classics | 256 pages | translated by Alan Brown | introduction by Paul La Farge (pictured)
Le Temps retrouvé (Finding Time Again) by Marcel Proust (1913-22, pub. 1927)
In Finding Time Again, the final volume of Proust’s monumental novel In Search of Lost Time, Marcel discovers his world destroyed by war and those he knew transformed by the march of time. An exquisite picture of France in the throes of the First World War, and containing, in the “Bal des têtes” sequence, one of Proust’s most devastating set pieces, Finding Time Again triumphantly describes the paradox of facing mortality yet overcoming it through the act of writing.
UK: Penguin Modern Classics | 400 pages | translated by Ian Patterson (pictured)
US: Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition | 432 pages | translated by Ian Patterson
Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa (The Case of Sergeant Grischa) by Arnold Zweig (1927)
Sergeant Grischa Paprotkin is a Russian soldier in the First World War who escapes from a German prison camp. When he adopts the identity of a dead soldier, however, he discovers that he has taken the name of a Russian deserter and he is arrested again as a spy. It is ‘the greatest novel on a war theme’, wrote J. B. Priestley, ‘. . . from any country’.
Not currently in print, but secondhand copies are available online.
Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) by Erich Maria Remarque (1929)
The most famous anti-war novel ever written. In 1914 a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the ‘glorious war’. With the fire and patriotism of youth they sign up. What follows is the moving story of a young ‘unknown soldier’ experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the trenches.
UK: Vintage Classics | 224 pages | translated by Brian Murdoch (pictured)
US: Ballantine Books | 304 pages | translated by A. H. Wheen
Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night) by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1932)
Told in the first person, the novel is based on the author’s own experiences during the First World War, in French colonial Africa, in the USA - where he worked for a while at the Ford factory in Detroit - and later as a young doctor in a working-class suburb in Paris. Celine’s disgust with human folly, malice, greed and the chaotic state in which man has left society lies behind the bitterness that distinguishes his idiosyncratic, colloquial and visionary writing and gives it its force.
UK: Alma Classics | 450 pages | translated by Ralph Manheim | introduced by John Banville
US: New Directions | 464 pages | translated by Ralph Manheim | afterword by William T. Vollmann (pictured)
Die Schlafwandler (The Sleepwalkers) by Hermann Broch (1932)
Broch’s panoramic, ‘polyhistorical’ trilogy spans the decades leading up to the First World War. The installments are set at fifteen-year intervals and written in distinct literary styles: nineteenth-century realism (The Romantic), early Expressionism (The Anarchist) and fragmented modernism (The Realist). The trilogy was admired by Albert Einstein, Thornton Wilder, T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender, who called it ‘one of the few really original and thoughtful novels of this century’. In the third volume, set in 1918, returning character Major von Pasenow is the commandant of Kur-Trier, a small town on the River Moselle, and August Esch runs the local newspaper. In the last months of the First World War, the deserter Wilhelm Huguenau is the ‘realist’, who arrives in the town and sets about ruthlessly exploiting its inhabitants.
US: Vintage International | 656 pages | translated by Willa & Edwin Muir (pictured)
Radetzkymarsch (The Radetzky March) by Joseph Roth (1932)
Set against the doomed splendour of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, The Radetzky March tells the story of the celebrated Trotta family, tracing their rise and fall over three generations. Theirs is a sweeping history of heroism and duty, desire and compromise, tragedy and heartbreak, a story that lasts until the darkening eve of World War One, when all is set to fall apart. Rich, epic and profoundly moving, The Radetzky March is Joseph Roth’s timeless masterpiece.
UK: Granta Books | 320 pages | translated by Michael Hofmann (pictured)
Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh (The Forty Days of Musa Dagh) by Franz Werfel (1933)
It is 1915 and Gabriel has returned to his childhood home, an Armenian village on the slopes of Musa Dagh. But things are becoming increasingly dangerous for his people in Turkey, and, as the government orders round-ups and deportations, the villagers of Musa Dagh decide to fight back. The seminal novel of the Armenian genocide, Franz Werfel’s bestselling 1933 epic brought the catastrophe to the world’s attention for the first time, and has become a talismanic story of resistance in the face of hatred.
UK: Penguin Modern Classics | 912 pages | translated by Geoffrey Dunlop and James Reidel (pictured)
Would you recommend any other non-English-language First World War classics? Please let me know in a comment below.
The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.
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Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity!
It's a vast topic and there are some good reminders and discoveries here. I might add Solzhenitsyn's "August 1914", though the Russian/Soviet experience of the war is a whole other topic...