Арнольд Цвейг: Outside Verdun

As the historian David Reynolds emphasises at the beginning of his recent book, The Long Shadow , [1] David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: the Great War and the twentieth century , London 2013. 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.

In the German context, the memory of the war remained a hotly contested issue. On the one hand, the nature of the war was radically de-heroicised by writers such as Remarque and Arnold Zweig. But around 1930 there was also a strong reaction from authors who were keen to have the war remembered as Germany’s supreme effort to assert itself as a nation, heroically and against great odds. [2] See David Midgley, Writing Weimar. Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918-1933 , Oxford 2000, chapter 6: ‘Remembering the War’. The favourite setting for these nationalist war novels was the Battle of Verdun, the attempt of the German High Command in 1916 to ‘bleed France white’ by attacking the French line at its strongest point. It was a strategy that notoriously misfired, producing almost as many German casualties as French and a total casualty list probably in excess of 600,000. Arnold Zweig’s Outside Verdun , first published in 1935, is a reckoning with both the human cost of that campaign and the subsequent mythologisation of it by the nationalists.

Arnold Zweig was born in 1887 and grew up in Silesia, a province of the German Reich with a strong literary tradition of its own. His Jewish descent and his lower middle-class background (his father traded in grain and leather goods) were no obstacle to his receiving a very good education – although Prussian legislation in 1896 that required the army to buy its supplies direct from the producer effectively drove his father’s business into bankruptcy. Zweig’s literary interests were well nurtured during his schooldays in the industrial town of Kattowitz (now Katowice, Poland), and between 1907 and 1914 he was able to study German literature, philosophy, psychology and the history of art at a variety of universities that included Munich, Berlin and Göttingen. Already before 1914 he had established his reputation as an author of narrative fiction characterised by psychological sensibility and a refined sense of style. He had also engaged powerfully with a notorious instance of central European anti-Semitism, the persecution of a Jewish community for alleged ritual murder in Hungary in 1882, and his drama on that subject ( Ritualmord in Ungarn ) was awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize in 1915. In April 1915, however, Zweig was conscripted into the German equivalent of the Army Service Corps, as a common soldier not bearing arms on account of his poor eyesight. He served in this capacity in Belgium, Serbia and in the vicinity of Verdun until the summer of 1917, when he was transferred to the Press Division of the Army High Command on the eastern front, in Lithuania. Here is the biographical background to the story of the trainee lawyer Werner Bertin as Zweig tells it in Outside Verdun .

Wartime experiences, a daily routine under military discipline shared with other common soldiers, undoubtedly sharpened Zweig’s awareness of the oppressive potential of Wilhelmine society. He emerged from the war as a radical pacifist, a fervent socialist and a committed Zionist. For several years he concentrated his efforts on political essays and the robust confrontation of anti-Semitism, which had become acutely politicised in Germany in the course of the First World War. His investigations of the social and psychological roots of anti-Semitism, which drew strongly on the insights of Freud, were published in 1927 as a book with the title Caliban (he saw the figure of the savage in Shakespeare’s Tempest as an epitome of the antipathy that one human group may develop for another). When he returned to literary writing in the mid-1920s his style, too, had become more robust. From now on his narrative idiom is often close to that of the serving soldier: stark, down-to-earth, and characterised by the low irony of the undeluded, whose main hope in life has been reduced to mere physical survival. And the driving force apparent in his major novels is a passionate commitment to the exposure of injustice and inhumanity.

The vivid and powerful nature of his writing meant that Zweig was among the very first German war novelists to attract attention in English translation towards the end of the 1920s. Already before the publication of All Quiet on the Western Front , Zweig had earned widespread critical respect with The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1927), a work that distinguishes itself from the generality of war novels because, in the entirety of its conception, it adopts perspectives that are independent of the exigencies of military action. Sergeant Grischa is a Russian prisoner of war who escapes captivity in the spring of 1917 and tries to make his way home. Arrested while carrying false papers, he is condemned as a spy and eventually shot, despite the best efforts of those who have helped to establish his innocence. Around this scenario Zweig builds a penetrating exposé of the mentalities and the material interests that determine human actions at this late stage of the war. The figures he depicts range from the soldier on guard duty who knows that only the punctilious execution of orders will prevent him from being sent to a murderous section of the front, to the general and the industrialist whose strategic calculations set the goals to which individual lives are subordinated. Grischa dies because, in the political circumstances of 1917, any situation that might nurture thoughts of insubordination among the German troops must be promptly eliminated from those calculations.

In Outside Verdun , too, what is at issue is not so much the carnage – the arbitrary nature of which is made plain enough – but the impact of the war on fundamental understandings of morality and humanity. Werner Bertin, as we encounter him in the first chapter, is someone who acts on humane instinct, offering water to a column of captured Frenchmen as they are led away from the battlefront, an act that makes him a target for recrimination and victimisation, someone of whom his superiors can make an ‘example’. His exposure to more glaring iniquities begins when he is befriended by a young NCO, Christoph Kroysing, who has discovered corrupt practices at work within his company, but who conveniently falls victim to enemy artillery fire before he can effectively testify about them. These experiences set in train a gradual learning process that will transform Bertin’s life, his apprehension of what the war is about, and his sense of who he is. And as he learns to adjust his expectations to the circumstances in which army life has placed him, he comes under competing influences. On the one hand the class-conscious workers in his company, Wilhelm Pahl and Karl Lebehde, who already know what they can expect from Prussian military discipline, would like to harness his intelligence to their cause. On the other hand the brother of the dead NCO, Lieutenant Eberhard Kroysing, is a born warrior who would like to help him escape from the ranks of the oppressed by joining the officer class.