Disquiet on the Home Front

From Trakl's battle-poem “Grodek” (1914) to Kraus's gargantuan drama Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind, 1919–22), some of the finest works in the Austrian canon were inspired by the trauma of the Great War. For many readers today, however, war fiction in German usually begins and ends with two novels belonging to the Weimar tradition rather than the Austrian tradition – Arnold Zweig's Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa (The Argument over Sergeant Grischa, 1927) and E. M. Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929). Since both novels appeared some while after the war's end, their authors were at pains to declare them authentic records stemming directly from lived experience of the conflict itself. The two works presented here to illustrate war writing by front-line soldiers in the Austro-Hungarian army required no such retrospective justification.

Unlike Zweig and Remarque, Andreas Latzko and Ernst Weiss felt no need for their experiences to be distilled by the passage of time. Latzko's Menschen im Krieg (Men in War, 1917) appeared while the battles still raged; Weiss's Franta Zlin came out shortly after the ceasefire in 1919. The first created a now-forgotten literary sensation across Europe, but has long been out of print. The other was recently included by Marcel Reich-Ranicki in Robert Musil bis Franz Werfel, the seventh volume of his extended collection provocatively entitled Der Kanon: Die deutsche Literatur (the editor's notion of what constitutes a “German” author may not be shared by all commentators).