Up to 50,000 poems were written daily in Germany as well as in Britain during the first month of the War. [E1] But it is, unfortunately, difficult to find German memoirs of the First World War that come anywhere near the relative objectivity of British memoirs. [E1]
The term war poet [E1] [I1] [F1] came into currency during and after World War I and it is usually connected to English Poetry. There was probably as much poetry of quality written on the German side of the Western Front[E1]; but it was in English poetry that the war poem became an established genre marker and attracted growing popular interest.
Martin Travers, in his book on German novels of the First World War, points out that the political atmosphere in Weimar Germany effectively prevented any truly objective memoirs from receiving wide readership[E1]. Every war memoir or novel printed between the wars in Germany automatically became political in nature because of the highly charged atmosphere of debate that surrounded interpretations of the war in this period.
Among the fiction production we remember “All Quiet on the Western Front ” [E1] [I1] [F1][S1], ‘a political work by Erich Maria Remarque, that was intended as a rebuttal of the "nationalist myth" of war represented by others authors’. The author himself said that he belonged to a generation “von Krieg zerstoert wurde - auch wenn sie seinem Granaten entkam” ( a generation destroyed by war, even when surviving bombshells). [I1][F1] [S1]
E. G. Lengel says: “Any study of the First World War should include an examination of a wide variety of war memoirs, including some of those less well known. Anyone who reads these memoirs and is able to keep in mind that they do not always provide objective accounts of the war can learn a great deal about why World War One was such a shattering experience for all Europeans, both soldiers and civilians.
Memoirs show that soldiers expressed a wide variety of views about the war, and most of them did not express Remarque's pessimism. Although none of the survivors were ever again the same as they had been in 1914, every soldier had changed in a different way. Some who survived the war became dedicated to pacifism. Others looked forward to the next war. Most, however, never entirely made up their minds.”
We are going to analyze some German Poets as Ernst Toller [E1][E2][F1][F2], August Stram[E1][E2][I1][I2]. Of Bertold Brecht [E1] [E2] [I1] [F1] [F2] and Georg Trakl [E1] [E2] [I1] [I2] [F1] [F2] [S1] we will read a text.
