Remarque, Erich Maria (1898–1970)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene Gammel
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Advertising Campaign ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Wide Readership ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Quiet Day

Born Erich Paul Remark in Osnabrück, Germany, Erich Maria Remarque is best known for his influential anti-war novel Im Westen nichts Neues (1929, All Quiet on the Western Front). First serialized in the Vossische Zeitung in 1928, All Quiet was launched with an unprecedented advertising campaign. Hailed as ‘the great war novel’, the book spawned a world-wide readership with translations into over twenty-five languages, and a film (directed by Lewis Milestone) in 1930. Written within just a few months in 1927, All Quiet on the Western Front toys with autobiographical references. The protagonist Paul Bäumer is a nineteen-year old war veteran whose seemingly non-consequential death in October 1918, on a ‘quiet’ day on the Western front, stands for the shared fate of millions of soldiers obscured by the unprecedented violence and horror of World War I. Remarque changed his name after the war, dropping his middle name Paul, and adopting his mother’s name, Maria, while also Gallicizing the spelling of his last name, thereby blurring national boundaries.

Stimmungen, Spannungen, Visionen

2019 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 339-371
Author(s):  
Max Graff
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Literary Magazines ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Military Surgeon ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Poetic Visions

Wilhelm Klemm, Expressionist poet and military surgeon on the Western front during World War I, published approximately 60 war poems, both in his collection Gloria! (1915) and in several literary magazines such as Franz Pfemfert’s Aktion. Some of them were soon hailed as eminently critical of common, glorifying poetic visions of war. This is certainly adequate; a closer scrutiny of the entire corpus of Klemm’s war poems, however, reveals a peculiar diversity which requires an awareness for their ambivalences. The article therefore considers three fields of inquiry: the poems’ depiction of the human body, their relation to lyrical paradigms focussed on nature and Stimmung, and ways of transcending both these paradigms and naturalistic representations of war and its effects. It thus identifies Klemm’s different modes of perceiving, interpreting and processing the experience of the Great War.

Touring behind the lines: British soldiers in French towns and cities during the Great War

Urban History ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
KRISTA COWMAN
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Foreign Country ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Civilian Life ◽  
Western Front ◽  
The Great War

ABSTRACT:This article explores the importance that accessing urban life assumed for British soldiers stationed in France during World War I. Many who fought on the Western Front had never visited a foreign country before sailing to France. Drawing on contemporary letters and diaries and later memoirs, it considers how men responded to the new experiences they found in French towns and cities behind the lines. Through exploring activities from shopping and dining to cinema and prostitution, it argues that urban outings became critical to sustaining morale by offering opportunities to engage with civilian life on a reasonably regular basis.

The Great War of the Postcards

2021 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-568
Author(s):  
Johann Strauss
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Book Illustrations ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Great War

This article examines the functions and the significance of picture postcards during World War I, with particular reference to the war in the Ottoman Lands and the Balkans, or involving the Turkish Army in Galicia. After the principal types of Kriegspostkarten – sentimental, humorous, propaganda, and artistic postcards (Künstlerpostkarten) – have been presented, the different theatres of war (Balkans, Galicia, Middle East) and their characteristic features as they are reflected on postcards are dealt with. The piece also includes aspects such as the influence of Orientalism, the problem of fake views, and the significance and the impact of photographic postcards, portraits, and photo cards. The role of postcards in book illustrations is demonstrated using a typical example (F. C. Endres, Die Türkei (1916)). The specific features of a collection of postcards left by a German soldier who served in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq during World War I will be presented at the end of this article.

scholarly journals The Politics of Russian Memory: The Great War in the European Context

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-235
Author(s):  
Olga S. Porshneva
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Central Committee ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Red Army ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The Great War

This article examines how the historical memory of World War I emerged and developed in Russia, and also compares it to how Europeans have thought about the conflict. The author argues that the politics of memory differed during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. In the wake of the 1917 Revolution, Bolshevik efforts to re-format the memory of the Great War were part of its attempt to create a new society and new man. At the same time, the regime used it to mobilize society for the impending conflict with the 'imperialist' powers. The key actors that sought to inculcate the notion of the war with imperialism into Soviet mass consciousness were the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Communist Party, the Department of Agitation and Propaganda, and, in particular, the Red Army and Comintern. The latter two worked together to organize the major campaigns dedicated to war anniversaries, which were important both to reinforce the concept of imperialist war as well as to involve the masses in public commemorations, rituals and practices. The Soviet state also relied on organizations of war veterans to promote such commemorative practices while suppressing any alternative narratives. The article goes on to explain how, under Stalin, the government began to change the way it portrayed the Great War in the mid-1930s. And after the Second World War, Soviet politics of memory differed greatly from those in the West. In the USSR the Great Patriotic War was sacralized, while the earlier conflict remained a symbol of unjust imperialist wars.

From the Great War to White Christmas

2019 ◽  
pp. 97-114
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Magee
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Great War

Irving Berlin’s all-soldier World War I revue, Yip Yip Yaphank, made a unique impact on Broadway in 1918 and in Berlin’s work for decades to come. The show forged a compelling and comic connection between theatrical conventions and military protocols, using elements from minstrelsy, the Ziegfeld Follies, and Berlin’s distinctive songs. Featuring such Berlin standards as “Sterling Silver Moon” (later revised as “Mandy”) and “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” it was revised for World War II as This Is the Army, and scenes from it reappear, transformed, in Berlin’s films Alexander’s Ragtime Band and White Christmas.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 206-214
Author(s):  
Michael Geheran
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
German Identity ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Great War

The book closes with a short glimpse into the history of Jewish veterans after 1945, as the survivors of the camps returned to Germany, outlining ruptures and continuities in comparison with the pre-Nazi period. Jewish veterans imposed different narratives on their experiences under National Socialism. As the past receded into the distance, it became a concern for the survivors to engage with the past, which they variously looked back on with nostalgia, disillusionment, or bitter anger. Although National Socialism threatened to erase everything that Jewish veterans of World War I had achieved and sacrificed, sought to destroy the identity they had constructed as soldiers in the service of the nation, as well as bonds with gentile Germans that had been forged under fire during the war, threatened to sever their connections to the status they had earned as soldiers of the Great War and defenders of the fatherland, their minds, their values and their character remained intact. Jewish veterans preserved their sense of German identity.

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), man of dissent

2009 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 365-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivor Grattan-Guinness
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Nuclear Disarmament ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Private Citizen ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Great War

Russell argued against the Great War, but he also wanted to drop atomic bombs on the Soviet Union after World War II, and later he advocated nuclear disarmament. How could a great logician accommodate such inconsistencies? How, as a private citizen, did he make such a world-wide impact in his late years?

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