Princes of the Trenches

the long version

The brief span of the Weimar Republic saw the publication of German First World War narratives. Veterans of the war, including Junger, Remarque, Beumelburg, Koppen, Schauwecker, Hein, and others, transmuted personal narrative into a national myth of the German war experience. Although a few works mirror the pervasive Anglo-American vision of meaningless loss and suffering, the dominant German myth glorifies spiritual survival and national regeneration through the community of comradeship. Princes of the Trenches is the first comprehensive assessment of the German war narrative to appear in English in over fifty years. Where earlier critics have interpreted the narratives on a simplistic pro- or anti-war continuum, Linder sees them as the product of early twentieth-century German culture and emphasizes their place within that culture and within the context of the Western European response to the war. Like Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory in English literature, this study provides an unprecedented look into the experience of the Great War from the German perspective, and sets the creation and exploitation of the war myth against the rich and troubled backgrounds of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. The book provides non-specialists easy access to a little-known and generally overlooked literature of great historical importance.