View original postAfter all, there are probably thousands of middling poets who express regret and helplessness.
View original postAlso,
Infanterie Greift An by Erwin Rommel is a fantastic memoir that I reviewed here on the site a bit earlier.
Haven't read this or the Jünger you mention.
View original postI would assume
Der Weg Zurück would also count, or even
Drei Kameraden if you take a long view of the war. Of course, by that standard you could take Hesse's
Der Steppenwolf or Mann's
Der Zauberberg or Döblin's
Berlin Alexanderplatz or even Musil's
Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.
Didn't directly state it on my blog, but I have read the first two books you mention (and those certainly will be reviewed at some point). Good point about the others tying in to the war in some fashion or another.
Indeed. And the novel about the sergeant whose exact title I'm forgetting at the moment.
View original postOf course, I would expect that just opening the Fussell book will give you a long list of English-language sources (Fussell was terrible about German sources - could he even read German?). Hemingway's
A Farewell to Arms covers the Italian Front pretty well.
Agreed on both counts.
And so I shall in the near future.
View original postThere really aren't a lot of good Russian works on World War I, because the Revolution and Civil War that followed get so much more press. There are parts of some books written by authors who lived through the period which discusses the "war before the Revolution" somewhat, like Pasternak's
Доктор Живаго and Sholokhov's
Тихий Дон, and a few poets seem to have written some words about the war, like Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Alexander Blok and Sergey Esenin, but there is hardly any direct assessment made, and most works about the period are completely devoid of information about what happened before 1917.
I was afraid of that, although if I also go on to do a WWII side-project, I could include of the Eisenstein films that reference the Germans in interesting ways.
There's some listed in the comments on my blog. Also hoping for some Italian sources as well. Got a promising Romanian suggestion there also.