The Representation of War in German Literature: From 1800 to the Present by Elisabeth Krimmer (review)

In her study The Representation of War in German Literature, Elisabeth Krimmer takes on a topic that is truly part of Weltliteratur since its beginnings, a universal theme that has captivated writers’ and readers’ imaginations alike for at least two and a half millennia. Krimmer′s book does not offer a comprehensive history of the representation of war in German literature in the last two centuries. The time framework given in the subtitle indicates the period from which Krimmer chose six wars and eight authors in order to demonstrate that texts of war are more often than not plagued with what she calls a friction: a feature that uncovers the texts’ or authors’ complicity in the war’s rationale in spite of their critical or even pacifist impulse. The four forms of friction—metonymic slippage, the content of the form, the body in pain, and war and gender—are located and analyzed across the broad range of generically and historically diverse works with occasionally uneven persuasive power and results.

In the first two parts, which discuss the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and the First World War, respectively, the author makes her proposition to view the chosen texts through the lens of their frictional aporiae the most convincing and developed. The thoughtful, well-informed, and balanced interpretation of Schiller’s and Kleist’s dramas acknowledges the dramatists’ manifold criticisms of war while at the same time pointing out the problematic infusion of the sublime in the war experience (Schiller), or conflation of gender and war (Schiller, Kleist). Her reading of the two iconic First World War authors will provoke some readers, since it questions and to a certain extent reverses the commonly held perspectives on Ernst Jünger’s and Erich Maria Remarque’s stances toward the war, by revealing the tensions between content and form of their novels. In part 3, Krimmer turns to the literary representations of the Second World War in Heinrich Böll’s and Günter Grass’s narratives, which in her view, particularly in the case of Grass’s novels, offer successful examples of ways in which war literature can formally and thematically avoid and overcome the ever present danger of “friction.” The last part of the book looks at the literary responses to the wars in the former Yugoslavia and Iraq, which—even though there were numerous other, longer, and bloodier conflicts raging at the same time—indeed take a special place in the German and Austrian literary and public imagination. However, in comparison to the depth of analysis in the other three parts of the study, it is the least convincing section of the book. Krimmer’s unsubstantiated claim that in both wars “Islam is a crucial discursive determinant” (151), will raise many a reader’s eyebrows who is familiar with the history and the reception of the Yugoslav conflict in German-speaking countries. There are some factual mistakes too, such as confusing the Serbian Chetnik movement with the Yugoslav antifascist partisan resistance in the Second World War. The examination of Elfriede Jelinek’s plays, while rightly focusing on the Austrian playwright’s preoccupation with the media representation of warfare, seems to expand the notion of war to include various forms of social violence Jelinek dissects in her writings, thus leaving us to ponder if and how they still can be classified as “texts of war” (201).

Krimmer’s decision to choose “the most devastating and epoch-making wars” (11) is understandable considering the limited scope of her study: however, jettisoning more than one hundred years of political developments and a large portion of the literary production of the long nineteenth century creates on the one hand too deep a gap and on the other an implied continuity that are historically and theoretically not sufficiently justified. Another possible point of contention may be the leap of faith required of the reader in accepting Krimmer’s premise that...