Outside Verdun

OUTSIDE VERDUN: Introduction

As the historian David Reynolds emphasises at the beginning of his recent book, The Long Shadow,[1] it is chiefly through literature that we remember the First World War. That has a number of implications. The publication of literary depictions of the war has depended to a large degree on the readiness of the general public to read and think about the subject, and it is a remarkable fact that the best-known literary memoirs of the First World War in English, for example – those by Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon – only appeared some ten years after the war had ended. In the German-speaking world, following the defeat of 1918, inhibitions against literary accounts of wartime experiences seem to have been so strong in the 1920s that when the Ullstein publishing house launched Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front in 1928, its marketing strategy was built around the notion that some kind of taboo was being broken. The newspaper serialisation began precisely on the tenth anniversary of the armistice, and Remarque’s novel was presented as the work that finally told the truth about the war, the truth that had hitherto been denied to the reading public.

In the German context, the memory of the war remained a hotly contested issue. On the one hand, the nature of the war was radically de-heroicised by writers such as Remarque and Arnold Zweig. But around 1930 there was also a strong reaction from authors who were keen to have the war remembered as Germany’s supreme effort to assert itself as a nation, heroically and against great odds.[2] The favourite setting for these nationalist war novels was the Battle of Verdun, the attempt of the German High Command in 1916 to ‘bleed France white’ by attacking the French line at its strongest point. It was a strategy that notoriously misfired, producing almost as many German casualties as French and a total casualty list probably in excess of 600,000. Arnold Zweig’s Outside Verdun, first published in 1935, is a reckoning with both the human cost of that campaign and the subsequent mythologisation of it by the nationalists.

Arnold Zweig was born in 1887 and grew up in Silesia, a province of the German Reich with a strong literary tradition of its own. His Jewish descent and his lower middle-class background (his father traded in grain and leather goods) were no obstacle to his receiving a very good education – although Prussian legislation in 1896 that required the army to buy its supplies direct from the producer effectively drove his father’s business into bankruptcy. Zweig’s literary interests were well nurtured during his schooldays in the industrial town of Kattowitz (now Katowice, Poland), and between 1907 and 1914 he was able to study German literature, philosophy, psychology and the history of art at a variety of universities that included Munich, Berlin and Göttingen. Already before 1914 he had established his reputation as an author of narrative fiction characterised by psychological sensibility and a refined sense of style. He had also engaged powerfully with a notorious instance of central European anti-Semitism, the persecution of a Jewish community for alleged ritual murder in Hungary in 1882, and his drama on that subject (Ritualmord in Ungarn) was awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize in 1915. In April 1915, however, Zweig was conscripted into the German equivalent of the Army Service Corps, as a common soldier not bearing arms on account of his poor eyesight. He served in this capacity in Belgium, Serbia and in the vicinity of Verdun until the summer of 1917, when he was transferred to the Press Division of the Army High Command on the eastern front, in Lithuania. Here is the biographical background to the story of the trainee lawyer Werner Bertin as Zweig tells it in Outside Verdun.

Wartime experiences, a daily routine under military discipline shared with other common soldiers, undoubtedly sharpened Zweig’s awareness of the oppressive potential of Wilhelmine society. He emerged from the war as a radical pacifist, a fervent socialist and a committed Zionist. For several years he concentrated his efforts on political essays and the robust confrontation of anti-Semitism, which had become acutely politicised in Germany in the course of the First World War. His investigations of the social and psychological roots of anti-Semitism, which drew strongly on the insights of Freud, were published in 1927 as a book with the title Caliban (he saw the figure of the savage in Shakespeare’s Tempest as an epitome of the antipathy that one human group may develop for another). When he returned to literary writing in the mid-1920s his style, too, had become more robust. From now on his narrative idiom is often close to that of the serving soldier: stark, down-to-earth, and characterised by the low irony of the undeluded, whose main hope in life has been reduced to mere physical survival. And the driving force apparent in his major novels is a passionate commitment to the exposure of injustice and inhumanity.

The vivid and powerful nature of his writing meant that Zweig was among the very first German war novelists to attract attention in English translation towards the end of the 1920s. Already before the publication of All Quiet on the Western Front, Zweig had earned widespread critical respect with The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1927), a work that distinguishes itself from the generality of war novels because, in the entirety of its conception, it adopts perspectives that are independent of the exigencies of military action. Sergeant Grischa is a Russian prisoner of war who escapes captivity in the spring of 1917 and tries to make his way home. Arrested while carrying false papers, he is condemned as a spy and eventually shot, despite the best efforts of those who have helped to establish his innocence. Around this scenario Zweig builds a penetrating exposé of the mentalities and the material interests that determine human actions at this late stage of the war. The figures he depicts range from the soldier on guard duty who knows that only the punctilious execution of orders will prevent him from being sent to a murderous section of the front, to the general and the industrialist whose strategic calculations set the goals to which individual lives are subordinated. Grischa dies because, in the political circumstances of 1917, any situation that might nurture thoughts of insubordination among the German troops must be promptly eliminated from those calculations.

In Outside Verdun, too, what is at issue is not so much the carnage – the arbitrary nature of which is made plain enough – but the impact of the war on fundamental understandings of morality and humanity. Werner Bertin, as we encounter him in the first chapter, is someone who acts on humane instinct, offering water to a column of captured Frenchmen as they are led away from the battlefront, an act that makes him a target for recrimination and victimisation, someone of whom his superiors can make an ‘example’. His exposure to more glaring iniquities begins when he is befriended by a young NCO, Christoph Kroysing, who has discovered corrupt practices at work within his company, but who conveniently falls victim to enemy artillery fire before he can effectively testify about them. These experiences set in train a gradual learning process that will transform Bertin’s life, his apprehension of what the war is about, and his sense of who he is. And as he learns to adjust his expectations to the circumstances in which army life has placed him, he comes under competing influences. On the one hand the class-conscious workers in his company, Wilhelm Pahl and Karl Lebehde, who already know what they can expect from Prussian military discipline, would like to harness his intelligence to their cause. On the other hand the brother of the dead NCO, Lieutenant Eberhard Kroysing, is a born warrior who would like to help him escape from the ranks of the oppressed by joining the officer class.

When Outside Verdun was first published in 1935, Arnold Zweig was living in Palestine. As a Jew and a prominent socialist writer, he had been forced to flee Germany when Hitler came to power. In the novel he can be seen to take account of various factors that had arguably contributed to the installation of the Nazi regime. When we find Bertin’s company commander, Captain Niggl, for example, imagining that the source of his misfortunes is a conspiracy of Jews and freemasons, then we are being given a pretty clear reminder of the scapegoating impulse that lay at the roots of Nazi ideology. And in his accounts of battlefield experiences Zweig systematically undermines the myths that had grown up in post-war publications and in public memory around the Battle of Verdun in particular and around the notion that the German army had been undefeated in the field. But true to the spirit of his psychological investigation of anti-Semitism in Caliban, Zweig does not caricature the human types that he recognises as posing a threat to civilised standards of behaviour. Instead he tries to understand their personality and motivation. In Eberhard Kroysing and his loyal and resourceful corporal Süßmann, he depicts two figures who have, to all appearances, successfully adapted to the physical conditions of the war of attrition, and it is the precise ways in which they have adjusted their attitudes and expectations to the conditions of the battlefield that contributes most to the process of disillusionment undergone by the idealistic intellectual Werner Bertin.

The town of Verdun on the Meuse was protected by an elaborate system of outlying fortresses. When the Germans advanced from the north in the closing days of February 1916, one of these forts, the Douaumont, fell into their hands. It had been left lightly defended because the French command was not confident in its ability to withstand the most powerful German artillery fire, and the tiny group of German sappers who found their way inside it had advanced more rapidly than either side had expected and took the defenders completely by surprise. The German success, then, was a piece of sheer good luck, as Süßmann explains to Bertin in Zweig’s novel, but it was publicly celebrated as a grandiose military exploit nevertheless. Moreover, the legend of the Douaumont grew over time because it became a major forward operational base for the Germans in their turn and therefore came under repeated heavy bombardment over a period of months until the French succeeded in recapturing it in October 1916. Aerial photographs of the time show it to have been progressively reduced to a flattened ruin.

This is the terrain to which Kroysing and Süßmann have adapted their lives and their outlook. They can laugh at the heroic legends put about by the Supreme Command, as they do at the naive insistence of Bertin – a Parsifal in squaddy’s boots, as Kroysing calls him – on inalienable principles of justice. The experiences of battle have stripped Kroysing of any illusion that official bulletins will be anything other than a tissue of lies, and he does not hesitate to have an entire company of service corps transferred to the Douaumont, to his patch, in order to take revenge on those he holds responsible for his brother’s death. Outside Verdun we are truly ‘on the fringes of humanity’, as Zweig puts it in his title for Book 4.

Just as in The Case of Sergeant Grischa, where Zweig had explored the social dimensions of a modern nation at war, here too he presents the socially conditioned mentalities that have been imported into wartime situations from civilian life in Wilhelmine Germany. It is above all the nature of industrialised warfare that he progressively exposes through the experiences of his protagonist, a form of war that is dependent on the continual supply of goods and armaments to railheads near the front, on an extensive labour force that attends to the physical and practical needs of the military forces, and on a substantial bureaucracy that organises and oversees the distribution of material and labour. The petty officiousness to which Bertin finds himself subjected thrives most readily among the military bureaucrats, epitomised in the figure of the retired civil servant Captain Niggl and the battalion commander Major Jansch, by profession a journal editor and nationalist ideologue. For Niggl, and for others who are numbered among Bertin’s oppressors, the war has brought enhanced status, as well as enhanced pay, and the opportunity to lord it over others, without apparent restraint.

The system of oppression to which Bertin finds himself exposed makes those moments when he can escape from it all the more enticing. His naïve belief that, despite all indications to the contrary, his army service must be helping to support a just cause is supplemented by a boyish spirit of adventure, which comes to the fore when he is allowed to roam in the landscape behind the front and to visit Kroysing and Süßmann in their quarters. What ultimately strips away his illusions is not the conversations that he has with them about the vicissitudes of military fortune, but the first-hand encounter with the reality of the battlefront that they also enable him to experience. Bertin is allowed to accompany Kroysing’s sappers when they move up to the front line and to witness the conditions in the forward trenches for himself, and Zweig’s description of his responses is worth quoting here verbatim. Peeping over the breastwork as the artillery barrage builds, Bertin experiences a moment of elation at the destructive potential unleashed around him. But when he ducks into the dugout where the crack troops are resting, he also makes a discovery that thoroughly undermines the heroic expectations he has brought with him thus far. It is the discovery that being on duty here is much the same as being on duty in his own company of military labourers:

The rest is attrition. The Douaumont is vacated under French pressure, Kroysing vanishes temporarily in the fog of war while vainly attempting to rally troops for a counteroffensive, and in the aftermath of that episode Bertin is confronted with a series of unnerving horrors: a blinded man mechanically addressing an imaginary doctor, a devastated field battery, and the corpse of a schoolfriend. In the course of his duties he is at the mercy of the institutionalised malice of his superiors and is assigned to the dangerous and fatiguing task of searching for unexploded shells. Progressively the novel registers the arbitrary destruction of the people Bertin has come to know. Both Pahl, the character most closely associated with the possibility of resistance against the war, and Kroysing, a defiant warrior and a fervent nationalist to the last, are killed in an air raid on the hospital where they are recovering from wounds. Süßmann, meanwhile, has died a particularly pointless death as a result of an accident during weapons training, and his last message makes clear the dichotomy between fond illusion and disillusionment that remains difficult for Bertin to resolve to the very end of the novel. Tell my parents it was worth it, Süßmann says, and tell Kroysing it wasn’t.

There are other novels in which Zweig explores the social and political dimensions of the First World War. He shows us the life of the home front in the early months in Young Woman of 1914 (1932), focusing on the situation of the fiancée that Bertin left behind with an unwanted pregnancy, and the political machinations in occupied Eastern Europe in The Crowning of a King (1937). Indeed, he continued to add volumes to the cycle he called ‘The Great War of the White Men’ after the Second World War in East Berlin, where he settled in 1948 and where he died in 1968. But it is in Outside Verdun above all that he brings his reader face to face with experiences that challenge and undermine any attempt to glorify the war. It contains his most penetrating depictions of the effects of protracted warfare on the personalities and the outlook of the people directly involved, and it allows the reader to accompany the naïve young protagonist Bertin on his journey to deeper self-knowledge as well as to an awareness of the conflicting aspects of human nature that the war has brought into the open.

Not that Outside Verdun brings the reader to anything as neat as a firm conclusion. On the closing pages, Bertin is shown to be still wrestling with the conflicts he has witnessed and with the question of how he should position himself in relation to them. The date of the final scene, in which he and his wife have come to visit Kroysing’s grieving parents, is June 29th, 1919, the day after the Versailles Treaty had been signed – with all the associations of subjugation that that event carried in the eyes of the German population, and thus also the associations of betrayal on the part of the politicians who accepted its terms. For his readers in 1935, Zweig did not need to spell out the poignancy of that moment. But here, too, his novel distinguishes itself from the common expectations we might have of a war novel. By contrast with Remarque, who tells us how the life of his protagonist was snuffed out on a day when it was reported that ‘all was quiet’ on the western front, Zweig takes leave of Bertin in a post-war world in which he, and all of German society with him, will be facing difficult choices.