Schlump
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- 15,99 €
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- 15,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
"Anti-nationaliste, anti-héroïque, humaniste [...]. Un livre lumineux écrit à une époque sombre."Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Schlump n'a pas dix-sept ans lorsque la Première Guerre mondiale éclate. Malgré son jeune âge, il se porte volontaire. Envoyé en France dans une petite commune occupée par les Allemands, il est chargé d'administrer la vie de plusieurs villages.
Mais la guerre n'a pas seulement besoin de bureaucrates. Schlump doit rejoindre le front. Crasse, maladie, désespoir, déluge de feu... Le jeune soldat découvre l'enfer des tranchées, l'hôpital, puis les séjours plus paisibles dans les campagnes françaises. Il y croise des filles en mal d'amour, des planqués, des profiteurs, mais aussi des compagnons de misère qui tentent de survivre alors que l'armistice tarde à venir.
Paru en 1928, peu de temps avantA l'Ouest rien de nouveaud'Erich Maria Remarque,Schlumpa été d'emblée considéré comme un ouvrage pacifiste, d'une immense valeur littéraire et humaine. Brûlé par les nazis dès 1933, puis tombé dans l'oubli, sa redécouverte est aujourd'hui fondamentale.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The boisterous and often brutal story of a young German's military service during World War I, Grimm's long-lost novel is a clear-eyed account of life during wartime. The unfortunately nicknamed Schlump joins the army on his 17th birthday in 1915, thinking of "nothing but girls and the war." His ardor continues with his cushy first assignment: he's "responsible for the administration of three villages" in German-occupied France. Schlump becomes the object of the village girls' affections and performs his task well, until he is reassigned to the front. In the trenches, Schlump is wounded twice, he sees fellow soldiers butchered by artillery and by one another, and even his dreams are haunted by "bullets, lightning flashes, roaring thunder... soldiers washed into the mud like fallen leaves." Wherever he's sent, Schlump finds comfort in the arms of willing women and hears other soldiers' tales of war brides, infidelity, madness, and violence. One soldier may have murdered his beloved; a lieutenant saw many of his men killed by friendly fire, the survivors forced to flee a burning hospital. Grimm's is a bloody picaresque with a fairy tale hero at its center; even as Germany is defeated and its armies retreat, Schlump "saw the world and the future in a thousand marvellous colours... surely there would be peace again now... What a golden era was beginning now!" Present-day readers will be touched and saddened by his enthusiasm.
