Schlump
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
An NYRB Classics Original
Seventeen-year-old Schlump marches off to war in 1915 because going to war is the best way to meet girls. And so he does, on his first posting, overseeing three villages in occupied France. But then Schlump is sent to the front, and the good times end.
Schlump, written by Hans Herbert Grimm, was published anonymously in 1928 and was one of the first German novels to describe World War I in all its horror and absurdity, and it remains one of the best. What really sets it apart is its remarkable central character. Who is Schlump? A bit of a rascal and a bit of a sweetheart, a victim of his times, an inveterate survivor, maybe even a new type of man. At once comedy, documentary, hellhole, and fairy tale, Schlump is a gripping and disturbing book about the experience of trauma and what the great critic Walter Benjamin, writing at the same time as Hans Herbert Grimm, would call the death of experience, since perhaps if anything goes, nothing counts.
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.
