Showing What Cannot Be Said

In the second part of a two-part series of articles, Santianez examines Edlef Koppen's Heerebericht (Army Communique), a novel which did not enjoy the enormous public success that welcomed Le Feu (Under Fire) and other war novels of the period. By the time the Nazis banned it in 1933, the novel had sold no more than ten thousand copies. The reasons for the discrepancy between the critics' high praise and the public's lack of enthusiasm partly have to do with the readers' horizon of expectations with respect to the literature on the Great War. At the time of the publication of Heeresbericht there was in Germany a revival of nationalistic pro-war narratives, while all across Europe readers and authors alike favored personal "authenticity" and historical "veracity" in war accounts. Such preferences were reflected in the hegemony of realist narratives and autobiographies (as a genre, but also as a narrative device in fiction) within the corpus of literature on the Great War produced between the late 1920s and the mid-1930s.