September 12, 2016
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.