Re: [ejlist] Query (fwd)

[e-ensign <e-ensign@thing.net>]

-- [ From: e-ensign * EMC.Ver #2.5.02 ] --

>well is there not a rough and ready trans in Engl of all of StG's >poetry?
Yes:  see pp. 182ff. with German and Engl. on facing pp. of >_Stefan George
Poems In German and English_, tr. Carol North >Valhope and Ernst Morwitz (NY
:  Schocken Books, 1967; 1st ed., >Pantheon, 1943)

Didn't know that. Have you read some of the poems? How does George's
magniloquence come across in English? 

>Now on the educational level of many on either side who fought in >WWI, I
think it was quite high in some cases--

That's true and well documented (see Robert Wohl's study "The Generation of
1914"). I just wanted to object to the notion of a majority of (in this case
: German) soldiers carrying books in their knapsacks and reading poetry in
their trenches. That sounds romantic, but is simply not true. Btw, the
educational level of the British soldiers was actually much higher than that
of the Germans - at least until 1916 and simply because the British Army was
a non-conscript army until then, with most of its professional soldiers
coming from public schools. 

Juenger himself just had a "Notabitur" (remember: he hated compulsory
education all his life) and the books he read during the Great War weren't
particularly highbrow stuff either (John made a list of these books while
reading through Juenger's original WWI diaries at Marbach, perhaps he could
give us some details). 

>there's a classic hagiographical German collection of letters of the
>fallen done a few years after the end of the war that illustrates this >in
a rather selective way-- it's edited by Phillip Witkop and is >entitled
_Kriegsbriefe gefallener Studenten_ (Muenchen, 1928).  >Highly selective, of
course....

As the title says: they were students. The working-class people (and they
formed the vast majority of the German Army right from the beginning)
couldn't care less about Stefan George. 

Regards,
RB

PS.: I doubt that "Hans Castorp" et al. made for particularly good soldiers.
They most probably caught a bullet or shrapnel rather sooner than later. I'm
not denying that there were intellectual soldiers (and especially in WWI
there were many of them - from Wittgenstein to J.F.C. Fuller), but I'm
saying that they were still an exception, not the rule. 


t