A 1977 trip to Glasgow introduced me to the fabulous second-hand bookshop Voltaire and Rousseau, which happily is still thriving. Getting past the entrance was hazardous; navigating the Niagara Falls of books was a risky business. Books tumbling from shelves onto the floor. Books toppling from shoulder-high stacks. Books overflowing cardboard boxes. A bibliophile’s heaven. Rummaging around, I came across a box – Pandora’s? – of books relating to the Great War, that industrialised slaughter of 1914-1918. It was a cornucopia of First War literature. Within I found an early translated copy of Ludwig Renn’s 1929 novel War, a translation of Ernst Junger’s The Storm of Steel, Arnold Zweig’s The Case of Sergeant Grischa, R. H. Mottram’s Spanish Farm Trilogy, a first edition of Goodbye To All That and a book – Schlump – with no author’s name. Pandora was pricey. But I bought it. Careful reselling has amply covered the initial expense. It would cover it still further if I was to sell my copy of Schlump, published by Martin Secker in 1929. You can pick up a similar copy on the internet but it will set you back £450. The box was full of unusual novels, memoirs, histories, some I have never parted with and one I never read. Until now.
My English translation of Schlump, in its dirty khaki boards with just that onomatopoeic word, in a kind of German Expressionist typeface stamped in red on the front cover and the spine, has sat on the shelf for almost 50 years. Maurice Samuel, a Romanian-born novelist, translator and fierce opponent of anti-Semitism, is credited with its translation. Schlump has travelled with me from Poland to Argentina, neglected but treasured, occasionally taken off the shelf but for some reason always put back. Yet for anyone who – like myself – has an obsession with that terrible war, Schlump is a novel to be prized, up there with Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, not least because it shows a largely neglected aspect of that war, how the occupying Germans rubbed along with the occupied French. I am astonished that it has not made it into cinemas.
Schlump was first published, anonymously, in Germany in 1928. Its author was a schoolmaster, Hans Herbert Grimm, who served in the Great War and afterwards taught Spanish, French, and English. He was born in Markneukirchen, a small town in Saxony close to the Czech border and home to German violin making. Grimm’s novel was published by Kurt Wolff, the first publisher of Franz Kafka. Wolff’s mother was Jewish; he fled Germany in 1941 with his second wife. They eventually made home in America, where they founded Pantheon Books in 1942. Wolff spent vast sums on promoting Grimm’s book, telling readers that “here is a book which every German man must read”, but to little avail. Remarque’s book, published shortly after Grimm’s, was an instant success, selling 10,000 copies a day; a few months after its release Schlump had sold just half that number. Grimm’s caution in publishing Schlump without his name was sensible. Five years after it appeared the Nazis burnt all copies they could seize, along with Remarque’s and Renn’s novels and around 26,000 other texts they considered ‘un-German’. Renn, the pen name of Arnold Friedrich Vieth von Golsseneau, was sentenced to 30 months in jail by the Nazis in 1934. Remarque was safe – by that date he was already living in Switzerland. No wonder Grimm hid a copy of his book in a brick wall in his home. The Nazis made no distinction between novels that made money and those that didn’t. If judged ‘subversive’, all were cast into bonfires.
Grimm stayed in Germany and, like many who sought self-preservation, joined the Nazi Party. Before judging him we need to ask ‘what would I have done?’ Volker Weidermann, the German journalist and author of The Book of Burned Books, wrote in the Paris Review in 2016 that Grimm joined the NSDAP “so he could live in safety”. I like to think that my translated copy of Schlump, published in 1929, is a testament to resistance against the Nazis. Renn’s novel and that of Remarque (who was born Erich Paul Remark) were both more commercially successful than Grimm’s and, published the year after Schlump, overshadowed it, although all three were semi-autobiographical. As the Nazis consolidated their grip over the German state it became dangerous to be known as the author of a book that contradicted their views of the Great War and which laughed at German military pretensions. In the Second World War Grimm served the German occupiers as an interpreter in France. That war over, he tried to resume his career as a school teacher but his NSDAP membership barred him; he took a job in the theatre from which he was also ejected. He then worked in a sand mine, until in the summer of 1950 he was summoned to a meeting of some authorities of the East German state, in Weimar. He never spoke about what passed at that meeting. Two days after it, on 7 July 1950 at the age of 54, he committed suicide at Altenburg, while his wife was out shopping.
Grimm was 18 when the First War started. The central figure of his only novel is Emil Schultz, who, we are told, was 16 on the outbreak of war. Schultz gets his nickname when he offends a policeman who, exasperated, can only roar “You young – Schlump!” The name stuck. Schlump dreams of military glory, the adoration of girls, and enlists against his family’s wishes in August 1915. Schlump swiftly becomes a darkly humorous bildungsroman, a picaresque fable in which Schlump endures the horrors of the trenches, falls in love easily, discovers he likes French civilians, and shares rations with fellow soldiers who spin tales and pass on tablets of wisdom. Early in the novel he recalls a conversation with an “old reservist” who told him “Listen sonny: there’s only one thing I’m heartily sorry for: the moments I could have been good to a pretty girl – and wasn’t.” As the novel begins Schlump is appointed, despite his youth, the military administrator of three occupied villages based in the hamlet of Loffrande, south of Lille. L’offrande translates as ‘the offering’ and has religious connotations. The “evil music” of the guns at the front rattles the window panes and knocks out the putty in Schlump’s quarters. Schlump is almost alone in Loffrande, surrounded by French peasants with whom he strikes up an avuncular friendship. In one incident a peasant boy gets his head stuck in a metal chamber pot, from which comes “a weird sound – like that of a bluebottle caught in a watering-can dashing its plump body against the metal walls, humming and droning till it finds the way and crawls out of the hole.” Schlump helps the boy, marching ahead of a group of agitated villagers first to the doctor and then to the tinsmith, who uses his cutters to free the child. On another occasion he tries to resolve an argument between Madame Gaspard and Madame Fontaine, over who is sleeping with a “Prussian”. Madam Fontaine has a face “as black as a stove door, and round her mouth a long grey and black beard grew in separate tufts…with vivid coal-black eyes” above which are “bushy grey eyebrows. The black hair which covered her head was twisted into greasy locks which looked as though they had never been washed.” The two “suddenly they went at each other, their mouths, with their tooth-gaps, opened – whereupon Schlump burst into such immoderate laughter that the two women stopped, stupefied, to look at him, then turned round and ran out of the door.”
Schlump is told by an older sergeant “Do you know who goes into the trenches? Idiots – or fellows who get into trouble.” Schlump doesn’t want to be considered an idiot but neither does he want to go to the front line. His unit is ordered forwards and set to dig trenches in “frozen hard” ground underneath which is a “stratum of hard limestone”. A shell explodes near them; “the fragments hissed through the air like a thousand wild cats and wailed and howled like lost souls.” Schlump is wounded, hospitalised, recovers and forms a relationship young Nelly, who becomes pregnant, but later tells Schlump by letter that he needn’t worry as “she now had a sweetheart who wanted to marry her. He didn’t have to be a soldier any more, for his left arm had been shot away.” Along with her letter Nelly’s parcel contains sausage, ham and bacon. “The good things came from a pig which had been killed in secret, for by that time poor Germany was already in the grip of hunger.”
Through all the torments of the trenches Schlump keeps his good humour and laughs whenever possible, such as when he passes a girl who remarks “There’s another poor sheep going to the slaughter. And so young!” He returns to his company, which “twice” has been “bled white” during the Somme battle. Guard duty, freezing weather, under constant shelling, scrabbling for bread, perpetual hunger, digging and repairing trenches, dealing on black market goods, connecting with girls, fighting the lice – this routine is interspersed with strange encounters. A fat rat comes along and Schlump is “glad to have a new friend”. He asks it to stay and chat. “What in the world are you thinking of?” answers the rat. “I’ve got seven children to look after; they’re all squeaking with hunger. I’ve simply got to get home. Good-bye.” Schlump is sent to collect rations and passes the corpse of a dead infantryman; a shell “had lifted off half his scalp. It lay close by the body, like a plate, and death had spread the brains out neatly upon it.” Officers play cards and drink in relative safety in dugouts while they force the starving men to chop wood for their fires for a slice of bread. Schlump thinks “how lucky those men were who got an arm shot off or a leg. They were at home now: they could lie down in their beds and sleep, sleep, sleep.” He goes out on patrol in no-man’s land with a comrade. They ambush a ‘Tommy’ who resists and is shot in the stomach with a “rocket pistol” (flare) which burns in his body as they drag him back to their trench, where he lays motionless – finally dead.
But it is the dream sequences and the tales told by passing strangers that truly distinguish Schlump from contemporary anti-war novels. The second time he is wounded and hospitalised he has a vision of an “old man”, who shows him “the home of music” in a “vale of beauty” where children “are taught to think”; the aim is to “develop the soul in three ways: in goodness, in beauty, and in knowledge.” The war lost, the soldiers start to trudge home. “They were passing down the street, rows of eight, close behind each other: without arms, in tatters, heads and limbs in bandages, on crutches, dumb, wordless; tortured faces worn by fearful effort and by pain. And the line never ended.” Schlump survives and takes a train home, where on the station platform he meets a former girlfriend, Johanna, who has been waiting for him. “Hand in hand they went out, to find his mother, who did not dream, just then, that the happiest moment of her life had come.”
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Gary Mead
Gary Mead has published books on America and the First World War, Douglas Haig, and the Victoria Cross.
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