The War Books Controversy Revisited

Abstract

The proliferation of war novels in the late 1920s and early 1930s divided readership and caused significant controversy. Motivated by the desire to determine the ‘proper’ way of writing the First World War, the many debates on war novels revealed the existence of a deeper crisis of memory which culminated around the first ten-year anniversary of the Armistice. The debates surrounding Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and Jean Norton Cru’s study Witnesses (Temoins, 1929) have already received considerable critical attention, but the War Books Controversy was, in many respects, a pan-European phenomenon. A comparative outline is given of the arguments used in the debates that followed the publication of All Quiet on the Western Front in Germany and Witnesses in France. Other illustrations are the controversy in Britain at the beginning of the 1930s, and a later debate, stirred by veterans’ testimonies on the subject of a Serbian war novel of the 1930s, Stevan Jakovljevic’s Serbian Trilogy (Srpska trilogija). The War Books Controversy can be seen as the first evidence of a major reconfiguration of the boundaries between fictional and factual narration, whose consequences are keenly felt today in a literary market progressively dominated by ‘faction’.