Schlump

by Hans Herbert Grimm, Volker Weidermann (Afterword), Jamie Bulloch (Translator)

Overview

An NYRB Classics Original

Seventeen-year-old Schlump marches off to war in 1915 because going to war is the best way to meet girls. And so he does, on his first posting, overseeing three villages in occupied France. But then Schlump is sent to the front, and the good times end.

Schlump, written by Hans Herbert Grimm, was published anonymously in 1928 and was one of the first German novels to describe World War I in all its horror and absurdity, and it remains one of the best. What really sets it apart is its remarkable central character. Who is Schlump? A bit of a rascal and a bit of a sweetheart, a victim of his times, an inveterate survivor, maybe even a new type of man. At once comedy, documentary, hellhole, and fairy tale, Schlump is a gripping and disturbing book about the experience of trauma and what the great critic Walter Benjamin, writing at the same time as Hans Herbert Grimm, would call the death of experience, since perhaps if anything goes, nothing counts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681370262
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	11/15/2016
Series:	NYRB Classics Series
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	437,309
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Hans Herbert Grimm (1896–1950) was born in the town of Markneukirchen and fought in World War I. After the war he taught Spanish, French, and English in Altenburg, and published Schlump anonymously in 1928 to avoid drawing his employer’s attention to his pacificist beliefs. Schlump was not the commercial or popular success Grimm had hoped it would be, but his anonymity protected him when the book was burned by the Nazis in 1933. To avoid suspicion, Grimm joined the Nazi Party and worked as an interpreter in France during World War II. After the war, however, he was barred from teaching because of his party membership and began working in the theater and, later, in a sand mine. In 1950, two days after meeting with East German authorities, Grimm committed suicide; it is not known what was discussed at the meeting.

Jamie Bulloch is a historian and translator of German literature. His most recent translations include Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes and Raw Material by Jörg Fauser.

Volker Weidermann is the former director and editor of the Sunday edition of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and is currently a contributor to Der Spiegel. His most recent book is Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and The Summer Before the Dark.

Editorial Reviews

Grimm's book belongs to the antic antiwar genre, alongside classic works like Jarsolav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk.

The New York Times - John Williams

09/12/2016
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. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"A lost classic of anti-war literature is revived in a fresh, vigorous translation...a welcome contribution to the literature of the Great War and its discontents.” —Kirkus

"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…Grimm’s is a bloody picaresque with a fairy tale hero at its center…. Present-day readers will be touched and saddened by his enthusiasm.” —Publishers Weekly

“An unusual, original and charming addition to that great army of WWI novels.” —The Times (London)
 
“A century after the Great War, Schlump reappears in Jamie Bulloch’s excellent new translation and the extraordinary story of its rediscovery probably warrants a novel of its own...exceptional.” —The Independent
 
“One of the great First World War novels, about a German soldier in a French village, who falls in love with it. It’s full of criticism of how the war was conducted by Germany, so when Hitler came in, it was burnt.” —Michael Morpurgo, Daily Mail
 
“The best of German war books so far.” —J.B. Priestley

From the Publisher

2016-10-05
A lost classic of anti-war literature is revived in a fresh, vigorous translation.His name may sound, to the ears of English speakers, like some kin of schlemiel or even schmuck, but Emil Schulz’s nickname, given to him by a cop, means something along the lines of “shrimp, scamp, scallywag and lump—a muddled concoction of all of these.” He is all those things, and, conscripted into the WWI–era German army, he is now, at the age of 17, the administrator in charge of three occupied French villages. There, writes Grimm, Schlump dreams, daydreams, chases women, and generally tries to avoid anything involving work; he’s a sympathetic fellow but essentially lonely, “a solitary figure as he wandered through the snowy fields of France.” Things take a turn for the worse when the Americans join the war, and then Schlump is packed off to a diabolical front line, where he tastes war for real: in one nighttime scouting foray to capture some unsuspecting British soldier for information, a comrade of his fires a flare gun into a Tommy’s stomach, and all hell breaks loose: “The Tommy was yelling, the machine guns firing at full tilt, and Schlump gave a shrill, noisy laugh.” Sent behind the lines for convalescence, Schlump dreams and schemes his way into peacetime. Both comical and arch, the novel, writes German journalist Volker Weidermann in an afterword, might have made a dent, but Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front appeared at about the same time and was heralded as “the German anti-war novel par excellence,” pushing Grimm’s tale off the charts and into obscurity. The sad ending to Grimm’s own life marks a dark conclusion to his tale, which celebrates the resilience born of bucking the system, whether the military on one side or the griftier aspects of capitalism on the other. Not quite the equal of The Good Soldier Schweick but still a welcome contribution to the literature of the Great War and its discontents.

Kirkus Reviews