Les écrivains combattants français et allemands, témoins de la fin de la guerre

Nicolas Beaupré, The French and German Combatant Writers, Witnesses of the End of the War. While, all through the war, the French and German combatant writers published numerous literary works relating their experience on the front, they remained on the whole relatively silent on the last months of the war, and that on both sides of the front. The context of the years 1918 to the early 20s was indeed hardly favourable for the publication of such pieces and the public was tired of war literature. Yet, the expected end of the war and the longed for victory had been major themes of the European leterature between 1914 and 1918. But after 1918, in France, the exhilara¬ tion of victory overcame both the mourning of the dead who had made it possible and the disappointment and the misunderstandings generated by the brand-new peace. In Germany, defeat was to heighten the disillusion and the hopes born from the end of the war. On both sides of the former front, the world structured by the culture of war and the unanimity of the faith in victory collapsed and the silence of the writers on this by-gone world settled in. Before perhaps the emergence of a new language that would make it possible to write again about the war

Ancient history · Art · Battle · Combatant · Context (archaeology) · Disappointment · Front (military) · Geography · German · Literature · Political science · Politics · Silence · Spanish Civil War · Unanimity · Victory · World War II · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Psychology