Published in 1929, Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Im Westen nichts Neues details a semi-autobiographical experience of the First World War. Translated into English later
that year, it achieved remarkable success in the United States. A Farewell to Arms, by
Ernest Hemingway, attained a similar transatlantic popularity when it was translated into
German in 1930. Both novels emphasize outward description and avoidance of inner,
abstract thought in order to emphasize a physicality that draws on reportorial and
objective traditions which attempt to attack a romantic sense of war. In privileging
physical experience, both novels and their translations have the similar goal of criticizing
propagandistic rhetoric. Despite these similar goals, each novel’s reception in the other’s
country was different. Americans viewed Remarque as simply a writer of documentaries,
while Germans saw Hemingway in a problematically primitive way, both viewing him as
a salve to overblown European intellectualism and subjugating him to a larger European
aesthetic scheme. This paper attempts to answer why these receptions differ, and offers
the solution that European critics remained in modes of thought reminiscent of the
nineteenth century and had a different horizon of expectations. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/ETD-UT-2012-05-5446 |
| Date | 08 August 2012 |
| Creators | Mothersole, Brian Scott |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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