Schlump

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, which was published anonymously in 1928 and widely translated at the time, 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.

Hans Herbert Grimm (1896–1950) was born in Vogtland. In 1928 he published his antiwar, semi-autobiographical novel Schlump anonymously in German. The following year it was published in English, in Britain and America. In 1933 it was banned by the Nazis and Grimm became concerned with preserving the anonymity of his authorship. To avoid detection, he joined the Nazi Party and worked as a language interpreter during World War II. On returning home to Soviet-occupied Germany he was no longer permitted to work as a teacher because of his involvement with the Nazis. In 1950 he was called to a meeting in Weimar by government officials—he never revealed what was discussed but two days later he committed suicide. The authorship of Schlump remained a mystery until 2013.
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Jamie Bulloch is a historian and translator of German literature. His most recent translations include Timur Vermes’s Look Who’s Back and Jorg Fauser’s Raw Material. He lives in London.