Cirrus@Austlit

'Two novels by and (though not exclusively so) about women, one in English and one in German, both written in 1930, and neither in the remotest sense partisan, offer a negative view of the war from the stand- point of those involved at the Western Front. Interest in the two novels is justified for a variety of reasons: both present the war from a particular viewpoint, that of the bourgeois young woman, who, in serving with the Red Cross, comes to see behind the scenes of war, and thus to reject it completely. Each work mirrors the moral and social changes brought about by the war and which had such a profound effect on the position of women in the present century; and each goes beyond this aspect to present the concept of the lost generation found in so many of the novels written around 1930. Both works, finally, have a link with Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues: Evadne Price's "Not So Quiet . . .", published under the name of the first-person narrator, "Helen Zenna Smith", patently uses the title of A. W. Wheen's translation of Remarque, and follows the most famous of First World War novels in other ways, though by no means as slavishly as has been suggested. Adrienne Thomas' Die Katrin wird Soldat was first published by Ullstein under the Propylaen imprint used for Im Westen nichts Neues and is close in tone and in some respects in style to Remarque, though it is not overtly modelled upon his novel. Both works have been neglected by criticism, perhaps more on grounds of literary snobbery than real obscurity.' (from p.57)