Ernst Glaeser (1902–1963)

Belongs next to Remarque and Hemingway.
I had never heard of Ernst Glaeser before but I hope the reprinting of Class 1902 will make him known to a whole new audience. Anyone who has an interest in the First World War - or the literature of war in general - should read this book. While Remarque and Hemingway's classic novels concentrated on the horrors of the front and the necessity of sometimes making a separate peace, Glaeser's book is a little-known masterpiece about the home front in Germany, as seen through the eyes of a young boy as he watches the war, from the age of 12 to 16. Glaeser's hero, known simply as E., is often more interested in solving "the mystery" - adult sexuality - than he is in what's happening at the front. After witnessing a brutal sex act early in the story, E feels he doesn't want anything to do with sex, if that's the way it is. He equates it with a kind of murder. It isn't until a couple years later that he begins to understand that what he saw was not representative of the real "mystery." In the final pages of the book he finds himself on the precipice of solving the mystery. His innocence is indeed finally irrevocably lost, but not in the way you might expect. This book was first published eighty years ago in German. It made its English debut in 1929, the same year A Farewell to Arms was published. Hemingway called Glaeser's work "a damned good book." He was absolutely right. The translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, was superb, and I doubt that much of anything was "lost in translation." E., Ferd and August emerge as very real and, even more importantly, sympathetic characters, boys in search of their place in an increasingly complex society as war looms on the horizon and finally descends with a vengeance that leaves them more concerned with finding enough to eat than with what's happening at either front, where their fathers are fighting and dying. Professor Horst Kruse's introduction is very helpful in putting Glaeser's book into a proper literary and cultural context. I cannot say enough about how absorbing and GOOD this book is. If you enjoyed Erich Maria Remarque's books about the Great War and the post-war era, then don't miss this one. - Tim Bazzett, author of Soldier Boy: At Play in the ASA… (meer)