First printing (after 600 numbered copies).
Maurice Genevoix's copy, with his manuscript ownership inscription.
A volunteer officer in the German army, Arnold Vieth von Golßenau commanded a battalion on the Western Front during the First World War. Under the pseudonym of his main character, Ludwig Renn, he drew on his field notes to write Krieg, first serialized in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1928, then published in book form.
The novel was an immense success: 600,000 copies sold, twenty-five translations, and critical acclaim comparable to Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, with which it is often paired. But Krieg stands apart through its drier, more impersonal tone: war is depicted as an absolute void, without rhetoric, message or transcendence. Its deliberately unadorned style turns this austerity into an expressive force.
Renn’s inspiration came directly from Barbusse’s Le Feu, of which he declared himself an admiring reader. He did not, however, pursue a conventional literary career: arrested in 1933 by the Nazi regime and convicted of “literary high treason,” he joined the International Brigades in Spain to fight against Francoism, then went into exile in Great Britain and later Mexico, where he chaired the Free Germany committee during the war.
Forgotten today in France, Ludwig Renn remains an essential witness to the war as experienced on the German side, told in a style of great restraint.
From the library of Maurice Genevoix (bookplate).