Feeling at War: Emotion and Rationality as Narrative Responses in German Antiwar Literary Traditions

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2023-04-14

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Victim Stories are powerful in evoking emotional responses by portraying the process of suffering. I argue that before The First World War, German antiwar literature relied on impassioned emotional pleas whereas thereafter, characters are led by rational compassion, comparing affective character reactions to suffering in Bertha von Suttner's Lay Down Your Arms (1889) and Erich Maria Remarque's All is Quiet on the Western Front (1928). Von Suttner's novel focuawa on Martha, a woman not physically engaged in combative war but affected by widespread domestic harms from war and perceptive to those on the front. Alternatively, many post-Great War narratives suggest a sense of futility. War would-be heroes like Remarque's soldier Paul become victims of the chaotic war machine, surviving or dying entirely by chance and watching others condemned to the same fate. A textual analysis of word frequency in Lay Down Your Arms and All is Quiet on the Western Front demonstrates some key differences between these antiwar texts before and after The Great War in how the words "compassion," "pain," "happiness," and "death" (Mitleid, Schmerz, Glück, and Tod) appear. I also provide narrative arcs to differentiate the emotion-driven response of von Suttner's Martha with Remarque's rationally compassionate character Paul.

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IDAH, spring symposium, digital humanities, Germanic Studies

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