People in War

Latzko, Andreas, 1876-1943Project Gutenberg · United StatesMar 2023

Rating 4.0
Word count
237K words
Chapters
24

Tags

Motivation and Growth War TraumaMilitary StrategyFate and FortuneHuman NatureHumanistic CareAnti-war ReflectionPsychological InsightHumanity at WarGreat War NarrativeTurbulent Era

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Menschen im Krieg by Andreas LatzkoAuthor: Latzko, Andreas, 1876-1943,Language: German, Class: PT: Language and Literatures: Germanic, Scandinavian, and Icelandic literatures, Release Date: Feb 13, 2011

Editor's review

Latzko's Menschen im Krieg is an anti-war literary work set in World War I, consisting of six short stories written in German. The work focuses on war's destruction of the individual psyche rather than battle scenes, using calm, restrained narration to present the fear, trauma, and human struggle of soldiers and civilians in extreme circumstances. Latzko himself had frontline experience, giving his writing immediacy and credibility. This is a free Project Gutenberg electronic edition, making it readily accessible to researchers and German-language readers. Its reading value lies in offering a perspective on World War I from within German literature, suitable for reading alongside Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front; its brevity makes it suitable as supplementary material for courses on war literature. Reading it requires some German proficiency, and it is advisable to understand the text's historical context in light of World War I history.

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Reading tips

  1. Read one story through first to grasp the narrative tone, then return to trace the lines of the characters' psychological development
  2. Consult World War I historical background while reading to help understand the period details in the text
  3. Read alongside All Quiet on the Western Front to compare how the two books handle wartime experience differently
  4. Allow time to record impressions after each story; the emotional accumulation across the stories is worth experiencing

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24

FAQ

Is this book a novel or a short story collection? It is a short story collection made up of several standalone stories that collectively revolve around war's impact on people. Characters and plots are not continuous across stories, but the themes and moods echo one another, making it suitable for reading story by story.
What level of German is needed to read this book? The original is in German and uses literary language, with sentence structures and vocabulary of some difficulty. Intermediate to advanced German reading ability is recommended, with a dictionary to handle literary expressions; beginners may wish to consult background materials first before attempting it.
What are the features of this edition? This edition comes from Project Gutenberg and is a free e-book, easy to obtain and search on a computer or e-reader. It provides a public-domain text without modern annotations or introductions, so readers need to supplement the historical background themselves.

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About the author

Latzko, Andreas, 1876-1943 Author · Austrian · 1876–1943

Andreas Latzko (1876–1943) was an Austrian writer born in Hungary, best known for his anti-war novel Men in War (Menschen im Krieg). His works draw heavily on wartime experience and focus on the trauma and spiritual distress that war inflicts on individuals, written in a calm tone with a strong humanistic concern. Besides Men in War, the library holds one other work by him, showing that his writing centers on the themes of war and human nature. Because public information is limited, details of his life are difficult to set out fully; yet from the surviving works it is clear that he does not glorify the battlefield but focuses on the fear, exhaustion and struggle of ordinary people in wartime, conveying a longing for peace. This approach gives him a place in anti-war literature, and his works, often classed as inspirational growth, are frequently read as reflections on war and personal growth.