British and German Trench Poetry

¶ … British and German trench poetry side by side Teaching British and German trench war poetry side-by-side One of the difficulties in teaching World War I is that the memory of World War II is often much sharper in the minds of students. The more ambiguous causes of the First World War, and the complex feelings of both German and British soldiers can be lost if there is too much focus on the British War Poets alone. Examining both nationalities' poetic response to war enables a compassionate cross-comparison of both traditions.

It enables students to identify both similarities and differences in the responses of German and British war poets, who were responding to the same experience of bloodshed, albeit from different sides of the front lines. It also shows the importance of literature and poetry in the culture of both nations to respond to national crisis, in a way that may be surprising to students today.

The author makes an interesting point that viewing 'the war' as a kind of common aesthetic culture may be a more fair way to evaluate poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, than comparing them with their fellow Britons writing at home. These young men were not immersed in the high modernist traditions of Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot: rather, they were immersed in the experience of war and their own visceral response to the horrors they witnessed.

Thus a multifaceted, rather than strictly comparative approach might be the most illuminating way to study this period of history and literature. Cross-cultural, comparative literary analysis is always imperfect, particularly given the linguistic challenges presented by evaluating German poetry in relation to its British counterparts. Contextualizing the British war poets requires a certain level of understanding how the war was seen by the other side, and by alien eyes. More is likely.