Charlotte Heymel, Touristen an der Front: Das Kriegserlebnis 1914-1918 als Reiseerfahrung in zeitgenossischen Reiseberichten [Tourists at the front:the 1914-1918 war as a touristic experience in contemporary travel reports] LIT Verlag, Berlin, 2007, 410 pp., €34.90.

摘要

The sentiment 'The first casualty when war comes, is truth', expressed in 1917 by Senator Hiram W. Johnson in an address to the US Congress, has often been quoted since. In her dissertation (Osnabriick University, 2006), Charlotte Heymel rightly relates it to strict censorship decrees and restrictive information policies dictated by security or other interests, but also to supposedly authentic reports on the experience of frontline action, which in fact cannot really be communicated. The object of her interdisciplinary study was the relationship between the experience of actual combatants and that of travellers to the front during World War I—i.e. the connection between the 'sightseeing' character of travel to the front undertaken by a number of authors and the literary construction of their published reports.