O impacto da Primeira Guerra Mundial sobre a Europa e a literatura de guerra

Abstract

Nowadays, one hundred years after the greatest sea and trench battles, a question is posed: how could this Great European War change not only the continental configurations, but also the concepts of war and war literature? Until the nineteenth century, many saw war as some heroic act through which men could prove their bravery in an open fight, facing the enemy directly. By means of new weapon technology, death comes invisibly: gas, submarines, long-range artilleries, mines, airplanes, tanks, and machine guns. War strategies are altered and the feeling of a worthy fight in order to defend one’s homeland is ended. In this article, the great disillusion with war will be exemplified in the following romances: Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet in the Western Front (1929); concerning land warfare, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916), as well as Reinhard Göring’s Ex-pressionist drama Seeschlacht (1917).