In the 12:30 section on Tuesday we mentioned briefly how this book was banned in Germany during WW2 for being anti-German/unpatriotic, along with showing the realities of war. I have not been able to stop thinking about how this book is no longer banned, and I wonder if a new war with that type of atrocity started, would it be banned again? Do banned books work? I was wondering what your thoughts were on how we can read and see the realities of war and conditions and yet still create them? This book was published in 1929 and people who served in WW1 had to turn around and see their children and families serve in WW2. We have so much access to media today but back in the 1930’s I can’t imagine how the portrayals of the battlefields would have been accepted.
Literature of the Great War
ENGL 348. Spring 2022. Dr. Scanlon.
I am a firm believer that all truly impactful books tend to be banned. Nor do I doubt that if another grand war were to begin, this book (and books like it) would be banned again so that we are ignorant to the realities of assisting a war effort. Banned books are based on censorship (to my understanding) that is governed by those who deem these books harmful to society and individual (particularly younger) minds as these books can steer people away from the mindset that a government may want their propaganda to influence. I don’t think they work. I saw on an instagram post once that when a book gets banned it just makes reading even cooler.
In terms of how we can see the realities of war through reflections in novels and in histories and yet repeat the same transgressions, I think that falls to our inherent human nature. Also on that sort of nationalistic ideology of “I am proud to be a -” or “There is no country as good as my own” that can create a bias that (with the domino effect of events that somehow end in a war) stirs a drive to defend and fight for what is your own. The people of YOUR country where YOUR children are. No wonder then that the other side matters so little. What matters far more is getting rid of what is threatening your normal by any means necessary.
At least that is just my own vague understanding that is largely based on my limited knowledge of human psychology.
While we may not be experiencing war in the sense of what is portrayed in the novel, it can be argued that it matters more NOW rather than when it did in the past. Yes, the novel itself was one of the first novels to barely fetishize the aspect of war and make it “appealing,” but it’s because of that rawness it displays that allows us to connect to the novel just as much, if not more now. It’s a work of fiction, but as we slowly lose more grasp on the foreign concepts of war from decades prior, it reminds us just how painful war can be. It’s evolved much throughout the years, but the effect that war has on the world is still prominent.
Banned books work to alter the general public’s knowledge/way of life. If books like these existed in abundance during The Great War, then there would be loss of morale and thus no war. I think that censorship would definitely return in times of war, especially outside of the USA. The US stresses freedom of speech so it will be harder to silence the people and their reading material, while in other countries it is commonplace to ban/censor books the government doesn’t like. I don’t doubt the United States wouldn’t try though. As much as we stand against book-banning, I’m sure governments around the globe would implement censorship to further their agenda. War needs bodies and you can’t have these bodies knowing better. My thoughts on how we can read and see the realities of war and conditions and yet still create them is that the public consciousness has a short memory. Even with those with trauma and PTSD, propaganda always seems to work. Everyone is susceptible. It is down to an art back then and even modern times. The sentiment of: ‘You do what you must for your country and home’ is impressed on everyone till they, especially the young, become fanatics. Thus, the cycle continues. No matter how much information, images, or videos we have of the horrors of war; the mass majority of people will never fully look at it. Many live in ignorance and will parrot the same slogans when the time comes
Banned books have always been fascinating to me. However, I honestly think that banning books doesn’t work. If anything, it’ll just spark people’s interest to read the book even more. I do find it interesting about what you said about Germanna banning All Quiet on the Western Front only to end up going into World War II a few years later. I also want to add on to what you said about what if a war was happing today, would there still be any banned books? I think that today it’s extremely hard to near impossible to ban any kind of war history or propaganda. This is because we have the internet.