FOREWORD
This is an anthology with direction, concerned with the after-War spirit in European literature.
There has been, during the past few years, a veritable deluge of books about the War. Any discussion of the value of that literature would be out of place here. It is a literature destined, doubtless, to go on. It may be that we have not achieved as yet anything like a just perspective of the Great Struggle.
Meanwhile, a new generation has come up to writing maturity. This generation, the younger members of which never saw the trenches, still bears the indelible impress of the War. It has had something, if possible, even worse than war to face: namely, after War chaos, a spiritual chaos, marked by the seeming breakdown of reality itself. A generation distinguished by its spiritual intensity and by its repudiation of pre-War aesthetics (as well as, very frequently, ante-bellum social and political systems), it has problems of its own to solve or to relegate to the unsolvable, and accordingly is, for the most part, disinterested quite in the realistic or wrathful reminiscences of the men who were at the front.
This young and disillusioned literature is beginning to loom large. In Germany, for example, there has been, noticeably since the fall of 1929, a decided turning-away from the literature of the War to that literature which may be described as Nachkrieg, from writers such as Remarque and Renn to Roth, Kesten, Lampel, Glaeser and their kind. There has been, there, a "revolt of the sons," the young wheeling upon the old with a bitter and despairing reproach.
In America, this conflict of generations is practically non-existent; and it is, as a result, extremely difficult for Americans as a whole to comprehend the preoccupations of young Europe. We catch vague echoes, at times, of the French Surréalistes and, vaguer still, of the Italian Novecentisti, etc.; but it all seems far-off and unreal, and comes to us, often, with a distant tinkle of the ridiculous. If such an anthology as this can bring Americans to see or to feel that there is, behind that Continental writing which may with accuracy be termed contemporary, a very real, painful and deep-rooted disorientation,
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