It is still November 2018, the centenary of the end of World War I (1914-1918). Back in 2014, I wrote a brief post saying that one of my great-grandfather's had a "piece" of that war; in fact, all of them had at least some piece of the era, as young men in the 1910s. Specifically and concretely, each of my four great-grandfathers had to register for the draft (conscription) in 1917-1918.

I have located all four their draft registration cards and will post the originals and transcribe them below, followed by some comments/thoughts on each of their individual cases and circumstances in 1917, and some informed conjecture on what they may have thought of the war.

See also these posts on the World War I:

• Post-224: My Great-Grandfather's piece of World War I
• Post-242: November 11th, 1918
• Post-360: Armistice Day and War Memory
• Post-365: Scenes from the end of the Great War, plus 100 years
• Post-366: The Book-as-Time-Capsule:  discovering my great-uncle's All Quiet on the Western Front(1930)

In May 1917, the USA was on the way to raising a multi-million-man army which was to reach a size of 4.35 million when all was said and done, up from a meager peacetime strength of one-hundred-some thousand (1916).

In another sign of lukewarm enthusiasm for the war, only 75,000 U.S. men had volunteered in the month after Congress voted to approve President Wilson's declaration of war (April 6, 1917), and so in May the government began to plan for a then-unprecedented national registration system for all young-adult men, and a tiered system of eligibility for conscription (based on "exemptions"). All young men had to appear in person before draft boards of their city or county on appointed days to register, under threat of prison for no-shows:

A booklet given to each registered man concluded with these words:

This positive-seeming term "selected" has survived in U.S. government euphemism/jargon, in the form of today's descendant of the 1917 draft system, the so-called Selective Service System, long dormant now but still in existence. I remember registering for it at the end of high school. (No longer do they say "Register or Go to Prison," though.)

Here are my four great-grandfathers' draft registration cards. Only one of the four was actually drafted, and it might not be hard to guess which one, given the information on the cards.

Great-Grandfather Number One:

Name: Peter Christian J----
Home Address: Osgood, Colorado
Date of Birth: 1893
Citizenship: Natural-Born [U.S. citizen]
Where were you born? Miller, Iowa, USA
Occupation: Farmer
By whom employed? Self
Where employed? Osgood, Weld Co., Colorado
Dependents: Wife
Married or single? Married
What military service have you had? No
Do you claim exemption from draft? No

"I affirm that I have verified above answers and that they are true,"
[Signed, Peter Christian J----.]

Registrar's Report
Tall, Medium, or Short? Medium
Slender, Medium, or Stout? Medium
Color or Eyes: Grey
Color of Hair: Brown
Bald? No
Disability? No

[Signed by the registrar of Weld Co., Colorado]
Date of Registration: June 5, 1917

Great-Grandfather Number Two:

Name: Bert B. Sveen
Permanent Home Address: RFD No. 3, [i.e., rural area near] Forest City, Winnebago Co., Iowa
Date of Birth: 1875
U.S. Citizenship: Citizen by father's naturalization before registrant's majority
Present occupation: Farmer
Employer's name: Self
Nearest relative: Mrs. Dina Sveen (wife) at RFD No. 3, Forest City, Winnebago Co., Iowa

"I affirm that I have verified above answers and that they are true,"
[Signed, Bert B. Sveen]

Registrar's Report: Description of Registrant
Height: Medium
Build: Medium
Color of Eyes: Blue
Color of Hair: Light Brown
Disability: No

[Signed by the Registrar of Winnebago County, Iowa]
Date of Registration: Sept.[?] 12, 1918

Great-Grandfather Number Three:

Name in full: Walter G. Kosswig
Home Address: 202 Hartford Ave., New Britain, Conn.
Date of Birth: 1886
U.S. citizenship: Naturalized citizen
Where were you born? Liepsic [Leipzig], Saxony, Germany
What is your present trade, occupation, or office? Paper Roller
By whom employed? Case, Lockwood, & Brainard
Where employed? Pearl St., Hartford, Conn.
Have you a father, mother, wife, child under 12, or a sister or brother under 12 solely dependent on you for support? Wife and two children and mother in part
Married or Single? Married
What military service have you had? None
Do you claim exemption from draft (specify grounds)? Only on ground of dependent

"I affirm that I have verified above answers and that they are true,"
[Signed, Walter G. Kosswig]

Registrar's Report
Tall, Medium, or Short? Medium
Slender, medium, or stout? Stout
Color of Eyes: Blue
Color of Hair: Light
Bald? No
Disabled: No

[Signed by the Registrar]
Date of Registration: Not noted. Presumably June 5, 1917, the date of the first nationwide draft registration. (Cannot be later than early July 1917, as Walter reported his age as 30 on the card; he turned 31 in mid July 1917.)

Great-Grandfather Number Four:

Name in Full: Earle Hazen
Home Address: 69 Church St., New Britain, Conn.
Date of Birth: 1897
Where were you born? East Berlin, Conn., USA
I am: A native of the United States [crossed out options are: Naturalized Citizen; Alien; I have declared my intention [to naturalize]; a Noncitizen or Citizen Indian (i.e., American Indian)]
Father's Birthplace: North Hero, Vt.
Name of Employer: Landers, Frary, & Clark
Place of Employment: New Britain, Conn.
Name of nearest relative: M.H. [Mahlon] Hazen (father)
Address of nearest relative: East Berlin, Conn.

"I affirm that I have verified above answers and that they are true,"
[Signed, Earle Hazen]

Registrar's Report
Height: Medium
Build: Slender
Color of eyes: Blue
Color of hair: Dark
Disabilities: None

[Signed by the Registrar of the City of New Britain, Connecticut]
Date of Registration: June 5, 1918

These draft-registration cards offer little portraits of each man as he was a century ago (as of this writing).

Some comments on how it turned out for each of the four (my four great-grandfathers). While I never knew any of them, I think I can re-create a lot of what they were like from second-hand,] information and through impressions of their children (my grandparents) and other relatives. I can offer up conjecture on why things turned out as they did. Some questions I cannot answer and will pose them openly.

Great-Grandfather Number One

Peter C. J---- [1893-1979] was not drafted.

Peter C. was of prime age but had a strong exemption: "Registrants employed in agricultural labor," and a lesser exemption: "Married registrants with dependent spouse." He had no children yet in 1917, but my grandfather was born the next year.

Though Peter C. was not drafted, I recall my grandfather saying that his father (i.e., Peter C.) had a cousin of the same first and last name, and of the same approximate age, with the only way to tell them apart being their differing middle initials (the cousin Peter S.). Peter S. was drafted but Peter C. was not.

One might be tempted to imagine a case of same-name mistaken identity letting my great-grandfather off the hook: [Draft Board official on selection day:] "Okay, next one. Oh, that name again? We already took him this morning; Say, who's in charge here, anyway? Who allowed the same name to come up twice? Shred that duplicate card, please. Next name, and no more duplicates!" This improbable situation is made impossible by the fact that Peter C. and Peter S. were in different states at the time (Colorado and Iowa, respectively).

An Iowan for about 95% of his life, in 1917 Peter C. happened to be in Colorado. He had gotten married in Colorado on May 10, 1917, less than a month before appearing before the draft board on June 5, 1917. It seems to me more than coincidental that he came to get married right between the declaration of war (April 6) and the day all age-eligible men ages 21 to 30 were to appear at the draft registration offices (June 5). I speculate that the declaration of war must have greatly sped up the process, of marriage that is.

Peter's wife was born Ethel Erickson (1892-1986), in Nebraska, to Swedish parents who had arrived about 1880. I have heard that she was a telephone switchboard operator when telephones first started taking off in the 1910s. As of May 1910, she was still in Lancaster Co., Nebraska, where the census-taker records her as attending school at that time (impressive, because she was then about to turn 18, and this was 1910 in rural Nebraska). Seven years later, May 1917, she gets married in Colorado. Neither Peter C. nor Ethel had any pre-existing connection that I can figure out with Colorado; both end up there in their early 20s chasing opportunity, Peter C. of a free land offer and Ethel (apparently) in the booming telephone switchboard operator trade. How they met, I cannot guess.

How would Peter C. have felt about the 1914-1918 war in general?

I can only try to reconstruct his views as follows: It is said that Midwestern farmers were against the war, so there is that as a baseline. There is something more in Peter C.'s case, though. He was of Danish recent ancestral origin, and not a run-of-the-mill Dane as both parents came from the region of South Jutland which was under German rule from 1864-1919. The political status of that province (i..e, detached from Denmark) was probably a main factor behind Peter C.'s father [1867-1948]'s emigration to the USA in 1887: He would have otherwise been subject to conscription into the German Army for several years; Peter C.'s father was born a Prussian subject and by age 3 was a subject of the German Empire, through no choice of theirs.

Peter C. heard stories about German conscription-enforcement officers raiding the house in South Jutland in about the mid 1880s, appearing at the front door to look for his father's two older brothers, wanted for draft evasion. They slipped out the back door as the MPs came in the front. This kind of family story might have inclined Peter C. to at least some sympathy for the war-intervention voices, but I cannot imagine he was anything much beyond neutral given the general anti-war feeling of his class: Midwestern, farmer, Lutheran.

(There is evidence to suggest that the Danish Lutheran Church in America was against intervention as late as mid-March 1917, weeks before the war declaration. This from World War I and American Public Opinion, 1914-1917, by Walter Edmund Hicks (1949), p.90 [p.101 of the PDF version]; the Presbyterian churches also had substantial opposition to the war at this late date; the Quakers and German Lutherans were against it -- these latter two not a surprise. The leadership [at least] of the Episcopalians, Methodists, and Baptists, in New York City were all pro-intervention when a vote was taken March 11, 1917 of all New York City Protestant churches.)

For another sort of observation, Peter C.'s stated place of residence in 1917 is:

"Osgood, Colorado."

You may be surprised to learn that there is no such place. A search for Osgood, Colorado, comes up empty on Google Maps, for one thing. Nothing online comes up for Osgood, Colorado. What's this about?

The determined searcher might land on the Weld County wiki entry, as I did, and there Osgood does finally make an appearance....under "Ghost Towns." (There seem to be many more ghost towns in Weld County than non-ghost towns. Don't ask me.)

Great-Grandfather Number Two

Bert B. Sveen [1875-1966] was not drafted.

According to my uncle's research, Bert's birth name in Norway was Børre B. Sveen; I think he exclusively used "Bert" in the USA, which was his home from age 7 or so in the early 1880s. The "B." middle initial in Borre B. Sveen was the patronymic Børreson, as his father [1832-1924] was also named Børre. Many/most of his U.S. descendants and other Sveens use "Swain" instead of Sveen, but I notice Bert himself used Sveen on his own draft-registration card.

The June 1917 wave called in men ages 21 to 30: Bert being over 40 was not among them. In 1918, it was decided to expand the registration process to men ages 18 to 45, which then included Bert. He would never have been high on the priority list due to his status as a farmer, his having dependents (including my grandmother), and his age.

And though this didn't matter to the draft board, I would note that his wife Dina (or Dena) [1880-1947], whom he names on his registration card as his closest relative, I understand was not much of an English speaker, having arrived in the USA as a young adult circa the turn of the 20th century. Bert and his wife both had ancestral origins in the Hedmark region of interior Norway, but Bert was a U.S. resident for over 90% of his life.

I do not know how the Sveens would have felt about the prospect of war against Germany during the controversy over intervention from mid 1914 to early 1917. I can say this: Of the 96 U.S. Senators in 1917, 82 voted 'Yes' on the war resolution in early April, and 14 did not (six voted 'No;' eight abstained); One of the six Senators who boldly voted 'No' was Asle Gronna (R-ND) who was of Norwegian ancestry. A wiki editor says: "Gronna...reflected the attitudes of his region -- progressive and isolationist."

Another wiki editor says this, citing a 1988 book called The Great Silent Majority: Missouri's Resistance to World War I by a Christopher C. Gibbs: "Midwestern farmers generally opposed the war, especially those of German and Scandinavian descent. The Midwest became the stronghold of isolationism; other remote rural areas also saw no need for war."

I cannot expect that Bert Sveen would have been a pro-intervention advocate or enthusiastic about the war.

Great-Grandfather Number Three

Walter G. Kosswig [1886-1952] was not drafted.

In the nationwide call-up of June 5, he was just within the age range of eligible draftees, fixed at ages 21 to 30. Walter turned 31 a month later.

I would say two things about Walter in 1917: One, the Kosswig family, of which he was a standard member, had a political tradition that would have been anti-war for several reasons, as I talk about in Post-366 (Book-as-Time-Capsule: My Great Uncle's "All Quiet on the Western Front"). Two, Walter could claim exemption for having two sons at the time, including my grandfather.

Unlike the two men I mention above, he was not working in a critical occupation like farming. He was following his father's calling and working for a printing press; he lists his occupation as Paper Roller (what that means, I am not sure) at a Hartford printer, Case, Lockwood, & Brainard. He was also involved in some way in this capacity with the New Britain Record newspaper, New Britain being the Kosswigs' hometown in America following emigration from Leipzig in 1887. (I note that Walter [or the registrar, who may have filled out the form] spelled Leipzig as "Liepsic," which was then a common English spelling (see Leipsic, Ohio).

The year 1917 was a bad year for Walter in that he suffered two near and dear losses: his father died early in the year, and later in the year he lost his hand in an printing machine accident. His stoic reaction to the loss of his hand earned him a favorable writeup in the paper the next day, the original clipping of which he proudly saved, and which was preserved by his son Ern, where I found it around the mid-2010s in a folder. His reaction was not panic or despair at the life-changing loss of his hand; rather, he patiently asked someone to inform his wife that he might not make it home on time for dinner.

Great-Grandfather Number Four

That leaves Earle Hazen [1897-1959], the youngest of my great-grandfathers. He was drafted, and served in the U.S. Army for a portion of the war.

I wrote more about Earle Hazen four years ago in Post 224: My Great-Grandfather's Piece of World War I, including a picture of him from 1930. I have so far not found a picture of him from his late teens or early 20s as he would have appeared in 1918.

I had assumed that he was drafted in 1917, but I learn from a close reading of this draft registration card that he was not even registered until June 5, 1918 (by which time, I might add, the last hopes for a German capture of Paris were beginning to fade, after some solid early-1918 successes including the separate peace with the new regime in Russia, on terms very favorable to Germany).

The reason Earle missed the 1917 registration was that was 20 years old. He turned 20 within a week of the declaration of war (April 1917). The youngest age that was to be conscripted in the summer 1917 call-up had been set by policy at 21. He was a year too young. He could have volunteered in 1917, but did not; this is possibly a clue on his feeling about the war at the time. Ethnoculturally his people (colonial-stock New Englanders) were, I think, pro-intervention by late winter/early spring 1917, anyway.

He appeared before the draft board on June 5, 1918, by now age 21; lacking any exemptions, he was soon called up.

Following training, he was stationed at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, where he spent the few months of his service until the armistice, and probably beyond. He was assigned to the Depot Brigade, which was the unit in charge of running the base. There were at least seventeen of these kinds of new bases throughout the USA, as described here. So Earle Hazen was one of the many U.S. troops mobilized that never went to Europe. The unit to which he was assigned was still critical for the U.S. mobilization as it was responsible for operating the large base (Camp Devens) at which a number of divisions were raised and from which many were sent to France.

A few other observations on the draft registration cards:

(1) Behind Blue Eyes. If the physical descriptions on the registration cards are to believed, one paternal great-grandfather had grey eyes, one blue; and both maternal great-grandfathers also had blue eyes.

The paternal side men's eye colors are no surprise because my father also has blue eyes.

The maternal side men's eye colors (both blue), if correct, are a surprise to me, because their descendants, as far as I know, all had/have darker-color eyes. This implies, according to the laws of inheritance genetics, that Walter Kosswig and Earle Hazen's wives were likely relatively dark-eyed. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

(2) Handwriting analysis. I am not sure who actually filled out these cards. It probably varied from place to place, the whole system being so new. In the case of these four cards, they seem likely to have been filled out by the officials (registrars) following in-person interviews with the registering men, after which they were signed by the men (the instruction is, after all, to "verify the above answers").

The handwriting on Peter C.'s card is easiest to read, but it seems impossible that he filled it out himself: Is anyone's signature that divergent from their regular writing? The main contents of the card are also similar to the registrar's signature, so I think he must have done it.

Another clue is that Walter Kosswig's card originally has "Single," which is scratched out and replaced with "Married." He would not have forgotten he was married, but a registrar might have messed it up absent-mindedly. I notice that Walter's signature, anyway, has a decided rightward slant. "If your writing slants to the right: You are open to the world around you and like to socialize with other people" (some website).

Earle Hazen's looks most plausibly his own handwriting.

All four cards have what I would consider very graceful cursive handwriting, characteristic of the time, the ability to write and even read which is now in the process of being lost.

(3) Clues to Personality. I note that Peter C. has a "No" response for the question on whether he, the registrant, claims any exemptions; if the registrar was the one filling out the form, Peter could have easily pressed him to include a note on his exemptions (for his wife, or his status as farmer), but he did not. His wife is asserted to be a dependent (line 9), and then he says he claims no exemptions (line 12). Why did he not (legitimately) claim an exemption? He must have felt that to claim something like an exemption for a social responsibility, as this was, would be dishonorable, would be asking for an unfair advantage over others.

Meanwhile, on the same day, two thousand miles to the east, Walter Kosswig has no problem claiming exemption, but saves face by starting his exemption with the word "only" ("Only on ground of dependent," that is, I'd really do it and all but I have theses chores to do...). A few lines earlier he had spilled over onto the second line explaining how many dependents he had ("wife and two children and mother in part").

And that's the end of this one. It was fun finding these draft registration cards and thinking more about them. I've written this out of my own interest and to collect thoughts on this, but I hope that others, somewhere, someday, get something from this. Thanks, people of the future (or present), for reading.

 

I wrote in 2017 about the film All Quiet on the Western Front [1930], which I rewatched recently in honor of the centenary of the end of the 1914-1918 war

(See also Post-365: Scenes from the End of the Great War, Plus 100 Years.)

The 1930 film was based on a 1929 novel, Im Westen Nichts Neues ([lit. "In the West, Nothing New [to Report]") by a German veteran of the 1914-1918 war. The book was a major hit of its time.

A June 1930 printing, English translation ("All Quiet on the Western Front") was among my grandfather's books, and it is the rediscovery of it that is inspiration for this post.

Aged a not quite ninety years, here is the book as it appears today:

My grandfather died in the late 1990s but his books and other papers and files remained intact until the 2010s (as my aunt continued to reside in the house) at which time I was able to discover many of them, preserved as they were twenty years or so before, some from decades earlier still.

The oldest few books in the house I believe belonged to my grandfather's grandfather [1857-1917], which I base on years of publication, subject matter, language, and especially the font used (a few of the oldest volumes use that awful font called Fraktur). Some of the books were those my grandfather bought himself. Others somehow ended up, this way or that way, over the decades, at the house (which my grandfather, his wife, daughters, and other relatives lived in from the 1940s through the 1990s), as in those from relatives. This copy of All Quiet on the Western Front is one of those. It originally belonged to George Kosswig, my grandfather's brother.

Now, I think this is a great discovery not because it is a rare book (which it is not; it would be easy to find for free in any library, and probably without difficulty online for free somewhere in PDF form, in a pinch, if you really want the text). It is rather, I would say, an example of a "time capsule" in book form.

This book-as-time-capsule idea came to me suddenly to me from the inner cover of this copy of All Quiet. Luckily for us here in the future, my great-uncle wrote his name and date of acquisition on the inner cover, fixing it at a point in time.

Actual time capsules work on a similar principle: They are a slice of "the present" hidden away, with ordinary items from a specific date contributed by specific people, not to be looked at again for x number of years, with the idea that when it is re-opened, it will be instructive to the people of the future, a gift of the present to the future. (Speaking of which, at about age eight I contributed some baseball cards to an Arlington time capsule, but I don't remember where it was deposited or when it is to be opened...)

And so that handwritten inscription, on the inner cover, is the inspiration for this post.

I went through several conceptualizations of this, but what it has turned out to be is a look back at the 1914-1918 war, "through" 1930 (the time of book acquisition) "from" 2018 (the time of this writing) (really from the 1990s to 2010s, my own life memories, experiences/memories of people involved, family history research, and understanding of history).

We inevitably have imperfect information about the past, because we weren't there. We may have some kind of information, with varying degrees of reliability, but we lack first-hand experience; even those who do have first-hand experience may not remember key things, decades later.

An item like a book can be useful here to signal or "signpost" the way towards a little portrait of the owner/reader/purchaser at the specific moment in time he/she possessed it. I think this one does that. Hence Book-as-Time-Capsule.

For this book-as-time-capsule idea to work, of course, we need supplementary or background information.

What was going on in 1930?

For one thing, here is what the George Kosswig's younger brother, my grandfather Ernest Kosswig, looked like at the time (picture taken at his confirmation, about 1930). (Note also that this picture was taken about sixty-seven years before the first Harry Potter book came out:)

So what else was going on in 1930? Motion pictures had recently started up, with full soundtracks of spoken dialogue. One of the most successful of these early "talking pictures" was All Quiet on the Western Front, filmed in late 1929 and 1930. It premiered in some U.S. cities in the middle months of 1930, and had a general U.S. release in all markets in August 1930. It won Best Picture for year 1930. It remains a  powerful movie to watch even in the 2010s.

That is one thing we can immediately conclude: July 31, 1930, was just weeks before the film's nationwide U.S. premier. George Kosswig, my great-uncle, was "in on" the wave of interest in this book at the height of its popularity. Did he buy it or was it given to him as a gift (it was not his birthday)? I cannot be sure.

The book's popularity pre-dated the hype surrounding the movie, though. The book's sales success was immediate following its Jan. 1929 publication in German(y), where it sold hundreds of thousands of copies in its first weeks. It had been partially serialized in a newspaper in November and December 1928.

It is notable that it quickly sold very well across all the Western, former belligerent countries. These numbers I find  in an essay by Hilton Tims, in a book of essays about the novel, called Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (Harold Bloom, ed.) [Link] (p. 158):

• Over 1 million copies sold in Germany by Dec. 1929; a second million German copies sold by July 1930 (according to an article in the Irish Times)
• 300,000 copies sold in France by about late spring 1930;
• 300,000 copies sold in Britain by early 1930;
• 215,000 copies sold in the USA by spring 1930; reaching 300,000 copies sold by June 1930 (according to the first essay in World War II, Film, and History, "The Anti-War Film and the Image of Modern War," by John Whiteclay Chambers, p.14).

Kriegsschuldfrage

By 1929-1930, when the book and then film came out in succession, the academic consensus on war origins (the Kriegsschuldfrage debates [Krieg: War; Schuld: Guilt; Frage: Question]) had been resolved with the so-called Revisionists decisively winning. They rejected the argument of unique German war guilt. That is, the international historians' consensus by the mid-to-late 1920s was that the argument for unique German war guilt for the 1914 war was definitely incorrect, and not an innocent mistake but a malicious one (based, understandably in a sense, on wartime propaganda and power politics).

It was a more honest age in many ways, as the capitals involved in the 1914 disaster largely released their internal files in the years after 1918 for scholars to look at. Thorough investigations of these diplomatic documents, as they were released in the early 1920s, proved to the satisfaction of most historians of the world that Germany [was] Not Guilty in 1914 -- the title of one of the Revisionist books of this era. The consensus became rather than a single malicious actor that it was a tragedy caused by foolish behavior all around, a systemic problem and not a good-guy-bad-guy morality play. This understanding has held the mainstream position ever since.

(The reason the Kriegsschuldfrage was so significant in the 1920s was that German war guilt was written into the 1919 Peace Treaty; among the consequences of the war guilt clause was the onerous, hyperinflation-causing reparations system; that and other conditions many viewed as undermining longterm peace. The argument of unique German war guilt had never been valid, it turned out, which turned the historians' controversy into a political one, and many steps to reduce the reparations burden were taken after the Revisionists' decisive academic victory.)

Reconciliation

I think it's fair to say that by 1930, anger over the war was past; reconciliation had been achieved as evidenced by the international consensus on the war guilt question. All Quiet on the Western Front burst onto the scene in this context, which is probably a key to its international success.

When my own cultural-political consciousness began to emerge in 1990s USA, the 1914-1918 war occupied at best a minor place in the pantheon of events which we are supposed to remember and through which we are supposed to understand the world.

The 1914-1918 war narrative seems to have been "puppetized" by the 1939-1945 war narrative, the earlier war made to serve the latter war's purposes in popular historical memory, which represents a net loss of historical understanding of that which prevailed in 1930. I have come to what I think is a now-common understanding, that the 1914-1918 war caused Western Man to lose something that I don't think we have regained in the 100 years that have followed. (Maybe the next hundred will be better, but it looks likely to get worse before it gets better.)

It is not a surprise, given the reconciliation achieved by 1930, that the film was produced and treats the German soldier (civilian-soldier) so relatively sympathetically. I know of no Hollywood movie from my lifetime that treats the German soldier sympathetically. Nothing like this from any era of German history, despite plenty of good material to draw from over 2,000 years. The film is, by that merit, a time capsule of its own right: A present-day White American watching this 1930 U.S. film is liable to be surprised that a U.S.-produced, major, award-winning film like this shows the German soldier sympathetically.

The war itself is depicted as a kind of natural disaster, rather than a heroic fight against an enemy (we never see or hear the enemy speak). I believe this is All Quiet's strength as a film. We see the protagonists as civilians and soldiers -- first as the one, then as the other -- but the two roles never quite separate: They are civilian-soldiers, the same as the French they are fighting (we do see a single French soldier in one scene but he doesn't speak). It seems to me that is what getting over war and returning to peace is all about: Re-stressing the civilian part and de-stressing the soldier part, of "civilian-soldier."

As to the fate of those unfortunate millions of civilian-soldiers, Remarque ends his preface with the words; "A generation of men...were destroyed by the war."

How many were destroyed by the war?

Looking at Germany alone: Different sources I find say that Germany mobilized between 11 and 13 million men, out of a total male population of about 33 million in 1914 [all ages]. This means that a very large majority of able-bodied 18-to-50-year-olds were mobilized.

The military casualties:

• Germany lost 1.8 to 2.0 million military dead [14-18% of all mobilized] -- of which comparatively few seem to have died of the mystery Influenza epidemic. (That virus killed just over one percent of all mobilized U.S. troops in the war, the highest rate of any army due I think to bad timing, as U.S. forces were highly concentrated in training camps, bases, and cross-Atlantic transit ships during the peak of the pandemic's worst wave in 1918, allowing it to spread rapidly);
  
• 4.2 million German soldiers were wounded at least once [32-38% of all mobilized], of whom many recovered and returned to the front. But 2.7 million [21-25% of all mobilized] were wounded enough to claim and receive disability benefits from the postwar government. This does not, as far as I know, include the 700,000 taken out of service at some point in 1918 after coming down with the Spanish Influenza [Wever and van Bergen, 2014]. Some speculate that the timing of the mid-1918 Influenza wave may have been decisive in ensuring the loss of the the German Army's strategic coordinator Ludendorff's final attempt to win the war in the middle months of 1918: The Influenza put hundreds of thousands of sorely-needed veteran German troops in sickbeds and not at the front at the height of these summer offensives whereas with them, they could have broken through and taken Paris after all; so the argument goes (I am skeptical...);
  
• Over a million Germans were captured and became POWs [9-10% of all mobilized],
• Summary of Military Casualties: Accounting for the range of estimates, between one half and two-thirds of all men under arms for the Kaiserreich in 1914-1918 became casualties in one way or another, with at least 35% killed or seriously wounded (eligible for disability payments).
  

Civilian losses:

• 0.8%-1.4% of German civilians died of malnutrition due primarily to the wartime British naval blockade;
  
• Another 0.5% of German civilians died of the 1918-1919 Influenza pandemic of unknown origin (far lower than the worldwide average said to be 3%).
  
• But the biggest demographic shock of the war was not the millions dying from shells and bullets, the troubling reports of blockade-induced starvation, or the Spanish Influenza, but the alarming crash in the birthrate that led to a birth-deficit in the millions. The 1915-1919 birth deficit was not made up for by any significant post-war baby boom in Germany. These can be counted as millions more losses (3.2 million, estimated by Vandenbroucke [2012]). The same dramatic birth slump also held for France and I presume other belligerents.
  

So the German baby deficit for 1915-1919 exceeds military dead by a large margin.

I believe this is a good metaphor for the civilizational effect of that war: Major disruption causing a loss in hope for the future, a kind of metaphor for which is the millions never born at all. (Three of my grandparents were born in this time range in the USA; had their parents been under a comparable birth-crash situation -- an abrupt halving of the pre-war birth rate, it means that there a one-in-two chance a baby that "should have been born" in normal circumstances would not have been born -- if this situation had prevailed in the USA, it seems likely I would never have existed at all; in terms of probability, I would need to flip three heads in a row, a 12.5% chance, for all three of my grandparents born in those years to have actually been born.)

The baby deficit is illustrated here:

Fortunately, the war finally ended on November 11, 1918.

It is said that nearly seven million men were on German military active duty, in uniform, on November 11, 1918; their uniforms presumably still largely in passable shape even as the regime that issued them had been fraying apart for weeks. In the days before November 11, the regime had received mortal wounds at home: Mutinies, Marxist uprisings, the overthrow of the monarchy.

The seven million returned home over the coming months ("Never Defeated," as the somewhat caricature-inspiring General Ludendorff wrote again and again in rightist periodicals throughout the 1920s). Some of them famously took to political streetfighting against Marxists, whom some veterans blamed for a late-war "Stab in the Back" (Dolchstoss).

Germany, from world-leader in the arts, sciences, and technology, from awe-inspiring economy, from beaming with cultural-political optimism, from the centuries-old tradition of Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers), to gangs of communists slugging it out with gangs of militant rightists, all within five years...

All these dead, the demographic hit, the political and cultural disruptions, were all for nothing. There was no need for any general war in 1914. Diplomatic crises far more significant than the one of June-July 1914 had, in the same era, and in all eras, been resolved without war.

Back to All Quiet on the Western Front, the semi-fictionalized novel and view of the war from a Frontsoldat's perspective. The book itself in 1929/1930 was already a time capsule on one level, a picture of life circa a dozen years earlier for the typical European young man. Ninety years later, it remains valid as such.

One good thing about paper-books is that they are final. The paper-book is as a frozen moment of time. A monument built of some solid material on a hilltop, rather than a beach sand castle built within the reach of tide, that is, not subject to ongoing "review" or loss in the way that material on the Internet is.

To use another metaphor, the paper-book is the kind of "engraving on a stone tablet" we speak of proverbially; the Internet, in a parallel metaphor, would be the following set of things: A mishmash of lumps of clay around a confusing array of conveyor belts going off in all directions, with spare writing tools to make marks in the clay laying around; the clay is always malleable and often washed away; the conveyor belts sometimes lead to furnaces that solidify whatever etchings a passerby makes in the clay into 'stone' that could last years or decades, while most conveyor belts lead to oblivion; it is difficult to tell which conveyor belt is which. (Most of what I have ever written on the Internet is already lost forever; this small website itself is now five years old and even in that short time has become littered with dead links due to various issues including URL changes.)

To get around to addressing my main point: My grandfather's brother (George)'s acquisition of the book on July 31, 1930 (a Thursday) happens to have landed on a metaphorical conveyor belt that has transported it safely into my hands, ninety years later.

The book raises a question that I think I can answer:

The question is: Why does he end up with this book in 1930?

To answer this question in a full-on way is exactly the value of this book-as-time-capsule / historical signpost.

This is the answer: All Quiet, as a work of anti-war German literature, nestled itself right at a confluence of three different "family traditions," as I see it, making it completely natural that this book ends up in 19-year-old George Kosswig's hands, possibly a gift from his father or another relative. The three family traditions are contained in the three words I used to describe the book there: Anti-War; German; and Literature.

To take these three "family traditions" one at a time:

[1] Pro-Literature. There was, by 1930, a long tradition of devotion to the printed word in this family, ever since the first Kosswig ancestor on whom I have any information [b. 1857] left the village of his birth along the Saale River, a tributary of the Elbe, about the early 1870s. He got involved in bookbinding as an apprentice in Leipzig in the newly declared German Empire (sometimes called the Kaisserreich). (A 19th-century young man probably ends up around printing because of a pre-existing family orientation towards the printed word; I fully expect that earlier Kosswigs were probably not just literate but enthusiastic readers despite likely limited funds, like the young Lincoln is said to have been.)

This ancestor Kosswig passed on this publishing-oriented trade to his son, who worked in printing in the 1900s and 1910s in Connecticut.

And the interest in books and reading/writing was certainly inherited by my grandfather Ern Kosswig, who was for decades a small-time hobby writer and definitely a reader (I witnessed him read the Civil War novel Killer Angels in one sitting one summer day in the 1990s). Among other endeavors, in the 1970s he attempted to publish a comedic novel he wrote, told from the perspective of a group of anthropomorphic ants who humorously observe human behavior (in the 1990s, two animated movies very similar to his novel came out). That he kept so many books for so many decades, never dumping them as old and useless, also speaks for itself.

Being that All Quiet on the Western Front had literary value, it would have appealed to this family. Here is the first page for good measure. Its literary value is said to be its highly realist style, now seemingly characteristic of early 20th-century writing but then something new, a departure from lofty 19th-century style writing (Hemingway would do the same around the same time in the USA):

[2] Anti-War. This is something I discovered, amid the documents at my grandfather's house, that I had not been really aware of at all from any kind of personal impression. There was more than a bit of a family political tradition of non-militarism and interest in the anti-war movements (if not strictly pacifism), certainly so in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

My grandfather recorded in an autobiographical essay that his German-born grandfather was involved in this kind of politics. I discovered one of the oldest books in the collection prominently featured essays from circa 1905 by a Karl Kautsky, a leading Social Democratic or Socialist figure of the German-speaking world at the time (Kautsky would come out strongly against the Bolshevik terror-state that was being set up in Russia in the late 1910s and 1920s, and was condemned at length by Lenin).

Another book I found in the house is one I expect my grandfather inherited from his father or possibly from his grandfather. It is an extended polemic against imperialism, war-mongering, war-industry/profiteering, and militarism generally, called War, What For? published in 1912. (The much-later song "War, What is It Good For?" [1970] I presume has such a similar name by coincidence only, but who knows.) I have paged through some of this 1912 book. It must have been an obscure book for its time, but you can't argue that the author was wrong; that is, the author didn't need to wait long to say "I told you so," as the 1914-1918 disaster was just around the corner...;

All Quiet on the Western Front's war-as-tragedy theme would have fit right in this family tradition; even though of course sons and grandsons do not share the same politics as fathers and grandfathers, the tradition is there.

[3] German Identity. The Kosswig family in Connecticut was of (relatively) recent German origin as of 1930. Patrilineally, I believe the ancestors of past generations would have had primary allegiance to the former Kingdom of Saxony in that state's heyday (hey-centuries?) and probably retained a feeling of Saxon identity through the 19th century, when a variety of successor entities came about on the margins, starting with map-rearrangement organized by Napoleon, then by the Concert of Europe, and finally Prussia. My grandfather's grandfather and other ancestors on whom I have information were born Prussian subjects but were still very close to the Saxony line.

From a big picture perspective, the Kosswig and related ancestors seem to be from the region immediately west of Leipzig.

This was the heart of Germany at the time. In the early 20th century, planners built one of the world's largest train stations at Leipzig because it was considered geographically right in the  center of Germany, making for most efficient cross-country transfers. It was from this city (Leipzig) that the Kosswig ancestor had lived in through 1887, when he came to the USA.

So as of 1930, the Kosswig line had been in the U.S. for only forty-some years. There was a relatively strong connection to German cultural and religious traditions, including everyone being involved in the Lutheran church (my grandfather recorded an incident that stuck with him in which he and a boy were punished for playing marbles during the church service), and the first Kosswig male ancestor being one of the founders of the New Britain (Connecticut) Quartette Club (a German singing group).

A lot of German language was spoken, as well, but by 1930 the younger people didn't quite have a native ability in it, and my grandfather once wrote that his parents would speak English together, except when they wanted to keep something semi-secret from the kids, at which time they would switch to German.

I figure I need to include a visual here: Below is my grandparents' wedding picture. The two men in the middle of the picture are my grandfather Ern (smiling, facing my grandmother) and his older brother George, whose book has inspired this long post:

As for the 1910s itself, how would the Kosswigs in Connecticut have reacted to the 1914-1918 war during the debate over U.S. involvement?

This family and those in its immediate vicinity would have been (and I have no doubt about this) totally against U.S. intervention, including against U.S. financing of the British/French side through loans, and against the selling of war materiel thereto (both of which occurred).

(The consensus among experts, I have read, is that such a position was the clear the majority one in the USA in 1914, 1915, and through 1916, with popular opinion perhaps moving towards favor of intervention only in early 1917 with the leaking of the Zimmermann Telegram offering Mexico an alliance if the U.S. intervened against Germany [January 1917; apparently endorsed publicly by German foreign ministry March 3, 1917] and with the declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare [Feb. 1, 1917].)

The family would have been against the out-of-the-blue rebranding of Germany (or of "the Kaiser") as some kind of major U.S. enemy. As for the Kaiser, they were not likely fans; the onerous "political police" of the German Empire in the 1880s appear likely to have been responsible for the Kosswig ancestor's decision to leave Germany in 1887 (what evidence I have seen suggests he may have been co-convicted under the anti-Socialist Law for involvement in publishing proscribed material, and levied with a heavy fine).

The Kosswigs and related families in the period before April 1917 would have said that to go to war in Europe for little apparent U.S. national-interest would be to take up the same poison chalice that the major powers in Europe had taken up in 1914. Kool-Aid was invented in 1927, and the Jim Jones mass suicide event was in 1978, but if this phrasing had been around, they would have said that to go to war at that time in those circumstances would be to "drink the Kool-Aid," in the suicidal sense (i.e., leading to the kinds of major demographic and cultural disruptions that the statistics above and subsequent history bear out).

"This war is one of the most evil things to which we have sacrificed ourselves." --Franz Marc, painter, killed at Verdun.

In short, I am sure the members of this and related families would have seen the 1914-1918 war as a tragedy for all three of the reasons above, which tie back into All Quiet and what George Kosswig and others may have been thinking about the novel in 1930.

As I am not sure I have fully achieved my goal here yet, let me attempt to to end this post by tying these three themes directly back to both 1914-1918 and 1930 with All Quiet on the Western Front :

[1] Literacy: In 1914-1918, I believe the Kosswigs and related families would have seen the war as a net loss for Western civilization and thus a net loss for intellectual pursuit like the written word.

In one of the opening scenes of All Quiet (the film), we see the high school boys who had just decided to enlist together en masse proceed to gleefully rip apart their textbooks and toss the pages carelessly around the classroom in celebration, certainly a deliberate metaphor. In a later scene, a student-turned-soldier during a rear-area respite quotes some mathematical principle he had learned to an older, not-academically-oriented member of the unit, asking him whether or not he too found that mathematical principle to be fascinating. It is a pearls-before-swine moment as the older soldier replies: "What do you wanna learn that stuff for? One day you'll stop a bullet and it'll all be worthless."

Ironically (or not), a major literary success came out of the war. But the author, who (in real life) was wounded during his frontline mission laying barbed wire and spent months hospitalized, could just as easily have died of his wounds, and that literary contribution would have been snuffed out before it ever emerged. Hence the tragedy of the loss of so many millions to civilization itself.

Consider also this: "Whereas, according to an Italian source, 330 out of 1,000 recruits entering its army were illiterate, the corresponding ratios were 220/1,000 in Austria-Hungary, 68/1,000 in France, and an astonishing 1/1,000 in Germany." (From Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, ch. 5).

[2] Anti-War: In 1914-1918, the political and cultural tragedy of fighting senseless modern wars for the benefit of empires and other big-money interests  (as many anti-war voices saw it) would have been why not to get involved; in 1930, the anti-war feeling of the earlier era and of the book may have still resonated, especially if George's father bought and gave him the book.

[3] German Ancestry: In the 1914-1918 period, besides some inevitable sympathy for those extended family members in Germany and for the German nation as a whole, there would have considerable worry about the negative impact a major U.S. war effort against Germany would have on German cultural life in the USA.

The major success of All Quiet, a story told sympathetically from the German common soldier's perspective and which does not "bash" Germans really in any way, would have been appealing to this family as of 1930, by which time general reconciliation had occurred and German identity had partially recovered from its low ebb of 1917-1918. (There is really only one character who is really bashed in the film depiction: A peacetime mailman the boys know who becomes a cruel drill instructor; but even he is ultimately harmless and dealt with in a prank by the boys.)

Th German-American Council, circa late 1930s

To jump forward just a little in time, and as a kind of coda to the German ancestral-identity stream:

By the late 1930s, my grandfather as a young man and many of those around him (including his cousin Dick Schroeder) were active members of a cultural-civic group called the German-American Council, one of many such ethnocultural identity groups at the time across America.

Surviving photographs show my grandfather with his then-girlfriend (my grandmother; daughter of a German-born mother) on outings associated with the German-American Council. Here is one I found:

I find very few traces of the 1930s-era German-American Council online. The people who knew it first hand are probably all now gone. Even Dick Schroeder, pictured above as a young teenager, died in 2017 (age 91).

I do find this entry in the U.S. Congressional Record, in which a Congressman praises the German-American Council in a June 1938 speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. He praises its pro-U.S. patriotism, and enters remarks by its president, Dr. Frank Zwick into the record:

And so ends my reconstruction of how the Kosswig family would have seen the war that people tend to call World War I, both in 1914-1918 and in 1930 when the "time capsule book" that inspired this post was acquired by my great uncle, with a brief mention of the late 1930s.

I have weaved here back and forth between the two eras deliberately. The idea is that there is historical continuity, and that it is worth understanding.

I believe this is why some people are drawn to history in general, and family history in particular: The realization that life, our lives, and our meaning in life, comes to us from those who came before, that we individuals are links from past to present of something greater.

Though we may be weak and insignificant as individuals, we are part of something else, something multi-generational, something that is greater than a sum of the individuals or their individual experiences, you might say. Past-->Present-->Future is not static, but dynamic, organic, and linked together.

Which leads me to these final pictures that complete, in one sense, a link of the chain. The author of these words, with the partial subjects of these words, my maternal grandparents:

I don't look much like that anymore.

My grandfather, at the moment the picture was snapped, could not have imagined that decades later the picture would be accessible from anywhere on Earth through a computer, or through a telephone (and the defacto end of the distinction between the two, computer and phone, he probably could not have foreseen).

This post has been a multi-layered retrospective that I have attempted to anchor on that moment (Thursday, July 31, 1930) that my great-uncle inscribed his copy of All Quiet on the Western Front with his name and date.

If, ninety or so years from now, a descendant of mine finds something I have done or written, and finds it of enough value to comment on in some venue like this one, as I have done here, then the chain will be extended yet further into the future. If I could be so lucky!

And so the centenary of the ceasefire (armistice) that ended the 1914-1918 war has come and gone.

I have written on these pages before about centenary events around the tragic 1914-1918 war, including twice about Nov. 11th:

• Post 224: My Great-Grandfather's Piece of World War I (August 2014)
• Post-242: November 11th, 1918 (November 2014)
• Post 360: Armistice Day, and War Memory (November 2017)
• Various other posts mention the 1914-1918 war to some extent; search site:Yule-tide.com "1914" or site:Yule-tide.com "1918" to see these.

Scenes like this (above) were repeated across the Western Front on November 11th, 1918, according to reports of those who were there. It seems surreal that the opposing armies immediately put down their guns and began intermingling and celebrating the end of the fratricide at last, in the hours after the ceasefire.

I propose that the above photo is the best possible commemoration of the Armistice, better than any thousand-word write-up anyone could come up with; some pictures, as they say, are worth more. (Though the photograph is not from Armistice Day itself [Nov. 11th] itself, it may as well be; it closely parallels the experience of hundreds of thousands that day.)

The picture symbolizes, at one level, the triumph of humanity and fraternal feeling through/over even the worst of politicians' blunders. I think it is symbolic, too, of the kind of the European unity and friendship that "could have been" (i.e., there was never any need at all for the 1914-1918 war.)  At once both positive and tragic.

I tried to do my own small commemorations marking the exact 100th 'hourly' anniversaries of both the signing of the armistice and its much-more-famous implementation later that day (11 AM Paris time). There was some confusion to get through about "when," in today's time, 11 AM Paris time would be, tricky because of time zone changes and Daylight Savings Times going in and out of effect.

All press reports from the time say the war ended at 6 AM Washington, D.C., time and 11 AM Paris time, five hours difference:

As the hundredth 'minute' anniversary of this remarkable moment passed, I stood in front of the door about to depart to McDonald's. By 7 AM I am at the memorial to General Pershing (commander of U.S. Forces in the war) in downtown Washington, D.C. for lack of anything better to do, and not wanting to sleep through it or go about things as usual.

The small and widely ignored Pershing memorial is the closest Washington, D.C. has to a 'national' WWI Memorial, though that is changing: A private group is sponsoring a more substantial WWI memorial (picture of their promotional poster above). It will be steps west of the existing General Pershing statue (pictured above).

A group of boy scouts (pictured above) was slowly assembling at Pershing Park, apparently to practice raising the flag and marching around. They must have been doing something ceremonial later that morning/day. It was only 7 AM by this time, and a Sunday morning.

I don't expect whatever was coming up later that morning/day would have much fanfare. It is a forgotten war, after all, and a war that is hard to be very positive about. It is pretty low on the average person's radar.

So what else happened on November 11th, 1918? I keep coming back to the accounts of the surreal-sounding, party-like atmosphere of the midday hours across the front. The imagery of the front-line soldiers of the opposing armies leaving (what had just been) their firing positions, approaching the other side through (what had just been) No Man's Land, cheering, greeting one another, soon celebrating together. It was apparently a very large number who did this all across the front.

A New Year's Eve-like atmosphere, maybe, but on larger scale. More joyous than that period after a run-of-the-mill Dec. 31st 11:59 PM. (As in the New Year, though, a new era did begin symbolically at that moment....but that's another, political-cultural, story, one the men streaming across No Man's Land to greet their fellows across the other side couldn't have known.)

How can such things happen? I imagine it must have started with a hardy, curious, and/or adventurous few at first, and when they showed the way (the "Demonstration Effect" -- I am doing this and I am not being killed, so you can, too), soon thousands, hundreds of thousands, were involved. And a few shots were all it would have taken to spoil it all, yet none came from any side. It all became as a big picnic, or "European family reunion" after the dark fog of war lifted.

U.S. flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker (1890-1973), having heard the armistice would be coming down at 11 AM, snuck his plane out (up) late that morning so he could witness it. He recounts what he saw in his autobiography.

In a scene fit for an epic film, Rickenbacker had his plane was right over the front as the clock turned from 10:59 to 11:00 AM, giving him the "best seat" in the world to witness the armistice. All other Allied planes had been grounded; he was alone in the sky. Rickenbacker reports seeing the abrupt silencing of the guns, followed not long after by a few figures below moving towards the other lines. Then, more...

As more and more figures slowly streamed across No Man's Land towards the opposite side, Rickenbacker says, there was no way any longer to tell the two sides apart, as the colors of the uniforms had kind of merged. He reports seeing some of the figures below appearing to physically embrace one another (in what must have been joy at this "outbreak" of peace). These 1910s-era planes were slow and low-flying. Rickenbacker would have been able to see quite a lot.

There were five hours of daylight left that day, between the ceasefire/armistice and sunset. Those must have been the best five hours of the war for many of men on all sides. It must have seemed to the German soldier, from the scenes across the front, that a Wilsonian peace really was at hand, one without anyone needing to be vanquished or humiliated or starved. (The politicians had other plans.)

I try to imagine what it was like to be a Western Front front-line soldier who wandered over into No Man's Land in those first hours of peace. The moment you see the enemy, face to face, but he is not your enemy -- and in fact never was 'your' enemy, just a man not so unlike you yourself.

One practical problem: You can't speak his language. So I imagine there was a lot of that kind of joking-around that people who don't quite speak the same language are prone to, i.e., covering/smoothing-over linguistic gaps with generous portions of lowish-brow good humor, grins, and gifts. (I have often been in situations like this at least from a linguistic-cultural angle, and can imagine how it must have been.)

It must have been that any Frontsoldat Germans with good English or French skills (and likewise Frenchman who spoke good German, etc.) would have been immediately, newly popular among their fellows and the centers of attention, as they would have served as ad-hoc translators and facilitators of the prodigious amount of attempted olive-branch communication-as-friend going on, and the gift giving.

To return to the photograph at the start of this post: The same kind of scene would have been repeated millions of times that day, across the front. That is the November 11th we ought to remember, one that symbolizes European fraternity and unity, not the death-cult that the commemorations of this day often seem to be.

Hope for civilization after all?