Week 8 Discussion
For week 8, we turn to the German perspective of the Western Front and introduce the US to the war. Our questions for this week refer back to these two perspectives, asking you to work with Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel and Alan Seeger’s poem
“I Have a Rendezvous with Death.”
(ATTACHED)
- In your opinion, does Ernst Jünger glorify the violence of World War One in Storm of Steel or does he mercilessly describe it? Why?
- How do Jünger’s descriptions of the war from the German perspective compare to the French or British perspectives seen in Chevallier’s Fear or Graves’s Goodbye to All That? Please choose one passage from Storm of Steel to refer to in your answer.
- Howard describes in Chapter 6 how the US under Woodrow Wilson sought to initiate peace negotiations for the war. How did the Allies’ peace terms differ from those of the German High Command, and what were some of the main points of contention between the two sets of peace terms?
- In your opinion, what makes Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” one of the most poignant poems about the war and in what ways is it different from, say, the poems that Siegfried Sassoon was beginning to write in 1916?
Alan Seeger (1888-1916)
I Have a Rendezvous with Death
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath—
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
God knows ’twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear …
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
**Alan Seeger was an American poet who volunteered to fight in France and was killed in 1916
(before America’s entry into the war)**