Wilhelm Lamszus: Oracle of Doom

In 1912, Wilhelm Lamszus published his anti-war novel The Human Slaughterhouse. It was a vision of the Armageddon of World War I still to come. The book was written for a young audience, but received general interest and much acclaim. It became an unlikely bestseller and a thorn in the side of the Kaiser.

Wilhelm Lamszus

The success of the book confirmed Wilhelm Laszus in his hope to warn humanity of impending disaster. “The Human Slaughterhouse” was published by Alfred Janssen Verlag in Berlin and Hamburg. It had an enormous echo. In a few months, the 110-page novel had been reprinted 70 times. After three months, 100,000 books had been sold. In 1913, a reduced-price "popular edition" of 20,000 copies was instantly sold out. In the same year, the book became available in an English translation with a starting edition of 10,000 copies. It was quickly published in French, Danish, Czech, Finnish and Japanese, too. The importance of the novel was recognized by publishers in all languages: The French translation was done by the eminent novelist Henri Barbusse; the Danish translation contained a foreword from Martin Andersen; and a later German edition was prefaced by an introduction by Carl von Ossietzky.

Among German Social Democrats, the popularity of the publication was extremely high. Shortly after its first release, excerpts from the book appeared in print in the party newspaper Hamburger Echo. They were also published in Stuttgart’s socialist weekly newspaper Die Neue Zeit. Editors praised the author emphatically.

As a matter of course, book and author were celebrated at the 5th German Peace Congress in Berlin as well as on the 19th International Peace Conference in Geneva. Publisher Bruno Wille said of the novel that it was a book sized pamphlet which should be distributed all over the country. The 1911 Nobel Peace Prize winner Alfred Hermann Fried was the founder of the German Peace Society. He wrote: This book should come into millions of hands. It will become one of the sacred books of mankind.

But the triumph with the intelligentsia was followed by repression by militaristic bullies. His Imperial and Royal Highness Crown Prince Wilhelm of the German Empire intervened directly with the Senate in Hamburg. He demanded that Wilhelm Lamszus be dismissed from his teaching post immediately. Hamburg only caved in partly to imperial pressure and banned the sale of the book for a short period. But to be sure, the senate set its secret police to spy on the author. The reports are still available in Hamburg archives. Secret policemen came dressed as mourners to the funeral of Wilhelm Lamszus' father in June 1914. The spooks filed all reviews and newspaper reports about The Human Slaughterhouse meticulously. With so much work, they still failed to incriminate him. With no proof of him being a public enemy, his expulsion from school and teaching post was impossible.

The reactionary press opened full fire on him Daily Mail style, lots of bombast and little truth. They denounced Wilhelm Lamszus as unpatriotic, a weakling, a nerveless coward, an anarchist, a syndicalist and a revolutionary. The escalation in the press finally kicked the Hamburg Senate into action. They feared riots and protests in the street and promoted the teacher out of the centre of the storm: Wilhelm Lamszus was commissioned to travel to North Africa. His task was completely spurious. He was to study the situation of Germans in the French Foreign Legion. The senate effectively exiled him on a state pension.

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Must Read Classic: Wilhelm Lamszus

Wilhelm Lamszus was the visionary who wrote the most realistic description of World War I two years before it started. He also managed to do this without any hero clap trap and emotional arms selling. He stuck to the bloody, gory details he foresaw so correctly. It's no wonder Hollywood never wanted to do the movie.

In “The Human Slaughterhouse,” Wilhelm Lamszus told the fate of a young family man and father enthusiastically marching to the fields of promised glory. The war would be waged against Germany’s hereditary enemy France. With uplifting and stirring martial music, he and his comrades are sent off to fight for king and country, or more correctly Emperor and German Empire. Prior to the cattle like transport to the front, the soldiers attend mass. It is held solely to consecrate their weapons of slaughter in church. In the name of God the Merciful, "He blessed our guns, that their expensive balls may make it count, that they may not get lost blown into empty air, that every precious cartridge may hit a hundred people and tear them to pieces all at once."

The protagonist of the novel is left nameless by Wilhelm Lamszus. Another prophetic twist, as we all know the graves of unknown soldiers just too well. At the front, he arrives after long marches through blood and iron and for the first time is confronted with death: "A cold fist touched us on scared hearts."

This darkly poetic style doesn't last much further into the novel. Modern war knows no poetry, only destruction. "We timidly peep out over the mounds. Has red hell opened? It screams and shrills and brings forth wild and boundless yells so unnatural that we huddle closer to each other ... and trembling, we see our faces and our uniforms were red with wet spots, and clearly visible we had meat pieces on our stuff," The soldier discovered "something white" on the dark sand: "a nameless torn off hand ... and there ... and there ... pieces of meat still attached to bits of uniform - and we recognize it, and horror descends on us: Out there are arms, legs, heads, torsos ... they howl into the night, the whole regiment is there torn to pieces, a lump of human flesh that cries to heaven ..." In the end, the protagonist also dies and is dumped into a mass grave. Nameless.

Wilhelm Lamszus uses language that points forward in its insistence to the great adventure novels of the post World War I period: to Henri Barbusse’s “Fire”, to Arnold Zweig’s “Case of Sergeant Grisha” and Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” as well as to Gabriel Chevallier’s “Fear”. Despite it all, in Wilhelm Lamszus' novel there is still hope left that it would be possible to avert the great disaster and to prevent the war.

For anyone thinking that war is something heroic, this book is a must read. And it should be on every school curriculum all over the world. The harmless little weapons of the World War I have long since been put to the museum and have been replaced by really destructive weaponry. In that sense, the book only heightens in horror if you look at it in its historical connotation.

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Lost and Found: Britannic's Lost Organ
Surviving Shipwreck Three Times

Wilhelm Lamszus: Human Slaughterhouse

Wilhelm Lamszus wrote a disturbing prophecy with his bestseller "The Human Slaughterhouse – Pictures of the Coming War". In 1912, the German teacher anticipated the horrors of World War I in his novel.

In 1908, the German philosopher Rudolf Eucken won the Nobel Prize for Literature; in 1910, the German novelist Paul Heyse followed him in this honor; in 1912, the playwright Gerhart Hauptmann was another German following both of them. But none of them, nor any other known German poet, writer, author or scholar, wrote of or against the threat of an impending world war. The government and the arms industry it belonged to saw to it that there was no fame to be gained in telling the truth. Parallels to today are not completely impossible.

At the turn of the last century, a lot of generally pacifist writings were publishes, such as Bertha von Suttner's famous novel “Lay Down Your Arms!” published in 1889 or “The History of War and the Future of Peace” by French physician Charles Richet published in 1907. They were in a minority and published in the sense you would publish the latest interpretation of Nostradamus: as curiosities which also sold a few books. But for the exponents of exalted modern literature, war was not an issue except to idolize and adulate it much like today’s print media and games console producers do. And so it was left to an elementary school teacher from Hamburg to utter the great warning. His novel, you may call it his prophecy, “The Human Slaughterhouse - Pictures of the Coming War” was published in the summer of 1912. It triggered a scandal, or rather a series of scandals.

Wilhelm Lamszus’ slender work had been intended for a young adult readership, but it still amazes by its eloquence and visionary description of the world war horrors that would unfold two years later. His vision is more realistic than any of the hero mongering movies produced by government agencies for lots of money under the guise of a free market.

Wilhelm Lamszus was born in Altona in 1881. He grew up there as a single child of a shoemaker. He discovered early that he was passionate for education. In 1902, he joined the public school service of Hamburg as a teacher. He became part of a group of teaching rebels that went against an education system they perceived and recognized as completely rusted and inhumane; a system that was nothing more than the breeding ground and recruiting station for the army. At that time, he wrote educational pamphlets exposing the shortcomings of the system. Their style, polemic force and emphasis carried them far beyond contemporary literature.

Wilhelm Lamszus had the idea for “The Human Slaughterhouse” while on a military reserve training course. "What a marvel of technology people had invented and constructed," he wrote later about the beginnings of his famous book. "The war machine had become ingenious, had developed into an art form. Someone was allowed to let a machine gun purr and it squirted bullets denser than rain falls! As if death had thrown its scythe on the scrap heap and had become a mechanic instead!"

Further reading
Evacuation From Yalta 1919
Lost and Found: Britannic's Lost Organ
Surviving Shipwreck Three Times