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Stilgebauer, Edward

Entry updated 28 November 2022. Tagged: Author.

(1868-1936) German editor, journalist and author, whose expression of pacifist sentiments during World War One may have influenced his departure from Germany; his pacifist novel, Inferno: Roman aus dem Weltkrieg (1916; trans C Thieme as Love's Inferno 1916), was banned in his native land, and he lived in Italy from 1917 until his death. In 1938 he was posthumously stripped of his PhD by the Nazis, and his oeuvre as a whole was banned. Das Schiff des Todes (1917; trans M T H Sadler as The Ship of Death: A Novel of the War 1918) traces the passage of the great liner Gigantic in its Ship of Fools passage eastwards across the Atlantic, until it is sunk after a mysterious personage, who has claimed the ship will not sink while he is on board, and whose sway over his fellow passengers may be due to Telepathy, leaves the ship at Brent, and the ship is torpedoed by a German submarine; to this point, analogies with the sinking of the Lusitania are visible, if distracted by plotting. In the second half, the captain of the submarine, as punishment, is subjected to thirteen successive Reincarnations, and is unable to die properly (see Wandering Jew). The overblown intensities of this tale perhaps demonstrate the difficulty of grasping so close to the event the realities of the Great War. [JC]

Johannes Edward Alexander Stilgebauer

born Frankfurt am Main, Germany: 19 September 1868

died San Remo, Italy: 18 December 1936

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