Moskva : Roman
Beograd: RAD, 1953.
Illustrated by Map endpapers. Hardcover. Good with no dust jacket. Item #15550
Covers soiled and rubbed, well toned text but not brittle, edgeworn, otherwise light wear. Solid hardcover. ; Serbian language translation of Theodor Plievier's novel Moskau, the second written but first chronologically of his World War II eastern front trilogy - Moskau, Stalingrad, Berlin. Plevier's World War One experiences in the German navy infused his anti-war, progressive novels of the early 1930s, which led to a Nazi ban on his work and his flight into exile in the Soviet Union. He returned to eastern Germany in 1945, and fled to western Germany in 1947. His WWII trilogy is strongly anti-war, condemning the both the Hitler and Stalin regimes for the wanton destruction and brutality their totalitarian regimes unleashed, as well as not sparing the German people of war guilt for having supported and encouraged the Nazi regime. His Stalingrad novel sharply condemns the German officers who were indifferent to the "heroic" massacre of their soldiers during the final three weeks after the refusal of the Russian terms of surrender led to a gruesome and futile battle to the death. "As in Stalingrad, the vivid description in Moscow of the immense suffering caused by the German attack on the Soviet Union, and by the Soviet regime, its historically accurate recreations of the battles of Bialystok and Minsk, and the immediacy with which it shows the chaos and terror of war, contributed to the success of the novel." - Jennifer E Michaels; "The War in the East: Theodor Plievier's Novels Moscow, Stalingrad, and Berlin" in Visions of War: World War II in Popular Literature and Culture; page 42. It is interesting to notice that despite the author's condemnations of Stalin's policies, this Serbian language translation was published under the Tito regime the same year as the German original. Quite uncommon edition of Plievier's powerful anti-war novel. ; 505 pages.
Price: $69.95