Defeat

REISSUE / FIRST THUS. This collection of six thematically linked short stories explores German life in the trying wake of the Great War. While the stories are often labeled ‘sympathetic’, such reputation has been earned by directly confronting the visceral political realities of the era rather than merely observing their distant effects from a detached perspective like in the Berlin stories of Christopher Isherwood. The narratives were influential; Graham Greene attributed his opinions of Germany in the early 1920s to the book. The title story centers on the meeting between a British narrator and his pre-war friend, Hasso von Koekritz. The two men—who once shared dances, hunting trips in England, and duck-shooting in Germany—reflect on the startling similarities of their wartime experiences. Koekritz recalls riding past the Kaiser with the same naive confidence as the British had felt in passing their own King. The story draws a sharp distinction between military loss and true national "defeat." As Koekritz observes: "A nation that does much scrapping must get a hiding sometimes.The French had been in Berlin before, but equally we’d been in Paris." For Koekritz, the tragedy is not the loss of the war, but the loss of the future. His personal "defeat" is realized when he is murdered by a gang of French-backed separatists—his death is a symbolic end to the hope of a peaceful, democratic Germany. The first edition of Defeat was published in 1924 by Constable (Boni & Liveright in the US) and was reprinted in 1925, with the title "Isn’t Life Wonderful": Defeat & Other Stories. This printing comes just as the coals and ashes of the First World War were starting to reheat, and with a new introduction by Harold Nicholson. A writer and politician, Nicholson joined Sir Oswald Mosley and his recently formed New Party and stood unsuccessfully for Parliament in 1931. Nicolson broke with Mosley after the latter formed the British Union of Fascists in 1932. Nicholson was one of the relatively few MPs both alert and attempting to alert England to the full threat of fascism in this time; when Chamberlain returned from Munich in 1938, he was one of the handful of MPs to remain seated in Parliament. Moss was an officer in the Grenadier Guards from 1905—rising to the rank of Major during the War—until 1919 when he left the army to write full time. His first book, Sweet Pepper (1923) was set in the decaying Austria-Hungarian Empire and became a best-seller—there were at least five printings of the US edition and it ran to at least the 75th thousand in the UK. Defeat was his second book. "Isn't Life Wonderful!", the penultimate story in the collection, was made into an acclaimed film by American director D. W. Griffith in the mid-1920s. Copies of any edition, including this significant re-issue edition, are elusive in the attractive jacket. Publisher’s orange cloth boards with black lettering to spine and outline to front cover, original dust jacket on thick card stock. BOOK: Boards a little faded; page edges a little toned, spotting to endpapers, some foxing to front-matter though text block predominantly clear. DJ: Dust jacket full, with attractive lettering and photograph of statue to front cover (of Kaiser Wilhelm???); price-label scratched off quite abashedly to spine, which is also darkened, and some scratched more gently in places (over the top of 'E' of DEFEAT) to front cover, with closed tearing to hinges at spine ends and wear to extremities. Scarcely found in any state, still presents quite handsomely on thick paper stock. It is almost certain the jacket design has changed from previous impressions on account of the change of publishers, though no other examples are available for comparison.…