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Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 45.2 (2022)
Literature and War  
(An Introduction)
Igor Žunkovič
European literature and world literature are permeated with war and 
wartimes from the very beginning. Gilgamesh kills the sacred bull of 
the goddess Ishtar and Achilles subdues the Trojans and kills Hector. 
Both heroes of the oldest literary works, Gilgamesh and Achilles, strive 
for immortality, and both of these desires lead to murder and war. But 
the Epic of Gilgamesh and The Iliad, amidst the design of a world of 
heroic ethics that enjoins the attainment of immortality by overcoming 
the enemy, also show scenes of self-reflection in which they ponder the 
purpose of their actions in remarkably similar ways. Thus Utnapishtim 
makes immortality for the seeking Gilgamesh: “The image of Death 
cannot be depicted. / (Yes, you are a) human being, a man (?)! / After 
Enlil had pronounced the blessing, / the Anunnaki, the Great Gods, 
assembled. / Mammetum, she who forms destiny, determined desti-
ny with them. / They established Death and Life, / but they did not 
make known ‘the days of death’.” (The Epic of Gilgamesh 90) Similarly, 
Achilles answers Odysseus, who persuades him to return to battle: “He 
that fights fares no better than he that does not; coward and hero are 
held in equal honour, and death deals like measure to him who works 
and him who is idle” (Homer) 
Like war, doubt about its meaning and doubt about the expediency 
of killing are also themes in world literature. Seen in this light, war 
literature is often also anti-war literature.
Literary studies attempt to understand war in literature through lit-
erary historical analysis, narratological analysis, and cultural interpreta-
tion. In the first, we look for the characteristics of literary discourse of 
war and its connections and differences with other discourses; in the 
second, we look for literary representations of fighting and war; and in 
the third, we look for the cultural context of literary representations of 
war, such as trauma in literature. Among all three aspects, however, the 
most important feature of war literature is its experiential dimension. 
Literary treatments of war have their own truth, which neither history 
books nor essays nor witness testimonies can achieve in equal measure. 
Their truth is the truth of the individual who experiences the war in 
the context of his or her personal circumstances, colored in many ways, 
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PKn, letnik 45, št. 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2022
such as by his or her gender, social situation, family and national per-
spective, existential reflection, experience of death and mortality, and 
also of meaning, hope, nostalgia, and love.
Literature can, of course, address the economic, social, or ideologi-
cal causes of war, the true goals of the warring parties, and the historical 
consequences of wars, but literature’s real job seems to be to show how 
individuals find themselves in these historical consequences, goals, and 
situations. Literature is about more than facts: It is about descriptions 
of the real experiences of an individual or about experiences that seem 
plausible and compelling to the reader. Through reading, we know and 
experience war as others see it—we know and experience the glory of 
war, but also suffering and helplessness, friendship and brotherhood, 
but also intolerance and hatred.
Therefore, the impact of war literature is never only esthetic, 
but also social, moral and psychological. In my paper on Svetlana 
Aleksijevič’s Chernobil Prayer, I note that esthetics is a catalyst that, 
especially in literary texts, enables and perhaps even triggers experi-
ences such as empathy and identification in the reader. Given the 
historical moment in which we find ourselves, we are aware that 
the moral and psychological implications of reading are often fore-
grounded, especially in war literature. We are once again living in 
Europe in a time that propagates certain authors, bans others, spreads 
individual opinions and views, and censors others. As a literary theo-
rist, as cruel and ruthless as this may sound, I fully understand this, 
because I know how literature works; as a reader, however, I strictly 
reject all censorship and propaganda, because they restrict my free-
dom and offend my moral judgment.
A little over a year ago, when we were preparing the thematic issue 
on literature and war, we could not imagine that it would become—
apart from discussing war literature in the European context—also 
necessary to think about literature in the times of war. Also, all papers 
predate the escalation of the war in Ukraine, although one of them 
touches on it indirectly through geographical and historical references 
and another one addresses it directly. Therefore, the question of the 
role of literary studies in war may be relevant—this thematic issue 
shows that reading literature in wartime is extremely important, but 
also that scholarly engagement with literature is socially, psychologi-
cally, and morally important.
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PKn, letnik 45, št. 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2022 Igor Žunkovič :    Literature and War (An Introduction)
The thematic section “Literature and War” consists of eight articles by 
four Slovenian and four foreign authors. The topics of the articles are 
diverse and range from strategies for teaching war literature to the cre-
ation of a historical memory of war. The methods used, which is char-
acteristic of the methodological pluralism of modern literary studies, 
are also diverse—from hermeneutic to imagological to comparative-
literary-historical.
The article by Vanesa Matajc deals with two novels about the World 
War II period, namely Ko golobice izginejo by Finnish author Sofi 
Oksanen and Nokturno za Primorsko by the Slovenian Alojz Rebula. 
The author compares the textual strategies of dealing with memory 
and half-past history in relatively modern novels with the strategies 
of accessing the past developed by contemporary historiography. She 
finds that the strategies used in both novels are very similar in content, 
especially by introducing new, previously silenced topics into the col-
lective memory of the community.
Kristina Bojanović, through an analysis of Levinas’ philosophy of 
otherness and using examples from war novels by Eli Wiesel, Erich 
Maria Remarque, and David Albahari, interprets war as the absence 
or suspension of morality. The author emphasizes the importance of 
literature as a medium that expresses the personal aspect of this suspen-
sion, that is, according to Levinas, the interruption of the continuity of 
personality. But the end of the war as an interruption of the continuity 
of personality also means a difficult and traumatic return of the per-
sonality, especially through memory. In this sense, she understands the 
process of remembering—including cultural memory—as the respon-
sibility of the survivor (Wiesel) or the descendants (Albahari). In this 
experience, Kristina Bojanović, in accordance with Levinas’ derivation 
of ethics, sees the path of peace as the existence of a self without egoism 
and selfishness.
In their article Katarzyna Jakubowska-Krawczyk and Marta 
Zambrzycka take a similar methodological approach as Matajc and, 
in part, Smolej, in that their comparison is based on a thematic and 
motivic analysis of the texts. The authors discuss a number of contem-
porary novels about the war in Donbass, focusing on two novels, The 
Pension by Serhiy Zhadan and The Eastern Syndrome by Julie Ilyukhe. 
In the context of these two novels, the authors are particularly inter-
ested in the image of home, which they understand either metaphori-
cally or literally as a place or even a house. The authors emphasize the 
individualized perspective of the novels, which depicts the fate of the 
individual in contrast to and in distinction from the broader historical, 
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PKn, letnik 45, št. 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2022
political, and social contexts of the war. The image of home is thus a 
trace of the individual’s identity formation, his relationship to himself 
and also to others, permeated by images of war and marked by trauma 
characterized by loneliness, homelessness, fear, and mistrust.
Tone Smolej performs a traditional imagological analysis of three 
Slovenian novels about World War II. The author is interested in 
the little explored image of a German officer in Slovenian literature, 
namely in the novels Bele so vse poti by Miško Kranjec, Ukana by Tone 
Svetina, and In ljubezen tudi by Drago Jančar. Each officer, Kranjec’s 
Wutte, Svetina’s Wolf and Jančar’s Mischkolnig, is treated compara-
tively and comprehensively, so that many interesting parallels can be 
seen between them, which probably point to some distinctive features 
of the discourse of war in literature. For example, all three have rela-
tionships with Slovenian girls, have Slovenian roots, or are members of 
the German minority in Slovenia, which makes them well acquainted 
with their working environment during the war. They are intellectuals 
who, as Smolej notes, go from being representatives of the idealistic 
culture of poets and thinkers to members of the imperialistic culture of 
judges and rabbis during the war.
Milosav Gudović examines Heidegger’s understanding of indi-
vidual Hoelderlin hymns, particularly the hymn Gedaechtnis and the 
hymn Wie an einem Feiertag, from which he deduces the possibility of 
overcoming the war, which was, after all, the context of Heidegger’s 
exploration of Hoelderlin’s poetry. Heidegger is probably also looking 
for a way to confront a man with himself, a war of a man with himself 
that could mean victory over the lowest passions of the human soul. 
Such a war is not about hatred, but about remembering the unity and 
transcendence lost in a total war. For the whole community this hap-
pens on a day of celebration when the original bonds of its members 
with each other and at the same time with transcendence are restored.
Časlav Koprivica also opens up the theme of self-questioning in 
wartime through a phenomenological treatment of the war essays of 
Stanislav Krakow and Ernst Juenger. The author’s key concept for 
understanding war as human behavior is a situation, or a wartime situ-
ation, which he understands in terms of Heidegger’s philosophy of 
appropriation, that is, a situation in which man not only finds himself 
but also lives and works out of it. He presents the uniqueness of the 
war situation through the testimonies of two authors who experienced 
such a situation in the trenches of the World War I. Their findings are 
indeed shocking, as they show, according to Koprivica, that the enemy 
exists only when he is killed.
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PKn, letnik 45, št. 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2022 Igor Žunkovič :    Literature and War (An Introduction)
The last two articles touch on cognitive and pedagogical theoretical 
understandings of literature to explain specific practical aspects of the 
use and impact of war literature on readers. Igor Žunkovič explores 
the question of how reading literary texts about war differs from read-
ing non-literary historiographical or essayistic texts on the same topic. 
Based on recent neurocognitive findings about the ways of reading lit-
erary texts and by examining the case of testimonial prose by Svetlana 
Aleksijevič, the author concludes that the richness of literary reading 
comes primarily from the strategic narrative features of literary texts, 
while esthetics serves as a catalyst for specific effects of literary reading 
such as empathy and identification.
Anja Mrak examines excerpts from the high school Reader 3 and 
related didactic tools. The author focuses on exploring the broader ethi-
cal and pedagogical implications of literary reading on murder, sexual 
abuse, stigmatization, and responsibility for crime. She notes that suc-
cessful strategies do not neglect context, are linguistically sensitive, and 
do not generalize blame. Mrak sees literature as an eminent space for 
opening up these challenging ethical and social issues, which require 
sophisticated didactic strategies that take into account the context of 
reading (sociopolitical interpretation) and the reader (possible personal 
experiences, personal characteristics, etc.).
WORKS CITED
The Epic of Gilgamesh. Trans. Maureen Gallery Kovacs. Palo Alto: Stanford University 
Press, 1989.
Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Samuel Butler. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2199/2199-
h/2199-h.htm#chap09. Access 14. 6. 2022.