Zero Hour

German Machine Gun Squad

Zero Hour  

By Georg Grabenhorst 

Univ. of South Carolina, 2006

Zero Hour is an autobiographical novel by German World War I combat veteran Georg Grabenhorst (1899–1997). Grabenhorst survived the war and later earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Kiel. He was a prolific author of both fiction and history and became active in the National Socialist movement. In 1945 he was dismissed from the regional service, deNazified in 1948, and retired in 1949.  His later works, including a two-volume autobiography, reflect strong rejections of modernism, contemporary literature, and culture.

Zero Hour has an entirely different pace and language as compared to that employed by Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front trilogy. The German title of the novel is Fahnenjunker Volkenborn after its protagonist Hans Volkenborn, an upper middle-class soldier—an officer trainee or cadet—in his late teens. As an officer trainee, he has comforts and privileges not offered to his enlisted mates, but this does not prevent his gradual descent into a depression brought on by the rigors of combat and expanding command responsibilities for his platoon.

Of particular historical importance are accounts of combat in the Ypres campaign in 1917 and the futile clashes in the woods of Aveluy in northern France the following summer as German hopes for victory faded.The battle scenes are powerfully drawn, based as they were on the author's own frontline experiences, which included being briefly buried alive by a mortar round.

Click HERE to Order

So too are the sketches of life behind the lines and on leave in a Germany quickly falling victim to food shortages and social revolution. Indeed, the novel appears to have been written as part of an attempt by the author to emerge from a serous bout of post-traumatic stress disorder, the shell shock experienced by Hans Volkenborn, whose name translates into English as "born of the people."

Georg Grabenhorst's Zero Hour equates duty with camaraderie and thereby finds a greater balance between bitterness and hawkishness than much of war fiction. 

Source: Expanded version of a review in the Sept/Oct 2009 issue of the St. Mihiel Tripwire