Customer Reviews

Count Not the Dead: The Popular Image of the German Submarine

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Professor Hadley's 1995 historiography of a century of writings about the German U-Boat in history, cinema and fiction is a groundbreaking account. For the first time the ordinary reader is able to see a country's entire efforts in a popular and complex field of work. The reader is also allowed into the worlds of the veteran, the theorist, the writer, the publisher and filmmaker, and the commercial and academic scenes they inhabit. By simply using a chronological approach, Hadley covers almost all the books, documentaries, novels, and much other media about the U-Boat from 1895 to 1995. He however does more than compile a large set of book reviews. Hadley places each book in a theoretical framework, of interest to both the literary academic and the general reader. He places each work in the context of its times, the other works of its era, and the changing social, emotional and political situation. We are given in this few hundred pages a history of Germany's relationship to the sea, to its armed forces, and above all its submarine forces and men, in a book open to all yet firmly grounded in literary theory and academic study. Apart from a few subjects not covered [such as books about other navies, and a brief equivalent discussion of other national naval genres], there is little to criticise in it. Hadley for one does not link or compare controversies in the English-speaking maritime world with those of the German scene. Hadley's privileged position as a Canadian naval historian and professor of German literature combine in the book of a lifetime. No-one in this subject has done this before or since.

i do agree that there has yet to be a work like this and in that the authors basis is very interesting.to have reveiwed all of these works at times i felt the author had little understanding of the kreigsmarine of ww2.and for some one who he devots so much time to the author clearly should have known that herbert werner never received the knights cross much less from the hands of donitz.a little disappointed in that he dismisses nearly all of the wartime works as "nazi" propaganda. alot of monday morning quarterbacking the decisions made in the conduct of the german naval war.this book really is more for the literature historian not the military or u-boat