Swiss Publisher Completes Reprints of Waugh Fiction

The Swiss publisher Diogenes Verlag has completed the republication in German of all of Waugh’s fiction (including collected stories). The project was brought to conclusion in March to mark the 50th anniversary of Waugh’s death. It began in 2013 with Brideshead Revisited (Wiedersehen mit Brideshead) and ends, appropriately, with Sword of Honour (Ohne Furcht und Tadel, literally “Without Fear and without Reproach.”) This last volume includes a translation of Waugh’s 1964 preface, explaining the recension of his War Trilogy, that was missing from the original German version published in 1981. The text of the novel is the original translation by Werner Perterich.  A review of the novel by the German Press Agency (dpa) has appeared in German newspapers, including the Muenstersche Zeitung. The review ranks the book with Brideshead, The Loved One and Handful of Dust. Here’s the conclusion (edited Google Translate version; comments or corrections would be appreciated):

It is the wonderful mix of British and black humor that makes the book both serious and entertaining. In literature, as in art generally, it is nothing new to come across the horrors of war expressed satirically. In Waugh it happens more casually that  Crouchback’s participation in the war with noble objectives has the opposite effect.