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Originally Posted by Hinrich Schwab
I think what makes this work draw so much venom is that people expected a recreation of events while the book is pretty much a romanticization of them.
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I think the problem lies in the fact that Werner, or his publicist, claimed that it
was fact. It's not the poetic license that causes a bad reaction, it's the pretending that there was none.
Quote:
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Likewise with Das Boot, Werner wrote this decades after the war and admitted in the book that he destroyed his journals on one of his patrols. As long as the book is not taken too seriously, it is good. Its scholastic merit is negligible except as an example of literature.
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Here I disagree. Buchheim said that his account was fiction, loosely based on fact. That makes all the difference.