“Köppen’s book remains unrivalled, unsurpassed as the most advanced war novel” — Jens Malte Fischer
“Köppen’s book should find hundreds of thousands of readers” — Ernst Toller
"More courageous, more honest, more modern than Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front" — Literarische Welt, Germany
From the book:
Rapid fire: The battery becomes a machine. The “rapid fire” command causes the arms of six gunners in a battery of six guns to tear open the breech six times in sixty seconds with the precision of six machine levers.
Rapid fire: The men’s fury is channeled into the guns. Six cold metal barrels toll the death knell six times in sixty seconds. The machine thirsts for blood . . .
Adolf Reisiger, a young student full of youthful curiosity, enlists in the German Field Artillery at the outbreak of World War I. But the war he imagined quickly dissolves into mud, blood, and the grinding machinery of industrialized death. His journey through the battlefields reveals a society — and a generation — irrevocably shattered.
First published in Germany in 1930 under the title Heeresbericht (Report of the Army Command), Rapid Fire is a groundbreaking anti-war novel that fuses fiction with historical documents to lay bare the brutal realities of the First World War. Köppen’s innovative, modernist style — interweaving news clippings, official communiqués, letters and propaganda — exposes the sharp divide between the illusions maintained at home and the soldiers’ brutal reality at the front.
Rapid Fire was banned during the III. Reich for its unflinching realism. A war novel, a gripping account of battle, a breathtaking thriller of survival and endurance — and a stark testimony to how a society corrodes under years of deceit and propaganda. Rapid Fire stands as one of the most important and unflinching works of Great War literature.
“An essential book for any military library” — Colonel Jarrod Stoutenborough, United States Marine Corps, Marine Artillery Detachment, Fort Sill
English translation © 2025 Sven Dethlefs.
Original German text by Edlef Köppen (1893–1939) is in the public domain.
All rights reserved. No part of this translation may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the copyright holder.
