Given the political circumstances in Germany between the end of the First World War and the Nazis' assumption of power, any treatment of the experience of serving at the Front – literary or otherwise – was automatically political. There were vested interests on both the left and the right, but especially the latter, in making the war experience work to the advantage of ideology. Hence, in the first years of the Weimar Republic, and then again towards the end of the 1920s, the war as a literary topic was predominantly the domain of nationalist elements, all the more so because of the historical role of militarism in the Prussian ethos. For these elements, who clung to the view that the German army had remained 'undefeated in the field', the experience of the war was to be esteemed as a forcing ground for völkisch values, which would come into their own once the compromise of Weimar had been overcome.