In his memoir Als wär's ein Stück von mir (As if it Were Part of Myself, 1966), Carl Zuckmayer discusses the impossibility of writing about war: “Ich habe kein Kriegsbuch geschrieben und keine Kriegsgeschichte erzählt. Mir schien es unmöglich, das mitzuteilen – vergeblich, das als Wirklichkeit Erlebte, sei es in einem verklärten, heroischen, kritischen Licht, wiederzugeben oder auch nur sachlich davon zu berichten” (I did not write a book about war or tell a war story. It seemed impossible to communicate this – futile to reproduce what I experienced as real, either in an idealized, heroic, critical light or even to report it in a matter of fact way). In his film Ulysses' Gaze (1995), set during the war in the Balkans, Theodoros Angelopoulos conveys the same topos visually. Instead of exposing us to a scene of cruel butchery, Angelopoulos shows a stark white screen. Like many others before them, Zuckmayer and Angelopoulos suggest that war is ineffable, that no representation can do justice to the violence and terror of war. And yet, flying in the face of this claim to unrepresentability is the fact that war forms the subject of countless novels, dramas, poems, and films.