But all this was far removed from Krenek, who was a reluctant soldier and was seeking to remain as inconspicuous as possible to get by with a minimum of effort. He was bored with his training, which was so easy that although he made no effort to excel, he ranked thirtieth in a class of three hundred. To pass the time he read a great deal, some of it sentimental tales of imperiled chastity and miraculous religious conversions by such now deservedly forgotten figures as Paul Keller, Peter Rosegger, Rudolph Hans Bartsch, and Enrica von handel-Mazzetti. And to ensure that his disaffection did not go unnoticed, on his tram rides Krenek made a point of conspicuously reading the heavily censored paper of the leftist Social Democrats, Die Arbeiter Zeitung (The workers’ newspaper), and Karl Kraus’s satirical antimilitarist periodical Die Fackel (The torch). During this period, too, he attended his first public reading (of King Lear) by Kraus, who was to become the strongest influence on his own writing, stronger even than the classics. By these means and his composing he endured the six months of training and in October 1918 was assigned, through his father’s efforts, to the arsenal, where he registered and stored surplus arms. The work was so light that he was able to write music while on duty and, again as a deliberate show of disaffection, to read Henri Barbusse’s bitter and revolutionary war novel Das Feuer (Le feu, later famous in English as Under Fire).
Stewart, John L. Ernst Krenek: The Man and His Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Print.
What a passive way to affect change.