AustLit

Gossip from the Forest is a concentrated fictional account of the peace talks that took place in Compiegne Forest in November 1918. The story focuses on the highest-ranking German negotiator, liberal pacifist Mattias Erzberger. According to the New York Times Book Review's Paul Fussell, the novel version 'is a study of the profoundly civilian and pacific sensibility beleaguered by crude power.... it is absorbing, and as history it achieves the kind of significance earned only by sympathy acting on deep knowledge.'

The film, which screened on the 29 July 1979, was part of a British television series called Screenplay, a series of discrete films by British script-writers.