Crime and Punishment (Page 6)

Nossack and the Berlin diarist maintain an understated, factual tone that is in keeping with the trauma; they sensed that the catastrophe itself was enough, that they didn't need exaggerated laments or special literary effects. The diary of a German soldier who fought in Russia, which will appear in English translation later this fall, A Stranger to Myself provides a telling counterexample to the spare texts of these professional writers. Drafted during the war, Willy Peter Reese is one of the few soldiers who kept an extensive diary of his experiences on the Eastern front. (The Wehrmacht discouraged the writing of diaries, fearing that valuable intelligence might fall into enemy hands.) Unskilled yet literarily ambitious, Reese gives us a wildly subjective, at times delirious, account of the hunger, arctic cold and fear that beset the German troops in the disastrous campaign against the Red Army. Very little of the world around him emerges with any sharp contours. His head is filled with Rilke and Jünger, with metaphysical speculations on death and war as "purifying," "elevating" experiences. The brute materiality of combat and bodily need sometimes bring him back to earth, but the minute his fear or hunger wanes he reverts to misty, inward-looking ruminations. He notes almost nothing of the enemy populations around him; no Russian civilians, no Jews, no houses with kitchens and beds and children. A rare exception is his brief remark about a Russian woman whose breasts the soldiers smeared with shoe polish before making her dance for their amusement.

Was Reese a victim? A victim of Nazi propaganda, Hitler's megalomania and the lack of military planning that sent him and millions of other young Germans to war without adequate clothing, food or medical supplies? The question seems at once too simple and grossly inappropriate. Reese remains silent about the atrocities he must have witnessed (or helped to commit) against unarmed Russians and Jews; he and millions of other Germans helped wage a criminal, racist war. However, his diary doesn't allow us to cast him in the faceless role of "enemy" soldier and unfeeling or sadistic perpetrator. Instead we see a young, naïve man full of hopes and plans; an aspiring poet who rages against the role of "killing machine" that he has been forced into; and finally, a soldier who is oblivious to the suffering around him and does what he is told.

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