Guest review by Leslie Wilson: WE GERMANS by Alexander Starritt

 

"The great strength of this part of the novel is that it makes the soldiers, and particularly Meissner, real people. Not monsters, but human beings who might be ourselves under other circumstances."

Leslie Wilson is the author of two novels for adults and three for young adults. Last Train from Kummersdorf was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Branford Boase Award; Saving Rafael was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and Highly Commended for the Southern Schools Book Award. The first two deal with Nazi Germany: The War’s Not Over Yet is just out as a Kindle e-book and is set at the time of the Russian blockade of Berlin in 1948. Leslie Wilson is half German, was brought up bilingual, and has spent considerable amounts of time in Germany.

My grandfather fought in Ukraine, though only up till 1943, but unlike the fictional grandfather here, my Opa never spoke to me or to my brother about his experiences (or anything he might have perpetrated). In fact, since he was an officer, his experience would have been different from those of the ordinary Landser, or squaddies. But when I read Alexander Starritt’s description of those men, some of them only lads, ‘fleeing on foot, broken, bedraggled, our tanks blown up, our artillery abandoned, our good name blackened for generations, our friends and brothers-in-arms buried in hostile soil', I did remember my mother’s description of my grandfather returning from the Front, haggard, unshaven, dressed in rags, drinking morosely in the kitchen. I also remember watching Gone with the Wind, when the movie showed the shattered Confederate army limping back, and my mother whispered to me: ‘That’s what our soldiers looked like when I saw them retreating.’ By the time she saw that, the soldiers had been beaten back to Graz, with the Russians hard on their heels. All the same. Not only defeated, but on the wrong side of history.

Meissner, the protagonist of We Germans, is one of a group of soldiers who are authorised by their captain to go hunting for a ‘food depot’ which, it’s rumoured, is about to be abandoned to the enemy. They don’t even half believe in its existence, but by now (1944) supplies aren’t getting to them and the ordinary soldiers, at least, are starving. Some of them are shooting themselves, or just wandering out to let the Russians kill them. The survivors will do anything if they think it might just fill their bellies.

What the soldiers first happen on, though, are the inhabitants of an entire village who have been strung up on ‘a single big tree ... in bunches, like swollen plums.’ Too hardened by the war, by the things they have seen and done, the soldiers leave them there, foraging onwards, arguing with each other and threatening each other, till they find an empty champagne bottle, Bollinger. That gets them on the scent. They follow a trail of empty bottles till they find a hunting lodge guarded by the much hated, brutal military police (hated because they’re brutal to their own side), Feldgendarmerie. At this point, Meissner tells us, ‘the desperate animal part of me barged any more complex sentiment out of the way. We stormed the compound just as we would have a Russian outpost.’ The soldiers kill most of the policemen. When they get inside, they find two frightened and teary Polish prostitutes. This novel is definitely not one for the squeamish, but the soldiers are more interested in food than in rape, and the Polish girls get away.

Meissner and his comrades (if that word is appropriate) help themselves to unimagined riches; ‘Italian sardines, French cheese, rollmops.. tinned peaches from Greece, sacks and sacks of firm, hale potatoes,’ also cigarettes and ‘fancy drinks.’ Finally, they torch the hunting lodge and leave it, having committed murder and treason. Yet the line they have crossed has given them ‘the taste of a certain destructive freedom.’ They escape out into the countryside, get huge quantities of the food down themselves, get the squitters because it’s too rich, torment each other.

Brutal and licentious soldiery, indeed. Meissner does have some human feeling left, but it’s too ‘deeply buried.’ Or driven out by the nagging misery of foot-rot, by, confusion, a vicious irritability, by fears for family at home, fear of death or capture, by, in Meissner’s case, a dogged determination to survive.

And yet these disaffected soldiers manage to seize a Russian tank and drive it towards the enemy, knocking out a great many tanks as they go. The story might end with their deaths, but they then get out of the tank and escape into the forest once more.

All this is portrayed with consummate and convincing skill; the reader is drawn into the ghastly reality of the soldiers’ existence, and the great strength of this part of the novel is that it makes the soldiers, and particularly Meissner, real people. Not monsters, but human beings who might be ourselves under other circumstances. Hunger does dreadful things to us; makes us more inclined to violence, sharpens the survival instinct to a lethal extent.

So far, so convincing. However, this is a novel of layers, and there are other layers which are less accomplished. Meissner’s narrative is a written document he leaves for his grandson, Callum, to read after his death, and it is heavily mediated. We have Meissner’s story from 1944, and then, like voiceovers, the older Meissner, and Callum speak to us; my reaction to those voices often veered from irritation to indignation.

I did at first wonder if what I was reading was the well-worn (in my youth) myth of the ordinary ‘Landser’ or squaddie, who fought a largely decent war, while police regiments and SS committed the atrocities. Then I thought, no, it’s not this kind of story. On the surface, Meissner is brutally honest; he describes how he and his fellow soldiers went ‘foraging,’ which meant stealing food from civilians, who were going to starve, but then you read: ‘What I want to tell you isn’t about atrocities or genocide’. Yet there is an episode where the soldiers come upon more Feldgendarmen and men from a ‘penal battallion’ (composed of convicted criminals), who are hanging German deserters, raping Polish housemaids and crucifying them and Polish labourers against the sides of a barn. So what, exactly, is Meissner’s definition of an atrocity? To be fair, he is quite clear that by merely fighting as a conscript he was complicit in the whole thing, but we know now that ordinary soldiers did murder civilians, incluidng Jews. Not Meissner, apparently.

Meissner also claims that the story is really about courage. Does he mean the naked instinct to survive (if so, are the others, who gave up, cowards?) or is it only about the capture of the tank? The tank capture actually prevents the Russians getting to the atrocities against the Poles and perhaps rescuing the victims before they died.

‘Did we do wrong?’ Meissner reflects. ‘By the morality of consequences, yes, undoubtedly. But it’s hard for me to accept that so baldly, because by the morality of virtues, of character, the others at least were brave and loyal.’

The elephant in the room here is that warfare is actually about killing people (though the expression ‘killing for your country’ is never used.) Nowadays it’s always justified in terms of some future good; the Russians, right now, are freeing Ukraine from ‘Nazis’, or so Putin tells us. We still feel that World War 2 was largely a just war, because it defeated Nazism (though it failed to protect the territorial integrity of Poland, which was where it started). In the post-war moral system, admittedly flawed, that Meissner is supposed to adhere to now, the morality of consequences is what it’s all about. What I would see in the tank capture is a kind of resetting of psychological equilibrium: the soldiers compensate for the treason they have committed. Or else they are simply doing what they have been programmed, by years of training and propaganda, to do.

Meissner does make one very valuable observation, a conclusion I came to myself after years of reading about Nazi Germany and thinking it through: ‘Only a very few of us were stronger than our times. Not me. A handful who somehow knew how to act beyond themselves, even then.’ Look at our own society. How many people dare blow the whistle on their employers, no matter what those employers do? He also writes: ‘I think that we were blemished by the consequences of what other people decided. No one ever has complete responsibility for his own moral balance. And the unforgiving truth, the severe, ancient truth, is that you can be culpable for something that you weren’t in control of.’

As one who has looked back at her own grandfather and wondered how he could live after participating in that war, and being part of that machinery, I have had similar thoughts. I cannot be indignant about the horrors of his internment after the end of the war, even though the investigators found nothing to convict him of in the end. He began by hating the Nazis; I do know that after the war he hated them, yet he became part of the machinery, to survive. To me, not the least crime of Nazis great and small is that the society they created made criminals of so many others. But I did feel that it might have been possible to get this view across through the narrative (indeed, I have passed quite a few moments, when walking the dog or dealing with mundane household tasks, working out how it could be done). I also wondered how far the opinions I heard were Starritt’s, rather than those of his characters.

Some of the interventions in the story are frankly off-beam, and why does Callum have to end an exposition of the myth of Ragnarok by sniping that dedicated recyclers are driven by an ‘end-of-days fixation’ which is a ‘narrow, atavistic niche in German culture, brought out by the extreme despair of losing two world wars’? It is news to me that recycling is a purely German concern. But what made me indignant (not to mention furious) was the attitude (whether Starritt’s or Meissner’s) towards the atrocities the Russians in their turn committed when they conquered Germany.

‘We were in the wrong,’ Starritt has Meissner write. ‘We had that knowledge hammered into us with the deaths of friends and the rape of our families. And the enormity of our crime meant we had to accept that the punishment, though terrible, was not unjust.’ Leaving aside the fact that the Russians also raped Polish and Yugoslav women (and what were they punished for?) what that boils down to is that the rape of women, girls and even young children and babies was a matter between men; the German army, the Red Army. Women, then, are property, what’s done to them is primarily an act of retribution against the males who own them?

But if there is ‘no fair, except what people effortfully construct’, as Starritt has Meissner tell us, then we need absolute clarity about what is just and what is not. What happened in Germany and Austria in 1945 was certainly the consequence of Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941; it doesn’t follow that it is right for a child to wake up and find a Russian soldier on top of her. ‘And then,’ (the adult woman, speaking on a video I once watched, shuddered) ‘the next one came, and the next one, and the next one-’

Imagine what that was like, if you can bear to, and see if you can comfortably talk about justice.

We Germans is published by John Murray.

The War's Not Over Yet is available from Amazon Kindle.