Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Certainly familiar tunes helped remind the Landser that another world did exist, one removed from the death and destruction of the battlefield. But even unfamiliar music could prove soothing, at least temporarily. “In this nocturnal silence, suddenly music falls on our ear,” Prüller noted of one evening in Russia. “Wonderful music. A balalaika is playing…. Ukrainians… sit down in the park and play us their songs. We listen to them for hours…. because we fancy that they could almost be Viennese songs…. But no, the ever quicker tones of the balalaika, often a crazy pace, remind us that we are deep in Russia, that we are hearing Russian songs.” Like Grupe, though, Prüller found “one single comfort: we still heard the Belgrade Wachtposten (‘Lili Marlene’). The song has really won the hearts of us soldiers. Despite the pouring rain, we all stood round the transmitter car and listened to the music…. I’ve got to hear it, otherwise, I’m not wholly myself.” 14

Martin Lindner, from the melodic city of Vienna, noted, “The north German officers especially love the Viennese… wine songs. You almost die laughing at the enthusiasm with which they sing along in our dialect…. I just heard Bach’s D-minor toccata on the radio. In its first tones it mirrors the upheaval and violence of our times…. When of an evening you walk along our quarters there is no tent and no house without music.” Perhaps the significance of music for the Landsers was best revealed, however, by a soldier trapped at Stalingrad. “Kurt Hahnke… played the Appassionata a week ago on a grand piano in a little side street close to Red Square,” he wrote to his parents in his last letter. “The grand piano was standing right in the middle of the street…. A hundred soldiers squatted around in their great-coats with blankets over their heads. Everywhere there were the sounds of explosions, but no one let himself be disturbed. They were listening to Beethoven in Stalingrad.” 15Although they were trapped, with death or captivity the only way out, music nonetheless provided a bit of comfort and solace to at least some Landsers in their moment of extreme agony and terror.

The Wehrmacht sought to provide musical diversion through such means as the popular radio Wunschkonzerts (musical request programs) broadcast to the troops, as well as by organizing stage shows to entertain troops at the front. These efforts sometimes backfired, however, for as Claus Hansmann noted furiously of one such performance,

we come from “outside,” this artificial world is too thin for us! We are angry, we can’t forget…. Fifteen months bloody handwork in the broad Russian spaces have accustomed us too much to the other side…. We can’t look at the magazine heroes…. We can’t listen any longer when they indulge in musical twaddle…. Then we see only the endless trail of blood, …ruined lives, burned down dwellings…. We hear through the music the howling, screaming, shrieking, the roar and bursting, see the hit and wounded…. Cheap theatrics disgust us, the jokes are too banal, the voices too sentimental. We can’t bear it any more. They should put us at the front, the cool rifle butt on the cheek brings us to reality; in our pouch we feel bullets, hand grenades, the helmet presses comfortingly. Comrades are also there. There we are men, but here…? Not that we have become heroes…. We have the same faults as before, but we are conscious of the abyss. We can be pitiless, gruesome, when we must…. Only silliness and boring amusements are unbearable to us. 16

Also unbearable, for many Landsers , was the absence of love, either erotic or affectionate. War seemed to enhance sexuality for many men, whether from being deprived of normal female relationships, for sheer physical gratification, out of a desire for affection, or in order to reaffirm that they were alive and that another world still existed. As insulation against cold reality, sex could offer at least temporary comfort and satisfaction. The problem for the average Landser was the lack of opportunity. For moral, military, and racial reasons, intimate fraternization with the enemy, especially in Russia, was strongly discouraged. Indeed, a Landser who engaged in sexual intercourse with a Russian woman faced the possibility of punishment for race defilement. Still, given the chance, many men willingly broke the rules to seek sexual release with local women. Sprinkled through his account of the wreckage of war, Guy Sajer noted numerous instances of Landsers socializing with Ukrainian women and enjoying simple moments of laughter and gaiety, encounters that often turned overtly sexual. “Hals had made the acquaintance of a Russian girl,” he noted, “with whom he was able to arrange a mutually profitable relationship. It turned out he was not the only one to enjoy the good woman’s favors. One evening he arrived to find himself a part of a troika. The other masculine member was the Catholic chaplain, who had survived hell and was indulging a few sins of the flesh as his consciousness of life returned.” Other of his comrades, too, reveled in the physical release of sex, as when “four of them had trapped a Polish woman of about forty in a barn. She had yielded to their ardor, which had lasted the four hours remaining.” 17

Some men expressed their unabated sexual desires in remarkably frank and openly erotic comments. Claus Hansmann revealed both an insistent sensuality and an aching need for affection. “Over the wretched, empty furrows that extend from our miserable hut treads now the deathly pale sheen of the moon,” he confided to his diary. “The feeling of apprehension, the many thoughts and burdens desert me, and almost cheerfully the fantasy of life bears a fruit that perhaps will never mature. First there are only the eyes, inscrutable, then hesitantly, tentatively the picture forms for me…. Shyly and furtively your image laughs…. The taste of your kisses presses on my lips…. My arms yearn for you…. Never before has your expression had such power over me and your caress such sweetness…. The blue dreams of your eyes are so enigmatic, they are the last that remains with me when you disappear in the fog.” 18

If Hansmann’s writings retained a certain literary quality, another Landser left little to the imagination in his recitation of his erotic fantasy. “Oh, pipsqueak, but of course I at times also like to dream about wonderful things, as you did recently, of when we kissed so marvelously and lay in the green grass in Beibrigg,” he wrote to his girlfriend, then spelled out what was really on his mind: “Your boobs peeked out; well, once I would like to know all that happens. But of course I would like not only to dream of it at times, but rather experience it in reality once again. My little cock is already yearning for you again. My ‘stovepipe’ would like so much to heat you up once again.” 19

Despite its physical release, for many Landsers sex did not satisfy the deeper thirst for companionship and love. As Sajer noted, when a consciousness of life returned, men revealed an aching need for female affection. For all his sexual activity, Sajer’s best friend Hals “had fallen in love once more…. With him, falling in love was compulsive. He really couldn’t help himself, and lost a piece of his heart every time we stopped in a rest zone.” Sajer knew the reason for this compulsion, and had himself come to realize that love was necessary: “I had to learn how to live, because I hadn’t been able to die.” And indeed, Sajer did fall helplessly in love; he had to “unleash [his] emotions,” for “the war had no power over my love for this girl, and holding back my emotion was out of the question.” Still, as he came to realize, “My happiness was mixed with too much suffering. I couldn’t simply accept it, and forget all the rest. My love for Paula seemed somehow impossible, in this setting of permanent chaos. As long as children were dying…, I would never be able to live with my love.” 20