Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

But the conflict between pattern and chaos persisted and led to inner haunting about the spareness of life. “I believe in a meaning, even if I cannot always detect it,” declared Horstmar Seitz. “I know now certainly that my life must fulfill a spiritual purpose.” But, he added tellingly, “you need much strength to remain hard and not to forget the larger issues in your own small fate.” “What keeps me going,” contended Gottfried Gruner, “is the consciousness that in the end everything must yet have a meaning.” Imploring, pleading that there must be a pattern, a meaning to this chaos, some Landsers in their desperate search seemed to turn to a mystic romanticism. “To us lonely men in our hopelessness one thing has been revealed,” wrote Siegbert Stehmann, “that reality is nothing, but miracle is everything. That keeps us upright. No man can help us, only God alone.” 65

Not surprisingly, many Landsers sought comfort in religion, but their faith was often tinged with arrogant self-pity, betraying anger at what they saw as both their own and Germany’s undeserved fate. “The Germans, the eternal Job of world history, sit everywhere on the ruins of their silent, beloved world,” moaned Siegbert Stehmann in September 1944, “and wait eagerly on the releasing word of God, who can heal the broken.” To him, faith in God was at once straightforward and complex: “The present,” he brooded, “is but a dark passage between God and God; for those who best know who God is sit in the grim fires of hell. We must not quarrel with our fate.” Still, Stehmann could not finally accept such a judgment but proceeded to squabble over, if not his lot, the fate of Germany: “The material concerns weigh lightly when one thinks of the coming fate of our Volk…. A thousand-year Reich is going to the grave…. God will help us. For the sacramental grace that now for a millennium has flowed in our country… cannot be lost…. No one in the world is more blessed than our people, which even today still has its roots in the profound.” 66

Germany, at last, had to be rescued from destruction, if only because the Germans were uniquely profound. Audacious and presumptuous as it seemed, Stehmann’s was not an atypical comment. “You must know to come to terms with your lot, even if it is tragic,” wrote Rolf Hoffmann in February 1945. “Everything has an end, even the war…. Then we will again construct a worthy existence. As Eichendorff said: ‘As long as I breathe, I’m not given up for lost.’ So it is with our beloved Fatherland. We have held out for six’ long years against a world of enemies; we knew only battle and work and battle again. Do we deserve in the end to be smashed and destroyed? We want to trust in the Lord God, that He has not deserted our German people and will give back to it at the end of this mighty struggle its right to life on this earth. That means waiting until a better future is granted us.” 67

Others knew better, however, recognizing that despite their maudlin self-pity the Germans merited their fate. Wilhelm Heidtmann rued the fact that “many Anglo-Americans fight in the belief that they speak for Christ’s cause when they defend the democratic form of state…. The Western powers have the advantage of an open profession of the Christian belief; thereby we are forced into the role of the opponent of the Christian faith. Furthermore, they are superior to us in that they have an unbroken belief in the practical consequences of the power of God in this world…. Perhaps in this we have something to learn from them. Who gives God honor, He helps. That you can see from history.” Walter Wenzl came to a similar though more pointed conclusion. “We must never forget,” he wrote at the end of March 1945, “that what has befallen us and is still descending upon us is deserved in its entirety. And only when we have served our guilt and when peace for us is again more than quiet and idleness, only then will this sacrifice come to an end…. Then what will also come will come from Him and He should find us ready.” 68

Some Landsers coped by maintaining a fierce will to live. After all, as Siegbert Stehmann noted, Rainer Maria Rilke had written that “‘everything beautiful has a horrible beginning.’ …And our life is beautiful, infinitely beautiful.” At the front, “we are all alike,” argued Helmut Pabst, “for we all have been shut off from a carefree life. But that does not lead to weariness or to resignation…. [Rather] we developed a powerful will to live…. One lives for the moment…. To live is alone happiness. But even in the serious hours one senses a life full of substance. It is bitter and sweet, all and one, …because we have learned to see the essential.” Bernhard Beckering, before he fell into despair, insisted, “Our love of the lively and beautiful must become so great that the feeling of infinity envelops us. Then we will slowly come to the point that even suffering and death can be received as something proper and subordinate.” 69This love of life could become so intense that some, such as Wilhelm Spaleck, wondered, “Do we not love life all too much? Is our love not life, life, glowing life?” Harry Mielert confessed, “I hang on to my body so much, I love beauty so much… that the dead make no frightening impression on me.” 70

Whether fearful, fatalistic, or clinging to life, all Landsers struggled with a frightful harvest of emotions. As Harry Mielert remarked in November 1942, no one could understand or repay “the enormous mixture of fear, horror, and other unnamable feelings and their counterbalance, bravery and overcoming, that these men here must daily and hourly summon up.” Despite everything, out of resignation, trust in some ultimate meaning, or belief in a better future, even the most discouraged and disillusioned Landser usually found the wherewithal to continue fighting, and to display an impressive willingness to sacrifice himself until the bitter end. “I know in my bones what… ‘courage’ means,” Guy Sajer asserted, “from days and nights of resigned desperation, and from the insurmountable fear which one continues to accept, even though one’s brain has ceased to function normally. I know what it means, remembering deliberate immobility against frozen soil, whose coldness penetrates to the marrow of the bones, and the howling of a stranger in the next hole…. German soldiers,” he concluded, “would have to endure everything, in the world we had created. We were fitted only for that world, and were otherwise inadaptable.” 71

Despite the perception of World War II as a mechanized Blitzkrieg, Landsers generally marched on foot into Poland, France, the Balkans, Russia, and most other arenas of battle. Hence, factors normally of secondary concern to historians forced themselves into the forefront of a soldier’s everyday world: matters such as climate, terrain, disease, filth, and lack of shelter or privacy. Even though combat and the fear of combat loomed constantly in every soldier’s consciousness, actual battle could be surprisingly infrequent, but no Landser could escape the unpleasant business of living rough, of coping with a harsh environment under conditions of extreme physical and mental exhaustion. For many Landsers , then, the real enemy often seemed to be the weather, the effects of living in the open, and the stresses and strains endemic to a group forced into proximity with an often unfamiliar natural environment. Getting accustomed to this primitive way of living often proved exceedingly difficult, especially for those from urban areas. War came to be seen as a dirty business, both figuratively and literally.