Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

The ethereal yet seductive nature of Russia made a similar impact on other Landsers. “The yearning of the German mind after the spirit will never be stronger,” claimed Wolfgang Kluge, then added ominously, “but also never bloodier, than in this realm of eternal horizons, where the land is like the sea.” Not a few Landsers , in fact, feared that the eternally restless spirit of the Germans might well run aground in Russia, that it might prove to be the unattainable great white whale to their Captain Ahab. “We must defend ourselves against it, must overcome it,” wrote Bernhard Ritter of the endless Russian landscape, “because it is the embodiment of the ‘without a goal,’ the infinite, ‘the never to be able to achieve an objective.’ In this country I am always in a conflict between the necessity of overcoming it and the foreboding of feeling its essence.” 42

The quintessence of the steppe, its vast, and solitary distances, seemed especially menacing to the average German soldier. Harry Mielert puzzled over “the endless space in which we feel after all eerily insecure, this mysterious Russian earth with its endless roads, where one spot looks exactly like another.” Siegbert Stehmann complained that the immensity of Russia caused one “to lose the feeling of time,” that it put one’s “consciousness to sleep, while the body struggled forward.” The steppe, it seemed, contained nothing but menace: “All around [was] a dismal landscape in great monotony and melancholy,” wrote Kurt Reuber. In like manner, Günter von Scheven lamented, “The countryside always stretches further, barren, emerging more melancholy,” while Ludwig Laumen detected in Russia “a strange, closed land, the faces of whose people are also strange and closed…. We travel without rest along the great roads, but we will never get near this profound folk, in the soul of this land.” 43

Whether menacing or melancholy, the Russian landscape made an impression on all Landsers. “The spaces seemed endless,” noted one, “the horizons nebulous. We were depressed by the monotony of the landscape, and the immensity of the stretches of forest, marsh, and plain… The villages looked wretched and melancholy…. Nature was hard, and within her were human beings just as hard and insensitive: indifferent to weather, hunger, and thirst, and almost as indifferent to life and losses, pestilence, and famine.” “Nothing could have prepared us,” agreed Siegfried Knappe, “for the mental depression brought on by this realization of the utter physical vastness of Russia. Tiny little doubts began to creep into our minds. Was it even possible that such vast emptiness could be conquered by foot soldiers?” The distances seemed so great and the spirit of the land so sinister that Harry Mielert concluded, “Only Vikings can wage war in this country.” As individual hopes and actions seemed to disappear, Guy Sajer, too, confessed to a “feeling of revulsion toward the Soviet countryside” because “the immensity of Russia seemed to have absorbed us.” For him, “the hostile indifference of nature seem[ed] so overwhelming it [was] almost necessary to believe in God.” 44

Often, in fact, the Landser conveyed a sense that nature gripped him in an embrace which threatened to overwhelm him. Not only the vastness of the steppe but the wall of the seemingly impenetrable Russian forests resembled to some the end of the human world. Willi Heinrich, himself a veteran of the eastern front, observed through a character in his novel, The Cross of Iron , “As far as the eye could reach, all the way to the purple-tinged mountains on the horizon, spread a tremendous forest. The bright, even green of the trees flowed on wholly unbroken; nowhere was there a sign of a clearing, of human habitation. The scene took their breath away.” But Heinrich understood that though “at first it was all new and exciting for our Landsers , …the excitement didn’t last long. These frightful spaces, monotonous and repetitious; you can’t help feeling that one of these days they’ll swallow you up.” The alien nature, the silence, of the woods seemed, as Heinrich put it, “to radiate menace; they felt the danger like a pain that transformed their senses.” 45

Nor was Heinrich guilty of novelistic excess. “Since the day before yesterday we have come into a somewhat hilly area,” Harry Mielert remarked in July 1941, but it wasn’t the hills that merited his attention. “There are here endless woods, strange, mysterious, hidden…. But for us also dreadful because in them lie hidden terrors.” Mielert felt such relief at finally coming out of the woods, in fact, that he said it was like “a rejuvenation.” Another Landser stated simply, “We do not usually go very far into the forests. You can have no idea of what they are like.” 46

This haunting natural power was only intensified by the effects of war on the natural landscape. Friedrich Grupe described a forest southwest of Lake Ilmen as “a ghostly caricature of itself: mangled and charred trees stare like a reproach from heaven.” And surveying the northern horizon one evening in January 1942, Siegbert Stehmann noted “a metamorphosis, something strange, the penetration of a new nature. In the distance out of the twilight rose a cloud…. It was blood red, on its edges flared golden flames. Steep pillars of light stood all around and supported the high, glowing vaults. That was no spectacle of nature. That was a warning, a conjuration of the future, a reaching into the unknown…. In this moment pretence was shattered…. Distant woods and villages burned and smoldered, and the smoke of disaster lifted itself dazzlingly upwards to accuse, warn, and communicate. The front came to us.” 47

In or out of battle, everywhere the Landser fought, the power of nature seemed to haunt him. “I felt the hot, still loneliness of Africa, where all life, desires, thoughts, and fighting is [ sic ] different,” remarked Hans Schmitz in February 1941, although he did not fully appreciate just how different, and sinister, the desert landscape could be until a few months later. “We were… putting up our tent,” he wrote in astonishment, “when suddenly from the west the world and the sky… were filled with dense sand that quickly raced toward us. In a few seconds the previously swelteringly hot wind was ice cold. The daylight became a sulfurous yellow…. Immediately the air was full of dust, the daylight disappeared, and an eerie black-gold night prevailed…. It was like before the creation of the world: one saw no beginning and no end.” “So here we stand in magnificent, dangerous nature,” mused Friedrich Gädeke, “small men, clinging to each other.” Indeed, in this primal world many a Landser felt adrift and bewildered. “Technology no longer plays a role,” Hans Pietzcker wrote in despair from Russia in December 1941. “The elemental power of nature broke the operation of our engines. What do we do?” 48

Nature could indeed induce fright, but it could also offer a different vision. Advancing into the Kuban lowlands bordering the Sea of Azov, Fritz Trautwein portrayed a pastoral Eden:

Wide fields of sunflowers stretch out in the glowing sun. The villages consist of thatched roof huts surrounded by fruit trees. One traverses deep gorges, passes by lakes in which water lilies offer up their blooms on the surface of the water. Then again comes the forest, then wide, golden fields of grain…. We are in a real paradise. Around the villages are fields of sunflowers, fruit trees, and small groves of beech and acacia trees. We sit here in a small woods surrounded by meadows with an infinite number of fruit trees, below in the valley “the lake smilingly invites one to bathe,” and in the distance broad stubbled fields are visible, interrupted by great heaps of ripe fruit. 49