Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

“These twenty-four hours are among the most unforgettable and really most stirring and beautiful of my life,” confirmed Wolfgang Doling as he reflected on a recent attack. “How such experiences affect individual men is totally different. There are some who simply hide away in animalistic terror. There are often those who then just meet with some kind of accident. There are others who are completely panicked and incapable of any kind of decision…. There are also the reckless mercenaries and natural adventurers who enjoy such moments and fall into an almost euphoric state.” Döring left no doubt as to his own category, concluding that in those moments he felt possessed of “a cool calm and almost an instinctive sureness.” 28To him, the sudden sense of power and liberation from conventional restraint proved intoxicating.

This heightened sense of awareness, the exhilaration of peering into the abyss, often acted as a stimulant, producing an experience “quite different from that portrayed in the World War books,” a sensation of “a new baptism.” “There is a strange joy in war,” Heinz Küchler remarked with little attempt at elaboration. Others, however, sought to give expression to the peculiar sensations war produced in them. “In life, pain and joy, despondency and happiness often come together,” asserted Rudolf Bader. “Their collision is painful, but can also be fruitful. Great things and deeds come into the world only with pain. Whoever seeks life must suffer the bitterness of death.” To Rudolf Halbey, it all seemed so obvious. “Life is no longer a given,” he remarked in January 1943, “it is a gift.” Guy Sajer neatly combined both explanations in deciphering the attraction of war. “Peace has brought me many pleasures,” he reflected, “but nothing as powerful as that passion for survival in wartime… and that sense of absolutes.” 29

Some insisted that one could appreciate the intensity of life only next to the horror of death. To Wolfdietrich Schröter, the exhilaration of war resulted from living “as if this were the last night, the last day…; this continual standing immediately before eternity awakens a great joy.” “For us men this war is perhaps an indelible experience,” mused Wolfgang Döring, “that can once more let us experience and live in a completely original sense the deepest law of our being. There is no question that the war has transmitted a new immediacy to everything and directed a totally fresh look at the few great and most important things of life.” “Only those who have experienced [war] can measure the range of human existence,” claimed Horstmar Seitz. Helmut Pabst noted, “Even in these grave hours one feels that life is full of content. It is bitter and sweet… because we have learned to see the essential…. In such hours the desire emerges… to form a second life out of our insights.” Similarly, Harry Mielert reflected: “We exist in a hard fate which daily puts the truth of this earthly existence relentlessly before our eyes, that out of that death and transitoriness springs as a blessed illuminating happiness an enjoyment of beauty, that only one who has experienced and grasped this existence between transitoriness and death can properly understand such a source of happiness.” Soldiers, Mielert concluded, were “members of a vital dimension.” Wolfgang Kluge agreed: “We who must walk on the shadowy side of life cling more to the beauty of life than those who possess it.” Indeed, some men came to believe, along with Martin Lindner, that “only one who has gone through the abyss and horror of many battles can experience how peaceful, how infinitely beautiful the earth and life is [ sic ], how beautiful flowers are, how moving music or how heartfelt a picture can be…. One feels the love and warmth of God strongest after a battle, and a great thankfulness and joy spreads through a person.” 30

Other Landsers asserted, along with Reinhard Becker-Glauch, that war brought a “consciousness of the limits of things, where the false values sink away and the true things remain.” “Nature,” declared Rolf Schroth, “has created us so that we sink into habit,” a tendency he saw as “not only false, but also weak, comfortable.” The value of war, then, was that it “demanded a constant proving of oneself, that again and again one had to conquer the obvious…. It is, after all, happiness that I experience here: I want to look more powerfully into the depths of life.” Some, such as Eberhard Wendebourg, valued war because one came “to judge men not by their rank and position, name and honors, but only by their character and performance…. War teaches the true worth of men.” Finally, a few, such as Hans Pietzcker, purported to be proud to have “lived” in this misery and distress and “not just gotten through it.” In a letter just before Christmas 1942, Pietzcker reflected: “Fate is difficult, often incomprehensibly hard…, [but] we have truly learned to treasure life more than someone at home…. We love this life of danger because the border between life and death illuminates the pure truth. Danger no longer means more terror for us, and death is no longer a threatening darkness. He belongs to life like a brother…. It’s only a pity that we won’t be able to apply to life what we’ve experienced in these hard hours. To pass on this experience to others, that may well be the finest thing.” 31

The “horribly beautiful power of war,” its “terrible splendor,” also flowed from an excitement released by the conquest of fear. As Reinhard Goes confessed, “I feel closest to life when death is at its worst and is mowing and destroying all around me…. This dangerous life is the best and the most liberating. When one has only the goal and task before one’s eyes, the fear disappears and the exhilaration carries along even the weakest.” Life interposed with death, danger with liberation, exhilaration with the accomplishment of the task—combat indeed released a complex jumble of emotions. As Hans-Friedrich Stäcker noted, “I have literally felt how in a hard moment a hot wave of blood shot through my heart and pulled me forward.” Some men indeed came to believe, parroting the words of Ernst Jünger, that war was the “father of all things,” creating a situation like that “before the creation of the world.” 32

Even men not consciously gripped by the “foolhardy magnificence” of war could betray similar sentiments. Caught in the whirlpool of battle on the eastern front, Guy Sajer felt “an almost drunken exhilaration,” filled, as he was, “with the spirit of destructive delight.” Confronted with seemingly endless combat, Sajer nonetheless remarked on the “hitherto unsuspected acuteness [that] sharpens every sense,” while “at the moment when our mission was about to be accomplished” he noted a violent feeling of nervous energy and release of tension. 33Mastering fear, living on the edge of danger, being liberated from tension, accomplishing the task—all of these produced that great intensity of sensation which caused some men to see combat as a drama of horribly beautiful power.

Still other Landsers were struck by the strange beauty of battle in the midst of horror and destruction. “Smolensk was burning,” exclaimed Hans August Vowinckel in June 1941. “It was an enormous drama…. With magical power the flame drew one to glance into its depths, as if it wanted to pull in men and machines.” In similar awed tones a Landser described his first experience of a Nebelwerfer (rocket artillery) attack during the German advance on Voronezh in mid-1942: “The night was dark but clear…. Three batteries of Nebelwerfers opened fire…. The sight was as awe-inspiring as the sound was nerve-shattering. A low-pitched howling rose quickly to a screaming crescendo and then huge gouts of flame erupted, firing the rockets and sending them like huge comets hurtling through the air…. Lines of flame escorted by trailing clouds of red-lined smoke marked their route as they streaked across the sky.” 34