Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Aware of its power but still unable to articulate this force, Hansmann was ultimately defeated in his attempt at definition; he could only conclude that comradeship was its own explanation. What did tie these men together, produced the void, the feeling when a comrade died that a bit of yourself had also gone to the grave? “I had looked for Hals,” remembered Guy Sajer of the chaotic days at the very end of the war, “but hadn’t been able to find him. He filled my thoughts, and only my acquired ability to hide my feelings kept me from weeping. He was attached to me by all the terrible memories of the war…. Hals and all the others, the war, and everything for which I had been obliged to live; all the names of all the men beside whom, my eyes huge with terror, I had watched death approach; and death itself, which could have overcome us at any moment; the names and faces of all the men without whom I would never have made these observations…. I could never forget nor deny them.” 61

To Sajer, then, comradeship loomed larger than life because it had bestowed life itself. A soldier solitary and alone, without friends, would quickly have been overwhelmed by despair at all he saw and did, would certainly have fallen victim to the insatiable appetite for death that ruled the battlefield. Only with the aid of a comrade could one hope to conquer the anguish and endure; only by sharing the pain could one live. Comradeship not only enabled Sajer, and many others, to survive; it allowed him to make some sense of the hurricane of events, to achieve a measure of comprehension of the deep human reality behind the impersonal facade of the war.

Observing the scene in Berlin upon the outbreak of hostilities with Poland, Joseph Harsch, the correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor , claimed with only a trace of exaggeration that “the German people were nearer to real panic on 1 September 1939 than the people of any other European country. No people wanted that war, but the German people exhibited more real fear of it than the others. They faced it in something approaching abject terror.” Indeed, as Adolf Hitler motored through the streets of Berlin to the Kroll Opera House, where the Reichstag met, to deliver a speech at ten o’clock that morning, the crowds were thin and noticeably sullen. Nor did Hitler’s words on the occasion of the outbreak of war generate much enthusiasm. 1German soldiers, in fact, marched off to war accompanied by none of the wild hysteria and excitement of 1914. Quite the contrary: in 1939 the Landser did not go joyously off to battle in search of an adventure, confident of his purpose and innocent of war’s punishing reality. But go to war he did, however much cynicism and intellectual wariness he carried as baggage. And still the Landser not only bore the brunt of the war’s frightful harvest but withstood its terrible fury for six long years, taking ground swiftly and giving it back only grudgingly, until Germany, as the focus of battle, ceased to exist.

Why, then, were these soldiers fighting? Did they fight for National Socialism, against Bolshevism, out of racial hatred, because of love of country, merely for themselves? Had the Nazis constructed a new creature invigorated by death? Might the Landser simply have been following in the tradition of absolute duty and obedience, the famous Kadavergehorsam of Frederick the Great? Or had the Nazis succeeded in creating a Volksgemeinschaft for the maintenance of which the Landser fought tenaciously? Since an army tends to reflect the society from which it sprang, if the men of the Wehrmacht fought steadfastly in support of Hitler and Nazism, something within the Hitler state must have struck a responsive chord.

In order to begin to understand the motivation of the average German soldier in World War II, one must look back to the impact of the Great War. Men had been transformed by the horrifying experience of the trenches. The very concept of the hero was redefined in World War I, when, as Jay Baird put it, “bare-chested men stood against the full force of the weaponry of a technological age.” The ideal of creating a new man after the bloodletting of the trenches stemmed from the belief that this sort of war had produced a new type of individual, a “frontier personality” who served as an agent of rebirth, regeneration, and new life, a person who journeyed to the limits of existence seeking renewal out of the destruction of war. This new man was not a fighter who enthusiastically sacrificed himself for glory and honor, as had the soldiers of 1914. Instead, driven by will, amoral, cool, functional, and hardened, he could withstand the ultimate test of battle without cracking. At the same time he was a technological warrior who understood that the war expressed the very rhythm of industrial life, as well as a man of steel who gained personal fulfillment through a narcissistic dynamism of will and energy. “All is permissible,” Gottfried Benn remarked in the late 1920s, “that leads to experience.” A certain matter-of-factness thus marked the new man, who replaced the romantic relics of a failed bourgeois age with the image of mechanical precision, a man who functioned to the rhythm of the machine. “The German factory,” despaired a French soldier in 1917, “is absorbing the world.” The Great War thus proved a breeding ground for the post-bourgeois man, as these workers of war fashioned a true revolution. 2

More than any other writer, Ernst Jünger expressed and popularized this image of the new man. In the Fronterlebnis Jünger discerned the glimmerings of a new society, a world in which the worker and soldier, made one by the energy of technology and the vitalism of war, fused to create a new being who combined “a minimum of ideology with a maximum of performance,” intellectual mastery of technology with primordial soldierly qualities. War, Jünger asserted, afforded personal rebirth through passage into the intoxicating world of instinct and emotion, where men thrown together in the hurricane of battle rediscovered courage and passion. “Perhaps one must lose all in order to gain one’s self,” wrote, Horstmar Seitz in October 1942, his tone certainly that of Jünger. “We must throw away all culture and education, all false pretenses that hinder us from being ourselves…. For us there is only one thing: to begin completely anew, to erect new values and create new forms.” War thus fostered both transfiguration and redemption, forging a community of men who shared a great destiny and encompassed a higher mission, a Gemeinschaft whose merits of action, decision, and existential commitment resulted in genuine self-realization. 3Inner truth, then, flowed from collective experience.

Modern war, Jünger proclaimed, transformed life into energy, so that it resembled a gigantic labor process. The new face of war, human mastery of the machine, led to the development of soldiers with steel armor and ruthless will, men who were resilient and malleable under the new conditions of battle, men who were “day laborers of death… for a better day.” Overblown rhetoric perhaps, although in a letter written in November 1944 Sebastian Mendelssohn-Bartholdy claimed that he “would like to be one of the nameless in the greater community who takes on every sacrifice for the war in order to serve a future that we don’t know and yet in which we still believe.” 4

To Jünger the front soldier, whose face was “metallic, …galvanized,” and who stoically accepted pain, was a fighter made of modern material: amoral, dispassionate, hard, and functional, a man who had become a fighting machine. “You must wait, sit, devise, and do the worst things,” Harry Mielert explained unemotionally in the tones of the new man in March 1943, “act mechanical and hard, look and see the inhuman without batting an eyelid.” “We don’t cry,” Mielert noted a few months later, “and our exteriors appear hard and like a bizarre personification of the pure manly, cold, warrior.” “This war has shaped us soldiers into something else,” Ansgar Bollweg mused in November 1943. “With the sharpness of a predator’s eyes we recognize that the remains of the old world will be crushed between the millstones of this war…. Out of ‘total mobilization’… comes the form of the worker. In 1933 I read a book of Ernst Jünger’s: Der Arbeiter [The Worker]. It left a great impression on me, but only now do I recognize the consequences…. I see how in the epoch of masses and machines each individual life will always become more explicitly that of a ‘life of a worker’ and how because of that the war gets it cruel character.” “You can’t afford to be soft in war,” Karl Fuchs explained in a letter to his wife in June 1941. “No, you must be tough; indeed, you have to be pitiless and relentless. Don’t I sound like a different person to you?” 5