Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

The war in Russia, with its horrible slaughter and characteristic smell of fire, sweat, and decaying corpses, prompted Harald Henry to observe: “On the whole I experience the war as totally different from how it was portrayed in the World War books, unemotional, nowhere as an unshakable uplifting song of ‘loyalty and courage in the face of death,’ as a steely rhythm of ‘fire and blood,’… as a ‘stirring and formative life force,’ [but] rather as a pessimistic caricature of overall life, as exactly the same mixture of tribulation, anger, joy, and passion, full of sacrifice and courage, full of egoism and malice. Only a German visionary could regard this as the best of all possible worlds.” Still, Henry did admit to a certain Jüngerian functionalism:

What I am living here is idealism. The idealism of “in spite of it all….” What we must do here, suffering until madness, holding on with clenched teeth… and yet then in the most gruesome misery, in the abysses and dark sides of life to preserve a belief in the bright and beautiful sides, in the meaning of life…, in the whole rich and beautiful world of idealism, how should we call it? It is that “in spite of it all,” that inner indestructibility, that unconditional will finally to comprehend even the most horrible as part of the whole, to see it within the “good” total cycle of life…. An enormous mental strength goes into this attitude. 13

Had the anonymous Landser , then, become the embodiment of Jünger’s worker-soldier, who thrilled at the dark, chaotic, inexplicable beauty of war and for whom ideological motivation was superfluous? Certainly one can find examples of nihilist bravado among the letters written by the Landsers , many of whom seem consciously to have adopted a Jüngerian attitude. “The front line, the entrenched riflemen, have deeply impressed me,” wrote Hans-Heinrich Ludwig from Russia, “especially their attitude. These fellows are fabulous. A complete resignation to fate.” Seeking to explain this feeling to his wife, Harry Mielert claimed, “There forward in my foxhole I was a free man…. Can you understand that I yearn somewhat for the freer life in the dangerous trenches?” During the retreat out of Russia, Mielert again emphasized this sense of existential freedom. The war, he claimed, “is again a great selection process. Whoever is not able to come along is left behind. The men abandon all their belongings and possessions in order to save their naked lives.” Similarly, Harald Henry admitted to distress but went on to claim, “Our suffering is… an infinitely beautiful, colorful, painfully lively suffering.” Confessed Hans-Friedrich Stacker, in a reference to Jünger’s most famous statement, “I have slowly come to the understanding behind the words: ‘war is the father of all things.’” 14

Others also closely mimicked Jünger. “Men die daily, and daily rise from the dead,” wrote Wolfgang Kluge, reflecting Jünger’s notion of rebirth through war; in a later letter he touched on the notion of affirmation, arguing, “We who must walk on the shadowy side of life hang on to the beauty of life more than those who possess it.” War affirmed life, as life seemed to Siegfried Roemer to affirm war: “But to us the war has now become a life form, to be sure full of danger and filth and blood, but we stand in the middle of it and affirm it to a certain degree.” Similarly, Siegbert Stehmann sought to understand the war “not as a refuge from our passionate time, but rather as a door into it.” To Heinz Küchler, it was “really curious to go marching into war with the attitude that we must have: without hate, without passion, …without a feeling for this war. And in spite of it we ‘fight.’” Küchler noted later, “The war here [in Russia] is being carried on in a ‘pure cultural’ sense; every evidence of humanity appears to have disappeared in deed and in heart and conscience.” 15

At first glance, then, the Jüngerian worker-soldier, the so-called new man glorified in the years following the Great War, seemed to be personified in the anonymous Landser , who endured the grim everyday life of war and persisted in his job despite objective considerations of victory or defeat. “To have created the new warrior,” boasted Signal magazine, a slick wartime product of Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda apparatus in 1942, “who dared to advance against the products of war techniques, was the proud achievement of the German Infantry [of 1918],” and those front fighters had “passed on to the coming generation a legacy of the spiritual kind, the science and teaching of the new man.” 16So strong was this attempt to link the so-called new soldier of World War II with the much-glorified trench fighter of the Great War that the Nazis even produced a series of picture postcards depicting the stern, dauntless visage of the stormtrooper of 1918, no doubt to remind the Landser that he stemmed from mythic material. Still, this image of the dispassionate, functional warrior obscures the complex interplay of forces that was the reality of the Landser’s motivation. The image is not so much incorrect as it is incomplete.

Although some Landsers seemed to validate Jünger’s contentions that modern war produced an emotionless, assembly-line soldier, a man acting in harmony with the machine but lacking any ideological motivation, such a reading of the average German soldier would be misleading. The typical Landser did not function as a robot devoid of a sense of purpose but was in fact sustained by a broad spectrum of values. “How then, I ask myself,” mused Friedrich Grupe, himself a front soldier, after the war, “were the enormous achievements of the German Wehrmacht possible, if the majority of the young soldiers thought only about saving their own heads?” As Hans Woltersdorf admitted, “We threw ourselves into national tasks with National Socialist idealism, redeemed ourselves.” 17Anti-Semitism, anti-communism, Lebensraum —these central tenets of Nazism were all inextricably linked with the Landser ’s conception of duty, with his place and role within the vast machinery of war.

Indeed, the notion that Germany was under assault from an alleged “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy” served for many as the prop that sustained them under the burden of war. “Now Jewry has declared war on us along the whole line,” wrote Corporal A.N. the day after the German attack on the Soviet Union. “All that are in bondage to the Jews stand in a front against us. The Marxists fight shoulder to shoulder with high finance as before 1933 in Germany…. Through our preventive attack, we again have the Reds by the nose…. We ourselves know exactly what is at stake in this game.” This sense of combatting a heinous conspiracy was seconded by Private H.K., who asserted, “We are… fighting against the Bolshevik world enemy.” “The great task that has placed us in battle against Bolshevism lies in the destruction of eternal Judaism,” thundered Corporal K.G. “When you see what the Jew has brought about here in Russia, only then can you begin to understand why the Führer began this struggle against Judaism. What sort of misfortunes would have been visited upon our Fatherland, if this bestial people had gotten the upper hand?” 18

Pure Nazism, this equation of Marxism with Judaism, and the formula recurred often in soldier’s letters. “Adolf and I are marching against our great enemy Russia,” exclaimed Private F. in the heady days of victory in July 1941. “Consequently one of my wishes has been fulfilled, as I was gladly drawn into this blasphemous country. This time we will certainly make an end of this power which is hostile to God…. You see evidence of Jewish, Bolshevik cruelties which I can hardly believe possible. Yesterday we marched into a large city, past a prison…. Inside lay 8,000 dead civilian prisoners, slain, murdered…, a blood-bath done by the Bolsheviks shortly before their withdrawal. In another city absolutely similar cases, perhaps even crueler…. You can imagine that this cries out for revenge, which will also be carried out.” Even Landsers initially dubious of Nazi propaganda claims concerning the threat of Soviet attack could admit, as one did in a letter to his parents, “If until now I have taken the declarations of the government rather skeptically and critically, so today I can actually acknowledge the truth of these reports totally.” 19