Stephen Fritz - Frontsoldaten

Most men, of course, simply wanted as quickly as possible to return to civilian life and begin the process of building a new existence, but here too they felt themselves victims of a swindle. They could not just return to a career, since most had not had the opportunity to begin one. “Yeah, it was also lost time,” answered Ewald Döring when asked his impression of the war years. “Today the people—well, they can go into their occupation, and those are the years that we missed…. [And] on that day [of capitulation]… [jobs] were no longer there.” 19

Others too remembered the war primarily as an interruption in their occupational pursuits. Walter Nowak, born in 1926, also emphasized the theme of lost years, which seemed especially acute to him since he was on the verge of beginning a career. “They stole ten years of my life,” he argued. “For Führer, Volk, and Fatherland. For you see, I began an apprenticeship in’ 41, finished the apprenticeship in’ 43 after a successful journeyman’s examination, and then two months later I was drafted into the army…. Ten years of my life, yeah the best, they stole from me.” 20Taken prisoner by the French in 1945, Nowak signed up with the French foreign legion for five years to escape the poor conditions in the POW camp, so his estimate of ten years lost to Wehrmacht service is not accurate. Nevertheless, Nowak believed that the war had systematically hindered the pursuit of his career and thereby unnaturally restricted his possibilities in future life. Both Döring and Nowak, like many other Landsers, felt that they had lost the ability to determine their own lives, that they had fallen behind in the normal progression of training, job, marriage, career and had never quite caught up.

Some men failed to readjust to civilian life at all. Michael Hörbach, himself a war veteran, chronicled in his postwar novel Die verratenen Söhne (Betrayed Sons) the disillusionment, the problems of readjustment, the difficulty in shaking off the imprint of war. Through the characters of Walter Richards and Hugo Fischer, men seeking unsuccessfully to find a stable existence after the war, Hörbach created a powerful sense of loss, of the hole left by the war which remained unfilled even seven years after the capitulation.

“We have lost everything in the war,” Richards said. “They have taken everything from us. We look for it, but we can no longer find it…. All the young men search after something that no longer exists….”

“How come they can’t just forget it?” asked Fischer.

“Can you really forget those years?” asked Richards. “The years that we lost? That made out of you what you are? The great hole…? I was seventeen when they took me. I was twenty-one when they spit me back. And then the miserable period afterward. I look for the lost years everywhere, but I know that I will never find them.”

Later, thinking back on the conversation, Fischer wondered:

“What has overcome us…?” He didn’t know the answer…. His conversation with Richards came back to him, and he thought of the lost years He had run after the lost years, but had never been able to catch up….

Even without the war perhaps everything would have turned out badly, he told himself. But owing to the war I certainly did so…. It had destroyed him…. He was not the only one, but that didn’t help him. There were millions of others, …but the decisive thing was that he was one of the millions. 21

For the fictional Fischer and those he represented, the war was ever present. No matter how fast they ran they could neither escape the memories of their experiences nor make good the years they had lost. For the “great hole” was not so much the physical loss of these years as the personal sense of despair, disillusionment, and melancholy that accompanied their later lives. As Richards tried to explain to one who had not experienced these years:

At the beginning of 1946 I came back to Frankfurt. I wanted a new life I told myself… you must forget the pain…. That allowed me to live for a little while…. In the first months after the war you had too much to do to get a roof over your head and a stomach full of food. But the more everything got back to normal, the more time you had left to think…. From then on I knew that I was living a life without a purpose or a goal….

It is not so much that it happened, but rather how it happened…. They died a senseless death…. A life thrown away. There were millions in this war who perished senselessly… and that is the important thing. 22

For the character Richards—and perhaps for the author Hörbach as well, who committed suicide in 1988—the only lesson of the war was its senselessness: people killed to no purpose at the time, others living a hollow life afterward.

Much of the war literature published in Germany in the first postwar decade was a literature of the “little man,” of the corporals and privates who saw the conflict from the perspective of the foxhole. One-time Landsers writing from their own personal experiences—novelists such as Michael Hörbach, Heinrich Gerlach, Hans Hellmut Kirst, Wolfgang Ott, and Willi Heinrich—sought to portray the essence of the war “from below,” perhaps in the hope thereby of breaking out of their own war-imposed isolation, of making the complexity and ambiguity of their experiences more accessible to others. Critics of this approach, themselves former soldiers such as Heinrich Böll and Alfred Andersch, refused to accept the “normality” of an everyday life in war, especially one fought for National Socialist purposes, and instead sought to illustrate how the war had destroyed the lives and sense of identity of those caught in its midst. 23Between these two poles of thought lay the problem of interpretation: Should the war experience be shown in its personal aspects, which ran the risk of ignoring or normalizing Nazi crimes, or should it stress the larger issues of Nazi and German guilt, thereby distancing itself from the sufferings and perspective of the “little man”?

At the level of the bookstore, the debate was resolved in favor of neither of these approaches. Although many of the earlier “common soldier” novels have been reissued, and Böll—as the first German author to win the Nobel Prize for literature since Thomas Mann (1929)—looms large on the literary scene, both have been overshadowed in the popular imagination by the pulp fiction of the so-called Landser-Hefte, inexpensive serial novels that appear regularly on German newsstands. Ostensibly published as a warning never again to go to war, these novels in fact blur the complexity of the Landser experience, reducing the war to an idyllic adventure full of camaraderie and courage, with the hero taking part in exciting, romantic exploits. 24Since these novels purport to depict historical events, and the majority of their readers are under the age of twenty-five, they run the risk of recreating in the Federal Republic the siege of war novels that belabored Weimar by glorifying the supposed liberating qualities of combat.

For those Landsers whose letters and diaries been published posthumously, or who later wrote memoirs of their experiences, the popularity of the Landser-Hefte mocks the authenticity of their everyday experiences. Amid a perplexing array of daily challenges, emotions, and perceptions, the average German soldier sought primarily to stay alive and to do what he had been told was his duty. Only after the war did most come to a realization that they had been not just victims but perpetrators of Nazi crimes, an insight that merely made the meaning of the war and their activities more problematic. “The war is now over. The Moloch has spewed me out again,” Willy Schroder reflected just after the capitulation. “I’m left, not by my own wish, not through my own merit… intoxicated by the will to destruction, made happy by a liberated, carefree life purified by suffering, everything profound and complete. Like a delirium it is behind me. I now feel myself empty and burnt out. Yet somewhere deep inside something remains that still needs a long time to mature.” 25Certainly it is easy after the fact to proclaim that collaboration in evil deeds destroys the collaborator; at the time, however, it seemed perplexing that such youthful idealism could result in such vast destruction. It is difficult at any time to avoid either idealizing or trivializing the “little man,” and the attempt to come to grips with the everyday life of the Landser is made even more troublesome by the question of their relationship to Nazism and the often broad support among them for Hitler and National Socialist goals. To those who saw themselves as victimized by the Nazi regime, the millions of people killed as a result of Nazi aggression—of which they were the sharp end—stand as a silent reproach.