ISBN: 0374139784
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Avg Cusomer Rating: 4
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Summary: Anecdotal, first person history - not literature
Willy Peter Reese was drafted into the German Army in 1941. He served with the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front until 1944 when he is believed to have been killed in action. As a member of the German Army in the Soviet Union, he was part of the most horrific killing machine in history - Reese, though young and a "patriotic" German - knew this.
An aspiring writer, which shows in the pretentious, florid style, Reese wrote and compiled this manuscript on his last leave at home. He returned to the Eastern Front and presumably died in battle, not as a prisoner of war. The manuscript was saved by his mother and after his death, another relative brought it to light and publication. Max Hastings, one of the very best contemporary war historians, provides an excellent foreword. Reese's memoir is a rare document for, as Hastings masterfully puts it, "Elderly Wehrmacht soldiers . . . must pass their declining years in the knowledge that they served the cause of the world's most terrible tyranny, in a struggle tht ended in defeat."
Reese's account of his development from a 20 year old former bank clerk into a hardened German soldier is fascinating and repellant. The inherent inhumanity of the German soldier of that era is revealed when, fresh out of training, Reese and his unit see Soviet prisoners being forced to work with beatings and clubbings with rifles. No one, of course, objected. Reese adds that they didn't know the Russian prisoners were starving. Later, Reese and his unit come across the bodies of two hanged Soviet partisans. Again, the Soviets become the butt of jokes and prodding with sticks.
Reese tries for the writing style of the day, which seems mroe than a bit overblown by today's standards. He recounts his moods which range from euphoric to so depressed that he stands up one day, hoping that a Soviet sniper will kill him.
Reese appears unstintingly honest in his description of his war. It is a brutal, dirty business, but one that calls forth "heroic" impulses: the willingness to kill, the willingness to die. The death of fellow soldiers becomes commonplace and accepted: it is the duty of a soldier to die. It is the duty of a soldier to kill. This is a catalog of brutality, of the horror of a war seeking conquest and enslavement.
Reese writes - and remember this is not intended to be fiction - "I was hapy. In the middle of Russia, I at last felt at home. This was where I belonged; nowhere other than in this world with its horrors and sparse joys was it good to be. Only here did my soul find its strange element."
There is no philosophy in this book: Reese considers himself a loyal German and will do what he is told to do. Reese is an intelligent young man whose views were shaped by his government, his nation's history and the pride of its people in their martial qualities. His memoir is one of the most chilling documents I have ever read not only for the realism of his descriptions of battle, but for the single-mindedness of Reese and his comrades in doing their duty. Frightening stuff, indeed. But one must hope that his own nation's soldiers would be as resolute, if not as immoral as Reese and his comrades.
Jerry
Summary: A brief but detailed book.
This book is interesting in the fact that there are so few accounts of the front line soldier on the Eastern Front. Can get bogged down in 'poetic-style' descriptions and the overall writing is not the best. For a more detailed, more gripping account, I would recommend Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer.
Summary: A literary gem
Like some personal combat accounts, e.g. the U.S. marine E. B. Sledge's "With the Old Breed," this is an in-your-face and vividly graphic account of front-line combat. Contrasted with raw accounts like Sledge's however, "A Stranger to Myself" is exquisitely literary. It portrays the action, experiences, and inner thoughts of an insightful young German foot soldier of considerable intellect undergoing progressive disillusionment accompanying Wehrmacht defeat on the Russian front.
Willy Peter Reese's portrayals are both graphic and poetic -- sparse in adjectives and rich in imaginative metaphor. Reese reveals remorse in passages like, "I was partly responsible for this devastation and the grief it brought the people, responsible like all the nameless victims, like all the soldiers." Almost in the same breath however, he reveals contortions of mind that permit him to continue to perform under absurdly difficult circumstances and to find meaning and worth within his increasingly tortured, war-skewed experience.
Some reviewers seem to see this as merely the combat diary of a Nazi pawn. I see the work as an evocative combat diary, but equally importantly as a short literary gem.
One can but wonder where this young author-philosopher's life might have led had he not perished on Germany's Eastern Front at the tender age of twenty-three years.
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