Alexander Starritt (2020) We Germans.

Alexander Starritt’s name can be added to the list of great Scottish writers. (He’s written another book I’ve not yet read, The Beast.)  I, initially, thought We Germans was a translation like Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Road Home. The format is simple.  A grandfather writing to his Scottish grandson, Callum. And his grandson replying. Oberkanonier Meissner was in the Wehrmacht. Six-foot-two and broad shouldered, he was conscripted at nineteen. He was posted to the East. He weighed seven-and-a-half stone (48 kilos) when he was repatriated from the USSR, aged twenty-six.

Early in his written monologue, he promises his grandson,

‘I wasn’t a Nazi. No court would find me guilty of anything, even an omniscient one. What I want to tell you about isn’t about atrocities on genocide.’

What he wants to talk about is courage. War he describes as ‘a battle between hammers and anvils’.

The war in the East was the real war. ‘Out of every eight German soldiers killed. Seven were killed in the East.’

He describes the decision to invade the East like a decision to invade the sea. In the first year in the East, the Germans starved two-and-a-half million prisoners to death. In barbed-wire camps Russian’s ate their friends. Western loses in comparison were a blip, easily brushed off.

Meissner’s letter tells Callum he’s familiar with the idea of ‘collective guilt’—as a concept—but not as a feeling.

Shame, however, he claims holds ‘a more pitless truth’.     

‘Shame is not like guilt. It’s not a matter of reparation. Shame cannot be atoned for, it is a debt that cannot be paid.’

In the introduction to Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914,  a Bulgarian historian on the Balkan’s Conflict observed, when we ask the question ‘WHY? Guilt becomes the focal point’. Twenty million soldiers killed in the First World War, roughly the number killed in USSR alone. Little wonder even Vladimir Putin calls it ‘The Great Patriotic War’.

Meissner admits to no guilt, but does admit to shame. He assures us we have become overfamiliar with the ‘pantomimes of valour’. Survival was enough.

When he and four other soldiers are sent foraging for food, the war was already lost. They were retreating home.

‘In that first, victorious summer, our invading tanks covered half the distance to St Petersburg in five days…The limiting factor wasn’t the Red Army, but the road surface: mud rather than tarmac.’

 ‘I became a pedestrian one day in spring 1943, in the Eastern part of Ukraine, more than a thousand miles from the German border.’

‘By 1944, those of us still alive were fleeing on foot, broken, bedraggled, our tanks blown up, our artillery abandoned, our good name blackened for generations, our friends and brothers-in-arms buried in hostile soil.’

Hunger eats away at a man, but when a man loses hope, he’s already dead. That autumn a rumour had spread that there was a food depot nearby. Stashed with French wine and Italian sardines and other loot from occupied countries the general staff were in such a hurry to retreat they’d left it to the Russians.  

Meissner didn’t believe the rumour. He didn’t disbelieve it either. He’d been ordered, with four others in their rag-tag army, to find it. None of whom he knew particularly well. Luttke, he didn’t like because he parroted party propaganda and tried to take charge. But he was quickly put in his place. The only one he could bully was Jensen. It wasn’t worth trying to remember newly conscripted soldier’s names. But they’d a little horse, Ferdinand, which hadn’t yet been eaten, when they set off.

He finds the nostalgia for when Germany was for Germans a throwback to when villages were looted and their occupants crucified and hanged—and all to protect a civilian population that readily took part in pogroms.

Primo Levi asks an open question: If This Is a Man?

We Germans offers no ready answers. Alexander Starritt, now there’s a writer worth knowing.  

The Man Who Saw Too Much, BBC 1, BBC iPlayer presenter, producer and director Alan Yentob and Jill Nicholls.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000bqt9/the-man-who-saw-too-much

The story of 106-year-old Boris Pahor is a eulogy to the twentieth century. The man who saw too much and experienced too much is a testament to man’s inhumanity to man. He wrote a memoir, Necropolis- City of the Dead about his incarceration in a little-know Nazi concentration camp, Natzweiler-Struthhof in the mountainous regions of Alsace, France.

He was also sent to Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Dora, Harzungen, Ironically, Natzweiler was one of the first concentration camps liberated by the Allies, but it was empty. Prisoners were sent to Dachau, but it was Natwieler he judged to be the most cruel. His account is illustrated by drawings by fellow prisoners.

Pahor’s ability to speak several languages, his native Slovenian, Italian, French and I imagine a bit of German saved him. It allowed him to get a job inside the barracks as a translator for the camp doctor an Austrian, who also trained him to be a diarrhoea nurse. Almost half of the 52 000 prisoners were executed, died of illness or malnutrition or died outside working in the granite quarry in sub-zero temperatures. A mountainous region, each step going up the graded slope to work was recalled as the equivalent of Christ on the road to Calvary.  The camp produced a particular type of red stone favoured by Hitler’s architects who created public buildings in honour of the thousand-year Reich.

Pahor was sent to the camp because he was considered to be an anti-fascist. He was arrested in September 1943.

Fascism comes from the term fasces, a bundle of rods with a projected axe blade, a symbol of the magisterial power in ancient Rome.

The neologism fascism was associated with the rise of Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain and Hitler in Germany. A megalomaniac belief in the strong-man theory of history. A contempt for the democratic process and calls for its suspension so the great man can act on behalf of the people.

Pahor, for example, recalls his upbringing in the cosmopolitan Slovenian port city of Trieste with access to the Adriatic being taken over by Italy after the first world war. As a precursor to Kristallnacht, Mussolini’s blackshirts burned down the Slovene cultural centre, closed their schools and banned the speaking of their language in public. School lessons were in Italian. Pahor, the anti-fascist was drafted into Mussolini’s army to fight the anti-fascist Allied forced.

Fascism = Capitalism.

Mussolini, the former Communist and man of the people, had a mandate to rule given by aristocracy, landowners and the moneyed classes. In contemporary terms it was based on deregulation. The bogey men of communism and working men organising themselves into trade unions was outlawed. Deregulation meant no regulation, the whip hand was with the rich and only the poor paid taxes.

King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy’s intervention in the second world war and his late backing of the Allied forces led to the arrest of Mussolini at the end of July, 1943. One fascist force replaced another. The German’s sprung Mussolini from prison and took control of the defence of Italy and split the country among fascist and non-fascist supporters.

An estimated 600 000 joined the anti-fascist resistance movement in Italy, around 70 000 of whom were women. Pahore was caught with a typewriter and accused of producing anti-fascist leaflets. So begins his odyssey in the death camps.

Primo Levi, Italian Jew, in his memoir, If This Is a Man asked a question what is it to be truly human?

Necropolis –City of the Dead is the answer. Them and us.  The ersatz category of subhuman that fight each other over a finger-tip of bread while mining pink-coloured rock that has decorative value. Capitalism in its purest form can be found here. Fascism and the strong man theory of history have made a dramatic comeback. Boris Pahor tells it like it is. He saw too much. We understand too little. This is a Boris you can trust.