Publisher's Weekly Review
Sometimes lyrical, this memoir by a German youth who miraculously survived four tours of duty on the Russian front during WWII-he died on his fifth deployment-is a significant historical document. It is also a laborious and overwrought cacophony of Wagnerian proportions. Reese, who was a 20-year-old bank clerk in 1939 when he was first drafted, inhabits many different worlds, all of them conflicting. Despite Schmitz's assertion that Reese was "no Nazi," he was, like the vast majority of German youths of the time, deeply imbued with Nazi ideology and experienced the war as a sort of sacrament. Duty, abdication and heroism are just some of his motifs. Reese sees himself as a poet deciphering the human condition, but mostly he is just a soldier who plays his part in the atrocities-often exuberantly. He laughs with the other members of his platoon at the spectacle of Russian partisans hanging by the neck-"yellow-brown ichor dribbled out of their eyes and crusted on their cheeks"-and makes Russian women dance naked. Despite its long-winded homilies and repetitiveness, this stark testimony provides new insights into both the ravages of Nazi indoctrination and the bloodiest military campaign in history. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Memoirs from the Eastern Front by an ordinary Wehrmacht soldier with an extraordinary grasp the horrors of war. In a cogent introduction, British historian Max Hastings stresses that the enormity and ferocity of the land campaign between Germany and Russia, the true centerpiece of World War II, were, and still are, in good part lost on Americans. The strategy of the U.S.--a small land force with air superiority--was premised on Russia paying the price in blood to defeat Hitler. At war's end, Allied dead totaled perhaps one million citizens; the Soviets lost 27 million. U.S. and British forces killed a combined 220,000 German troops; the Russians killed three million and also shot 167,000 of their own troops attempting to flee the battlefield. Introspective Private Reese records his disdain for military service as well as his acceptance of its inevitability, and sets down in page after graphic page the absurdity of the war and his amazement at his own ability to sometimes revel in it (often drunk). After looting a captured train of spirits and food, he writes, "we...whooped and skipped over the rails and danced in the cars...made a Russian woman prisoner dance naked for us, greased her tits with boot polish and got her as drunk as we were." In the aftermath of a night battle, however, he starkly recalls the faces of the dead and contemplates what is gained by fighting: "If I fell tomorrow, life would go on without me...thousands more were ready to work and to bring the task to completion, to quarrel with destiny, and prevail or, like me, fall by the wayside." After a furlough, Reese returned to the Front and was killed in 1944; his diary was preserved for decades by his mother. Candid, personal, laced with thoroughly haunting imagery. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The brutality of battle is vividly rendered in this harrowing memoir from Reese, a German soldier who served on the Russian front during World War II. Killed in combat at the age of 23, Reese left behind a diary documenting the atrocities of war and his growing disillusionment with the attitudes of his fellow countrymen. (Reese was no Nazi, writes editor Schmitz in the book's preface, in which he first recalls reading the blistering manuscript inherited by Reese's cousin.) The late soldier's meditations are by turns poetic and macabre; he reflects on the literature of Tolstoy and Baudelaire_and dramatic clashes drenched in blood. War both robs Reese of his soul and imbues his life with a sense of purpose, leaving him feeling like a stranger to myself. His prose resonates with images of a bitter, corpse-strewn Russian landscape, where it's only a matter of time before a young man's heart turns to stone. One soldier, unable to find his felt boots, chops off the frozen legs of a dead Red Army soldier. He bundled the two stumps under his arm and set them down in the oven, next to our lunch, writes Reese. By the time the potatoes were done, the legs were thawed out, and he pulled on the bloody felt boots. --Allison Block Copyright 2005 Booklist
