How it felt to be inside the skin of a Nazi marauder
In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch advises his daughter that you can never properly understand a person “until you climb into his skin and walk around in it”.
Daringly, in what is only his second novel, Alexander Starritt climbs into the skin of one of the most appalling archetypes of the 20th century: a Nazi soldier as he marauds across Eastern Europe during World War 2.
Though no readers (short of psychopaths) are likely to admire the soldier’s wartime actions, they will at least be confronted in We Germans by his experiences as both killer and victim.
Starritt’s taut novel takes the form of a letter written by an elderly German war veteran to his British grandson, Callum.
The book clanks against the sides of this somewhat contrived structure, but it does permit an indirect dialogue to develop as Callum adds his own notes to the story. Those exchanges are all the more resonant considering that the Scots-German Starritt’s own grandfather was a German soldier who spent several years in a Soviet prison camp after the war.
Meissner, as the soldier is known, tells us he spent seven years in Eastern Europe, first as an artilleryman and then as a captive. He does not flinch from describing horrors as the Nazis “kicked out the supports under the edifice of civilisation”. During the first year of the war, the Nazis intentionally starved 2.5-million Russian prisoners to death. When the wheel turned, the Russians responded in kind.
Compared with the eastern front, he says the war the Americans and British waged in the west was a “decorous sideshow” ,a “kind of formal dance with flags and national costumes, advances and retreats”. Out of every eight German soldiers killed in the war, seven died in the east. It was only in 1956 that the last 10,000 German prisoners returned home.
“In the east, prisoners of war didn’t amuse themselves with escape committees and counterfeit documents; they ate their friends.”
The action takes place over a few demented days in 1944 when Meissner becomes detached from his unit and joins a group of fellow German scavengers. They murderously raid one of their own food depots, witness a massacre of Polish villagers by Nazi German troops, hijack a Soviet tank to fight the Russians and try to escape to the west.
We Germans captures the terrible moment of realisation when it dawns on the onceswaggering Nazis that they are going to be crushed.
“As the possibility that we were going to lose thickened into certainty, we began to count up the terrible things we’d done,” he writes. “We knew that retribution was coming, and what it looked like.”
Starritt’s descriptions of conflict are shocking. But he becomes less sure-footed when the two characters start moralising about war.
Meissner is full of contrition, acknowledging that it was right and just that the Germans lost. But he says he cannot feel guilt for events over which he had no control, even if he does feel a profound shame.
“Shame can’t be atoned for; it is a debt that cannot be paid.”
From Callum we learn that his grandfather returned to Germany after the war, ran a pharmacy in a village near Heidelberg and lived 46 years with the woman he loved.
But, as Meissner recalls, the war always remained buried within him, only to resurface in unexpected and traumatising ways. Blue-black plums, dangling from a branch, remind him of hanged civilians in wartime villages. Just one of many haunting images from Starritt to pierce the semiromantic mythology that, in Britain and the US at least, now enshrouds the war. /©