A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War : Russia, 1941-1944
by Willy Peter Reese, Stefan Schmitz, Max Hastings, Michael Hofmann
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Book Summary Information
Author: Max Hastings, Michael Hofmann, Stefan Schmitz, Willy Peter ReeseEdition: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2005-11-02
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 176
Book Reviews of A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War : Russia, 1941-1944
Book Review: A Stranger to Himself, But a Friend to the Rest of Us
Summary: 4 Stars
Of all the countless memiors written by German veterans of the Eastern Front, A STRANGER TO MYSELF is the most unique I've yet read. It distinguishes itself from the "field gray flood" of nonfiction books on the Russian campaign in two very distinct ways: first, the author, Willy Peter Reese, did not live to see his scattered notes, many scribbled by the light of a cigarette, get published; he was killed in action in Russia in 1944. Second, Reese was not writing a mere litany of combat experiences and behind-the-lines hijinks but rather a deeply introspective, quasi-metaphysical self-portrait of a thoughtful young man in the midst of a war he neither agreed with nor understood.
Willy Reese seems to have been a rather tortured soul well before he was drafted into Hitler's army - he had a tendency to brooding and seems to have been somewhat anguished about the meaning of life, not to mention oversensitive to its vulgarity and cruelty. The military service did not sit well with him, and he nursed a deep disgust for the Nazis and their cult of anti-intellectualism and brutality. By the time he got to Russia he seems to have given up on the human race, which made what he saw and experienced there all the more horrifying for him.
Roughly 32 million people died on the Eastern Front between 1941 - 1944, the majority of them Russian civilians, and Reese himself survived long enough to see enough carnage for 1,000 lifetimes. He expected war to be horrible; what he did not expect was that he himself would willingly perpetrate some of this horror, and learn to do so with a smile on his face. Such was his transformation, from vaguely pacifistic poet to stone-faced hunter of his own species, that he came to feel that he had changed into someone that he did not know - a stranger to himself. Trapped between who he had been and who he was becoming, his only release ("spiritual morphine") came in writing down his experiences, notes which, after his death in combat, his mother would later organize into this book.
American war literature tends to be very straightforward, and so it's no surprise a lot of people feel that Reese was a pretentious pseudo-intellectual trying to impress his audience with his vocabulary and intellect. After all, many of the book's passages are taken up with philosophical contemplations of the meaning of existence, the human soul, the relationship of man to nature, and the cycle of life and death. And Reese is the sort who doesn't step over a rock, he picks it up and contemplates its place in the Scheme of Things, sometimes with a seriousness that may seem silly to a (further) Westerner. This will be very annoying to a lot of readers who want their "war" books heavy on the "war" and light on the half-mystical philosophizing, but what readers and critics must understand is that Reese was merely a product of his times and of his country. German education heavily stressed philosophy, history, mythology, and classic literature, and Germans as a rule have a very deep connection to nature. This tends to effect their writing, and it deeply effected Reese's. You can love it or hate it (or something in between), but you shouldn't view it as affected - it was quite genuine.
A STRANGER TO MYSELF is not without its gripping moments. Like one of his influences, Ernst J?nger, Reese often digresses into turgid rambling, but just like J?nger, these tedious passages almost always give way to beautifully written and vivid descriptions - when Reese describes the horrible fury of the Russian winters, the plagues of lice, the stench of decomposing corpses, the terrible exhaustion and thirst of a long march in the Ukrainian sun, the pathos of a dead soldier "whose rigored hands refused to yield his rifle", you feel these things as certainly as if you were experiencing them yourself.
A STRANGER TO MYSELF is an important book, one which approaches an unbelievably savage conflict from the perspective of a man who was quite aware of what the war was doing to him, but powerless to stop it. And that theme of powerlessness, of being swept along the currents of Fate by forces he did not understand, is part of what makes the book such a poignant and necessary read. The Eastern Front was a hell that only one in four of the German soldiers who served in lived to talk about, and while Reese did not survive, his voice rings very loud indeed.
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