We Germans: interim report

A chance pick-me-up from the Raynes Park platform library, still functioning despite the building works sprawled all over the two country platforms. An easy-read paperback of just 200 pages. This by way of an interim report, while the first reading is still fresh.

A made-up story built around a short episode in the service of a young German soldier, who had been on the Eastern front since the very beginning, an episode from the time several years later when the Germans were starting to collapse, towards the end of 1944. Inter alia, a reminder that the Eastern front was not only much bigger than the Western front, but also much more savage. Savagery which might have been started by the Germans, but which had, by 1944, taken over the whole front. A savagery which extended to the savagery (by the military police and their equivalents) needed to enforce and maintain discipline. But a battlefield savagery which, for the most part, did not amount to actionable war crimes.

A story which is partly about that, but also about what happens afterwards, both to the survivors and to their families. How do they live with what has been done? All this from the point of view of the losing side.

Starritt no doubt draws on material from his German grandfather, of an age to have been a soldier in the second war, although we are not told whether he was or not, or, indeed, much about him at all. Maybe he did become the happily married village pharmacist in the way of the grandfather in the story.

Sarritt's provenance aside, my worry today, which will be familiar to regular readers, is a worry about the truth. When one writes a fictional or fictionalised account of events in the relatively recent past, how much can one make up? Should one flag up the bits that are made up? A matter which I last got exercised about in the context of reference 6.

This triggered in part by an anecdote about the end of the Bismark, in which the commander, when he knew the game was up, opened up the stores so that everyone could have a last feast - at least of food, booze and tobacco - before going down in a defiant blaze of glory.

Checking with Wikipedia at reference 5, I find a slightly different story. The commander is killed on the bridge, fairly early in the last battle, and the first officer eventually gives the orders to scuttle the battered Bismark and to abandon ship around an hour later. There were  a little over a hundred survivors from a complement of around 2,000 men.

First  thought was this was all wrong. For most readers this will be the most that they get to know about the Bismark and they will remember the fable rather than the history.

More prosaically, if the author tells us a whole lot of stuff about how the seed drills of the day worked, thriller writers quite often going in for padding of this sort, you expect him to have done his homework and got it right. You are allowed to invent people, but not important stuff about seed drills.

I then remembered about the sinking of the Yamato, the story that I remembered being that the commander summoned the crew before she left harbour and explained that they were on a glorious mission for the emperor, a glorious mission during which they would all meet a glorious end. A story made all the more plausible by the Japanese penchant at that time for suicide bombers and death before dishonour, which last included captivity. Looking that one up, I find that the ship was indeed sent on such a mission, but was battered to death by overwhelming force, mainly airborne force, before she got to her intended beach. This battering took around 3 hours, so the Yamato lasted rather longer than the Bismark. There were around three hundred survivors from a complement of around 3,000 men. A first person account is now on its way to me.

In the meantime, the second thought was that whatever the truth of the matter, the anecdote told by Starritt might well be what a private soldier on the Eastern front might have believed happened. Might well have been what he saw on the newsreels. Might well have been what he remembered years later. After all, the Bismark was sunk fairly early in the war, when Führer-worship was riding high. The commander and his officers at least might well have been full of the spirit of the Nibelungenlied. For see, for example, reference 8.

And what a private soldier might have believed is perfectly respectable material for a novel. The only catch being that the truth might take a bit of a battering on the way.

And then I remembered about the sinking of the Revenge, well over three hundred years later, well before what is now Germany had emerged from the complicated mess of central Europe. My memory was that the commander, one Sir Richard Grenville, a famous Elizabethan sea-dog (aka pirate), stood on the burning deck while his ship went down, screaming abuse at the Spaniards who had surrounded him. While the stories turned out by both Unstead and Hume were slightly more prosaic: he did fight his ship against long odds for a long time, but in the end he surrendered and died of wounds. There were some survivors, but they and the prize crew were lost in a storm a short while afterwards. A line which even Tennyson stuck to in his well known ballad, apart from a significant twist at the end, to be found at reference 9.

So, as the title of the post suggests, an interim report. More thought needed.

PS: I have used the well-known photograph of the Yamato include above before. Finding the post in question is left as an exercise for the reader.

References

Reference 1: We Germans - Alexander Starritt - 2020.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Starritt.

Reference 3: https://www.daytonliterarypeaceprize.org/. His prize. All being a bit ironic, given the present state of the world.

Reference 4: https://www.some.ox.ac.uk/news/beyond-good-and-evil-alexander-starritt-discusses-we-germans/. The story from the author's old college in Oxford.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_battle_of_Bismarck.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/01/author-author.html.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_ship_Revenge_(1577).

Reference 8: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2010/06/lighting-up-time.html.

Reference 9: https://allpoetry.com/The-Revenge---A-Ballad-of-the-Fleet.