Gerald Steinacher…A Review Of Walter Kempowski’s Book “Swan Song-1945-Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich”see note please
http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-swansong-1945-by-walter-kempowski-1431040073
Frankly speaking, I don’t give a damn about German suffering during the war….they hailed and supported Hitler and the genocide and the Allies crushed them…..They deserved all their suffering and more…..rsk
Soviet Troops Raped and Ravaged. German Civilians Committed Suicide in Despair. And On May 8, 1945, The Nazis at Last Surrendered
For more than 20 years, the German novelist and archivist Walter Kempowski collected newspaper articles, diaries, letters, memoirs and documents written by people on both sides of the fighting and from every station in life during World War II. The result was a 10-volume magnum opus, “Das Echolot” (or “Sonar”), documenting ordinary life in Nazi Germany during the monumental days of the war through the eyes of thousands of German and Allied citizens.
The series began in 1993 with a volume on Operation Barbarossa, the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. “Swansong 1945” is the last book in the series, originally published in German in 2005, two years before Kempowski’s passing. Kempowski zooms in on just four days from the final year of the war: Hitler’s 56th birthday on April 20; the first encounter of Soviet and U.S. forces in Germany on April 25 at the Elbe River; Hitler’s suicide in his Berlin bunker on April 30; and Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 8. It offers an emotionally immediate and multi-faceted perspective of the last days of the Third Reich.
Born in 1929 into a conservative upper-middle-class family, Kempowski grew up in the northeastern German town of Rostock. Like most of his peers, he had to join the Hitler Youth. In February 1945, the 16-year-old was drafted into an auxiliary anti-aircraft unit as a messenger. At the end of the war, Kempowski worked for a short time as a store clerk for American military in Wiesbaden. In 1948, while visiting his family in Rostock, then in the Soviet zone of occupation, Kempowski, his brother and his mother were arrested and sentenced to hard labor for espionage. Released in 1956, a traumatized Kempowski moved back to West Germany and started a family.
In the late 1960s, he won recognition for his autobiographical novels about his time in the Hitler Youth and in a communist prison. But Kempowski wanted to do more than document his own story. He wanted to rescue “the voices of the dead,” and do justice to the memory of the wartime generation.
ENLARGE Swansong 1945
By Walter Kempowski
Norton, 479 pages, $35
The majority of Germans wanted only to leave the past behind in the 1950s and ’60s. But Kempowski insisted on asking uncomfortable questions about the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. He was among the few to recognize in his work that along with German guilt there was German suffering. At the time, references to German victims were viewed as an expression of right-wing revisionism; now they are rightly understood as crucial to understanding the war. “Swansong 1945” is full of descriptions of the horrors of the final weeks of World War II, with its concentration-camp survivors staggering through the German countryside on death marches, countless suicides among soldiers and civilians, the plague of rapes by the Soviet troops intent on revenge for German atrocities, and the continuing senseless fighting.
Among the many descriptions of human misery is a diary entry written by a German doctor who was called to a German military hospital train: “no bandages, no tablets, no medication. They are calling for help from all the trucks. I am dragged with some difficulty into a cattle truck. A picture of misery: blind in both eyes, one leg amputated, shot to the lung, coughing blood, hectic appearance. A woman shot in the arm. Next to her, her child with a bullet in the back and the beginning of scarlet fever. . . . No leadership left. Like these wounded, the whole nation is being led towards the downfall, towards suffering and misery.” Hitler, meantime, was insisting to some of his entourage that the German people deserved this agony because they proved themselves too weak.
Yet amid such horrors, “Swansong 1945” documents the survival of human joy in everyday life: A simple diary entry written by a teenager in Berlin documents his excitement about a bowl of unskimmed milk. A young Red Army soldier in Czechoslovakia writes to his sister: “The weather is glorious now. It’s hot. There is green everywhere. I am now writing the letter on a balcony like the one on which Romeo and Juliet once declared their love.”
What underlies Kempowski’s work is the conviction that “history should not be left solely to historians.” Intermediaries are unnecessary to understand how it really was, and he presents his primary sources without context or the explanation of his selection process. Yet “Swansong 1945” is no mere anthology but an artful collage. A number of eyewitnesses are quoted repeatedly throughout the book, giving it a sense of structure. The short, stenographic-style biographies in the back of the book of the people quoted is very useful. Still, many of the sources do not automatically speak for themselves, and some authors and sources are not easily identifiable. “Swansong 1945” is neither a scholarly work nor a traditional work of literature. Yet whatever its genre, the book, compellingly translated into English by Shaun Whiteside, is difficult to put down.
On May 8, 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally. Shortly after, President Harry S. Truman was in San Francisco and at the conference that formed the United Nations. He reminded delegates: “It is easier to remove tyrants and destroy concentration camps than it is to kill the ideas which gave them birth and strength.” Meantime, a young Waffen-SS officer greeted the news of Germany’s defeat: “Certainly, the war was over, I had come out of it alive, but it was equally certain that . . . we wouldn’t see home for a long time, perhaps a very long time.”
Seventy years to the day since the collapse of the Nazi regime, we are again faced with a dramatic rise of violence in the name of religious or racial supremacy. These voices from the past, reflecting on the realities of war and human evil, at times appear disturbingly present.
Mr. Steinacher is an associate professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the author of
“Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice.”
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