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A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War: Russia, 1941-1944

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I have burned all the cities, strangled all the women, brained all the children, plundered all the land. I have shot a million enemies, laid waste the fields, destroyed the churches, ravaged the souls of the inhabitants, spilled the blood and tears of all the mothers. I did it, all me. I did nothing. But I was a soldier."

Thus begins Willy Peter Reese's "A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War: Russia, 1941-1944. Winston Churchill may have said that history is written by the victors, but the recent discovery and publication of these memoirs provides some evidence that history's `losers' sometimes also have a chance to contribute. A Stranger to Myself is a valuable addition to our collective memory.

Willy Peter Reese was a recent high school graduate and a trainee bank clerk when he was drafted into the German army in the spring of 1941. The German invasion of the USSR, Operation Barbarossa, began during Reese's basic training. Like many of his fellow soldiers, Reese thought he would be home by Christmas. Reese was quickly disabused of this notion once he found himself in the middle of what may be the most brutal fighting in the history of humanity (or inhumanity). Not only was the war on the eastern front fought between armies but it was a war in which brutality was inflicted on the civilian population on an unprecedented scale. In addition to the Holocaust inflicted on the Jews of Poland, the Ukraine, and Belarus, millions of other Poles, Ukrainians, and Russian civilians lost their lives through hunger or murder, along with millions of Red Army and German prisoners. As noted so aptly in the Preface, Reese found himself in the "greatest abattoir in human history".

This memoir emerged in 2002 and represents the reflection of Reese on life in the abattoir. Reese kept a diary during his time as a soldier. He'd set out his thoughts on every scrap of paper he could find. He would write during lulls in the horror or sitting in an army field hospital after being wounded. He wrote long letters home to his mother and father. Sent home in late 1943 after being wounded, Reese took his diary and those letters home and turned it into a manuscript. He left his manuscript with his mother and returned to the front. He was killed in 1944. His mother kept all his documents as a shrine to her dead son. A Stranger to Myself was published in Germany in 2002 and has now been translated (very capably by Michael Hoffman) into English.

Reese was well-read and considered himself a poet. As such these memoirs are unusual for its florid prose. The writing is not terse but extravagant in its description of Reese' desperate mood swings during his time on the front. However, the ornate prose, which would seem utterly pretentious in a piece of fiction, serves as a stark and compelling contradiction to the horrors that Reese writes about. Reese does not spare himself. He is brutally honest about the loss of his soul, his absorption with the efficiency of killing and his own mistreatment of the civilian population. It may be asserted that Reese did not mention the Holocaust or go into any great detail about the atrocities he saw committed and perhaps committed himself during his time on the front. That is a fair enough comment to be sure. However, after reading this book it is clear to me that Reese's focus was not war on the grand scale but on the war and its effect on him. These are internal, not external reflections. He, like virtually ever other soldier, was concerned first and foremost with his own or her own survival. The big picture is for other people to draw. Looking at it through that lens, Reese's memoirs are frank and brutally honest. He does not praise the war and in fact finds it irrational and unforgivable that his country waged it. Yet at the same time he has no aversion to participating in the fighting and the drinking and the looting that takes place. He displays a certain arrogance towards the people whose land he helps occupy. He wrestles with his demons and lays it out for the reader. Anyone who has seen this horror cannot believe in God he writes, yet he cannot help but think that the sins he and his comrades commit are unforgivable. We see him sink to a depth where it seems there is no turning back, where he stands up from his slit trench in order to be shot by Soviet snipers, only to see his spirits revive a bit when he gets a days rest or finds a bit of food to eat.

Reese's story is an important one for many reasons. It makes for compelling reading and it will have an impact on the reader that will linger after the book is read and put back on the shelf.

L. Fleisig

A remarkable book which left a deep impression on me. At once literary in style and harrowing in its descriptions of life as cannon fodder, albeit thinking, passionate, feeling cannon fodder.

Willy Peter Reese was no hero. I am not even sure he was brave. However, as a good German boy he did his duty to the fatherland. First he trained to put on the "mask" of the soldier. Then he went of to war in Russia, mask in place.

He passed through a land where atrocities were the reality. He pillaged food from the starving. During the German Army's massive, fighting retreat Reese's unit was always among the last to get the order to fall back. His young eyes took in the full terror of the Nazi's scorched earth terror tactics. And he was part of it.

Along with his comrades, he routinely drank himself into some other world. When there was no other way to move it, he and his fellow soldiers relentlessly dragged the unit's artillery piece. Day after day. Month after month. Year after year.

All the while, his young mind processed what he witnessed. Temperatures so cold he could only cry. A body infested with parasites. Legs and feet with open oozing wounds. Taking shelter in hand dug hovels. Corpses hanging from trees, lying in ditches, everywhere. In between the bouts of horror and killing, however, were sights of beauty and moments of mental and spiritual clarity. His writing only stopped when his life ended.

Yes, Reese was trying to write like a writer. His loves were Rilke and others of that ilk. His book though, must be taken as a whole. To dissect it, to say this part is too wordy or that part is too introspective, is to miss the point. No, Willy Peter Reese was not a hero. He did his duty as he saw it. He tried to stay alive. He was not brave. Surely, then, he was the typical German male of the day who was thrust into a situation over which he had no control. He did not rage against his lot nor did he relish it. He simply existed through it as best he could.

The best thing about this book is its honesty. It presents war as it really is: brutal, dehumanizing, miserable and painful. There is no attempt to justify anything, or to explain the history and politics of the time. There is just a description of one man's experience in war.

Willy Peter Reese wanted to be a writer, so he wrote about his experiences. The first part of the book is over-written, as if he was trying too hard. But in the second half of the book, Reese matures as an author as he matures as a soldier. There are some powerful passages that will awaken memories and feelings in anyone who has been in circumstances where life has lost its attraction.

I stumbled on this book why visiting some sites about Stalingrad. It was mentioned by a couple posters so I decided to give it a read. I was not disappointed.

This is not a book looking for hard facts about places and people. It's the writings of a man coming to terms with war and how it changed him.

There is a great deal where the author goes into vivid descriptions about feelings, memories, and impressions of his surroundings. This could annoy some people.

Do not look for detailed descriptions of tactics and strategy.

What makes this book interesting is the contrast of hope and despair. The prose that starts a chapter changes to despair over time. There are ample descriptions of soldiers abusing people, looting, and drinking. Reese tells of his own actions and in the end drinks heavily. He even decided to get himself killed or wounded by standing up from a trench.

There is no propaganda in the book. He does not preach the glory of Hitler. Yet, he also doesn't mention other things such as the holocaust. There is even a reference to a friend in Auschwitz.

Towards the end of the book I got the impression he decided to die in Russia. There isn't anything obvious to state this idea. It's just how it read to me.

There are photos in the book ranging from his early days, joining the army and even a Red Cross report telling where it is thought that Reese died.

It is a good thing this book was published. The mother held his writings till she died. One aspect that is useful is that it goes contrary to a belief that the German army was clean in it's actions in Russia. I have read more then a few comments from people that argue the Germans were noble while the Russians were savage.

Probably the most prophetic comment was the end of the book:

"The war went on. Once more I went out there. I loved life."

Like some personal combat accounts, e.g. the U.S. marine E. B. Sledge's "With the Old Breed," this is an in-your-face and vividly graphic account of front-line combat. Contrasted with raw accounts like Sledge's however, "A Stranger to Myself" is exquisitely literary. It portrays the action, experiences, and inner thoughts of an insightful young German foot soldier of considerable intellect undergoing progressive disillusionment accompanying Wehrmacht defeat on the Russian front.
Willy Peter Reese's portrayals are both graphic and poetic -- sparse in adjectives and rich in imaginative metaphor. Reese reveals remorse in passages like, "I was partly responsible for this devastation and the grief it brought the people, responsible like all the nameless victims, like all the soldiers." Almost in the same breath however, he reveals contortions of mind that permit him to continue to perform under absurdly difficult circumstances and to find meaning and worth within his increasingly tortured, war-skewed experience.
Some reviewers seem to see this as merely the combat diary of a Nazi pawn. I see the work as an evocative combat diary, but equally importantly as a short literary gem.
One can but wonder where this young author-philosopher's life might have led had he not perished on Germany's Eastern Front at the tender age of twenty-three years.

reese's book is a collection of personal writings never intended for publication as they appear in 'a stranger to myself' (some of the other reviewers may want to read the book's preface.). not a history book, not a collection of anecdotes about slaying the 'russian hoards', not even a memoir but rather the thoughts of an individual knowingly trapped in death's grip w/no hope of escape. little of the 'flash, boom, bang' most war memoirs offer but 'astm' far exceeds any other title in putting us in the "secret chambers of the soul".
a book of what the author thought and felt rather than what he saw or did.
absolutely first rate...

Willy Peter Reese. I had never heard of him before the first part of June 2007. I met Reese, in his memoirs. He bared his soul for me. I sat next to him as he endured the frigid cold of a Russian winter. He told me of his pain when wounded. I watched as he and his fellow soldiers wore lice infested uniforms, suffered from pyoderma and lymph inflammations.
I watched a young man, quiet and reserved, go to war. In degrees I witnessed this young man give up on life and accept the horrors of war.
Reese, through his writing style, has left behind a compelling piece of literature; painting the war on the eastern front in such vivid colors so as to burn a hole to the readers soul.
Please read, A Stranger To Myself. For those who glorify war this may give you a realistic perspective of what can, and usually does, happen when soldiers face each other. As an Army veteran I am not so naive as to think war can be avoided every time, but when one reads what war is really all about then it is worth the time to try diplomacy first.
Read this book. It will take your breath away.

Richard Neal Huffman
The Bear And IDreams in Blue: "The Real Police"

The week that I'm writing this review saw the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Some 2,400 were killed there. In all of World War II the United States suffered a little less than 300,000 killed in battle. The Soviet Union about twenty times that, something over six million in the army, perhaps 25 to 30 million all together. The Soviet Union was where the war was really fought.

This 'confession' as he called it was written by a young German soldier, drafted into the Army in 1941 just as the invasion of Russia was beginning. It tells the story of the war, not from the high level view of the generals, but from down in the mud. It tells a tale where the Werhmacht was not a squeeky-clean army, misled, misused by a murderous Nazi elite.

Reese claims not to be a Nazi. But the thoughts and feelings that he had of being a member of the Master Race, the teachings of the party, the horrors he saw, and indeed participated in himself show what unlimited power with no fear of punishment can bring to a young man.

This book was written during his three tours of duty on the Russian front, and compiled into a manuscript while home on leave after being wounded. He was killed during his fourth tour.

First published in Germany, this book seems to show that the Germans are beginning to come to terms with what their armies did, what their young men. So far the Japanese still seem to be in full scale official denial.

This was a very interesting book that was written by an average soldier that had an above average intellect. This young man would have been "somebody" if he had survived the war. Unfortunately, he did not and these pages show his view of the war in the East. The book itself does jump around, but this can be understood since it is written by a 20 year old that is trying to understand something that can't be understood. War. Take it for what it is. These pages were written for himself in order to help him find his sanity. This should be taken into account before reviewing the item. You may not like its format or lack of combat detail, but it is about a soldier of intellect trying to search his soul. It is a moving book if you read it with an open mind. Indeed, put yourself in his boots and out of your comfortable armchair and how would you have done?

Viele Gruesse!

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 Jünger, Reese often digresses into turgid rambling, but just like Jünger, 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.