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

~ (Author), Stefan Schmitz (Editor), Michael Hofmann (Translator), Max Hastings (Foreword)
Key Phrases: tarmac road, felt boots, Red Army, Willy Peter Reese

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sometimes lyrical, this memoir by a German youth who miraculously survived four tours of duty on the Russian front during WWII—he died on his fifth deployment—is a significant historical document. It is also a laborious and overwrought cacophony of Wagnerian proportions. Reese, who was a 20-year-old bank clerk in 1939 when he was first drafted, inhabits many different worlds, all of them conflicting. Despite Schmitz's assertion that Reese was "no Nazi," he was, like the vast majority of German youths of the time, deeply imbued with Nazi ideology and experienced the war as a sort of sacrament. Duty, abdication and heroism are just some of his motifs. Reese sees himself as a poet deciphering the human condition, but mostly he is just a soldier who plays his part in the atrocities—often exuberantly. He laughs with the other members of his platoon at the spectacle of Russian partisans hanging by the neck—"yellow-brown ichor dribbled out of their eyes and crusted on their cheeks"—and makes Russian women dance naked. Despite its long-winded homilies and repetitiveness, this stark testimony provides new insights into both the ravages of Nazi indoctrination and the bloodiest military campaign in history. (Nov.)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* The brutality of battle is vividly rendered in this harrowing memoir from Reese, a German soldier who served on the Russian front during World War II. Killed in combat at the age of 23, Reese left behind a diary documenting the atrocities of war and his growing disillusionment with the attitudes of his fellow countrymen. (Reese was no Nazi, writes editor Schmitz in the book's preface, in which he first recalls reading the blistering manuscript inherited by Reese's cousin.) The late soldier's meditations are by turns poetic and macabre; he reflects on the literature of Tolstoy and Baudelaire_and dramatic clashes drenched in blood. War both robs Reese of his soul and imbues his life with a sense of purpose, leaving him feeling like "a stranger to myself." His prose resonates with images of a bitter, corpse-strewn Russian landscape, where it's only a matter of time before a young man's heart turns to stone. One soldier, unable to find his felt boots, chops off the frozen legs of a dead Red Army soldier. "He bundled the two stumps under his arm and set them down in the oven, next to our lunch," writes Reese. "By the time the potatoes were done, the legs were thawed out, and he pulled on the bloody felt boots." Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 20, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374139784
• ISBN-13: 978-0374139780
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #85,328 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

92 of 97 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "We are war. Because we are soldiers, November 29, 2005

By	Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Terror, boredom, revulsion, obedience...life as cannon fodder., February 13, 2007

By	S. Potter - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars War as it really is, March 17, 2006

By	Ken McCormick "kmccormick12" (Waverly, IA USA) - See all my reviews

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.