Jan '25, semi-biennial reread; guts me every time but is also a weird kind of comfort read for me.
~~~
This book and I go way back. I first read it when I was about 14 and stumbled across it in our tiny library's tiny box of retired books, where I snatched it for free. At the time, we'd already covered WWII in history class; a few years later, we'd do it again, and I was lucky enough to have teachers who made you care. We'd watch movies and have proper discussions, and yes, perhaps by the time you'd been through the whole thing twice, in detail, you'd think you'd get Third Reich education fatigue, but I never did. I read every book I could get my hands on. One of our field trips in high school was to a concentration camp. I've never heard a more complete silence than on the bus ride home, 20+ obnoxious teenagers just struck utterly mute.
None of that left as much of an impact as this book did. Dieter Noll wrote this heavily autobiographical novel in 1960, when he was in his early 30s, and clearly his personal impressions of the final years of WWII had not faded a bit for him. The story follows 16-year-old Werner Holt from his last days of school in 1943 through his training as a Flakhelfer to the end of the war. The protagonist is consistently sympathetic not because he's better than anyone else, but because he is a painfully authentic character: because his journey illustrates with perfect clarity how easy it is from the safe superiority of historical awareness to level accusations against a generation that grew up brainwashed by heroic-mythical propaganda hogwash and ended up shattered by disillusionment. Werner is so relatable because he neither swallows what he's fed without questioning, nor is he unaffected by it. He wants to believe, he's charmed by ideas of heroic soldierly valour, comradeship, friendships that he thinks will last forever. He wants to believe in something wholeheartedly, but he questions, agonises, seeks answers and examines his identity as any modern teenager does, and there's not a moment in this story where his motivations don't make sense. And in a world where 16-year-olds training for war is perfectly normalised, the novel also makes room for all the other things that drive young people anytime and anywhere: friendship, first love, rebellion against your parents' generation, struggles of self-identity.
It's not an overwritten or elaborately structured book. The prose is fairly straightforward, almost sparse; emotion is there but it's hidden, cautious, dragging you right into the spirit of the time, when to show feeling would have exposed you to danger. It's also choc-a-bloc with military detail to the point where I would normally be tempted to skip parts, but for some reason every moment of this is captivating, down to the last lengthy discourse about what a certain weapon does or how this or that military manouevre works. The air of complete immersion extends even to aspects you might not normally care about. I've read this book about 7 times, and every time I'm in the midst of combat with those boys and want them to make it, and I occasionally resurface and realise that I shouldn't want them to make it, that they are fighting Allied soldiers, that they're fighting on the side of monsters. But overall, this books puts paid to the idea of gods and monsters; all the devils here are people.
The secondary characters are fantastic, as well. Wolzow, the exemplary soldier, unstoppable and terrifying; Gomulka, the quiet intellectual who questions events as much as Holt does but takes a step further to draw the consequences. Every time I read this book, something new draws my attention; this time I ached the most for Peter Wiese, the gentle pianist who is in no way cut out for the horrible time he lives in. The female characters have real depth and agency of their own as well. As I grow older, I do tend to roll my eyes more at the questionable romantic dynamics (Werner tends to use girls as emotional crutches and jumps from one to the next like they're sinking logs in a swamp), but again, the motivations all make sense.
I could go on and on. This was one of my formative books. It saddens me immensely that it's not been translated into more languages because it really, really ought to have been. It's such an excellent story to illustrate the whys and hows of functional fascism, the awful cultish well-ordered structure of it, how easy it is to get sucked in especially if you're young and impressionable, how difficult it becomes to try and extricate yourself.