The Turncoat
A Novel
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
“Never has the aftermath for Germans been better depicted than in Siegfried Lenz’s elegiac, The Turncoat. A newly discovered masterpiece.” —Alex Kershaw, New York Times bestselling author of Avenue of Spies
Previously unpublished, this German postwar classic is one of the best books of this major writer, who died in 2014.
The last summer before the end of World War II, Walter Proska is posted to a small unit tasked with ensuring the safety of a railway line deep in the forest on the border with Ukraine and Byelorussia. In this swampy region, a handful of men—stunned by the heat, attacked by mosquitoes, and abandoned by their own troops in the face of the resistance—must also submit to the increasingly absurd and inhuman orders of their superior. Time passes, and the soldiers isolate themselves, haunted by madness and the desire for death. An encounter with a young Polish partisan, Wanda, makes Proska further doubt the validity of his oath of allegiance, and he seeks to answer the questions that obsess him: When conscience and duty clash, which is more important? Is it possible to take any action without becoming guilty in some way? And where is Wanda, this woman from the resistance he can’t forget?
Written in 1951, The Turncoat is Siegfried Lenz’s second novel. Rejected by his publisher, who thought that the story of a German soldier defecting to the Soviet side would be unwelcome in the context of the Cold War, the manuscript was forgotten for nearly seventy years before being rediscovered after the author’s death. A posthumous triumph.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lenz (1926 2014) effectively mines his experiences in the German army for this memorable account of a German soldier, written in 1951 and posthumously published. Six years after fighting in WWII, Walter Proska plans to write a confessional letter to his sister, blaming himself for her living alone, and prepares for her to curse him in response. Walter then flashes back to the war and his first encounter with Wanda, an attractive Polish woman whose life he helps save before learning she is a partisan with plans to blow up the train they've been riding on. The story line builds through camraderie between Walter and his fellow soldier Milk Roll and encounters with Walter's brother-in-law, and on the battlefield and prison camp, where Walter's allegiance is sorely tested. A gut-punch of a climax brings out the full ramifications of a central tragedy, which only becomes clear at the very end. Lenz is especially good at conveying the quotidian details of a German army grunt, from the way his comrades achieve sexual release by using trees, to making sure that a gift intended for an officer who's killed before he receives it is still made use of. Lenz's meaningful exploration of loyalty owed to one's country and family is packed with thrills and chills.
