We Germans
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- €3.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize
Shortlisted for the Prix Femina 2022
Shortlisted for the Prix Médicis 2022
'An impressively realistic novel of German soldiers on the Eastern Front' Antony Beevor
'Starritt's daring work challenges us to lay bare our histories, to seek answers from the past, and to be open to perspectives starkly different from our own' New York Times
When a young British man asks his German grandfather what it was like to fight on the wrong side of the war, the question is initially met with irritation and silence. But after the old man's death, a long letter to his grandson is found among his things.
That letter is this book. In it, he relates the experiences of an unlikely few days on the Eastern Front - at a moment when he knows not only that Germany is going to lose the war, but that it deserves to. He writes about his everyday experience amid horror, confusion and great bravery, and he asks himself what responsibility he bears for the circumstances he found himself in. As he tries to find an answer he can live with, we hear from his grandson what kind of man he became in the seventy years after the war.
We Germans is a fundamentally human novel that grapples with the most profound of questions about guilt, shame and responsibility - questions that remain as live today as they have always been.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Scottish-German writer Starritt (The Beast) unearths the horrors of the eastern front in WWII Poland through a letter written by a veteran of the German army to his grandson in this thoughtful, unsettling chronicle. Meissner begins the long letter by addressing a question he presumes his grandson was afraid to ask him: "Did you do terrible things?" "It's hard to say," Meissner writes, "but certainly not in the way you presume." Meissner recounts his memories of the fall of 1944 near the German border, when he and four fellow soldiers search for a rumored stockpile of food delicacies. They come across a hunting lodge that's being guarded by Feldgendarmen, German military police. Upon killing some of the Feldgendarmen and pilfering the Wehrmacht's store of food and alcohol, the five soldiers flee, fearing pursuit by the remaining Feldgendarmen. As they wander through the woods and ponder their next moves, they come upon a Russian tank brigade and capture one of them before attacking the other Russian tanks. The aftermath of the skirmish is most memorable to Meissner as he recalls the bravery of one of his fellow soldiers, who helped carry him to safety from the Russians. Starritt's gritty depictions of the horrors of war and the moral choices faced by soldiers add intensity to the ruminations on courage. This is a fascinatingly enigmatic addition to the literature of Germany's coming to terms with the past.
