Claus Hansmann provided a remarkable portrait of “raw reality” for the average soldier.
In the rain, the tents stare at us stiff and clay-like while we hurry to dig out the marshy field…. Before us the… gray desolation leaves us so all alone…. With upturned collars and heads drawn in, two sentries stamp back and forth at their posts…. The area stands breathless under the pressure of the evening fog… that penetrates our uniforms, constantly, coldly. Hastily we knock together the contrary tents and cover the bunker…. We throw our things down into the hole…. In the darkness we bump into and press against each other. Someone lights a tallow candle…. Soon we chew on dried-out bread with the eternally same salted canned meat…. We are so tired we can’t think…. The light reveals our rain-blackened coats and our swollen boots misshapen by the mud and stubble. We scrape… the mud from our pants and legs with a knife….
The silence weighs on us. Then, with a sigh, someone begins: “Ah, if only this damned swindle would just finally end!” All along our backs, which are leaning against the wall, penetrates the coolness of the earth. Amid the smoke… another voice which seems strangely transformed by the darkness: “If we could just once forget everything…!”
The words make broad circles in us, like stones that fall into deep water…. “The little people must always pay in war….” The breathing and confused dreams become deeper, we press against one another for a little warmth. So we lie there in our miserable existence.7
The historian can achieve this actuality, wretched or otherwise, as Christopher Browning has pointed out, only through an intense depiction of the common experiences of ordinary people. This book is thus not about war but about men: the average, common German soldiers of World War II. War itself forms the background and environment, but as in all great tragedy the theme is human destiny and suffering, as experienced by a group of individuals, a group bound together in a common effort to endure the unendurable. It is about fear and courage, camaraderie and individual pain, the feelings of men under extreme stress, and the unique sensations that war produces; it is about the patient creation and recreation of relationships after one catastrophe and their destruction by another. One doesn’t have to empathize with these men in order to depict accurately what they experienced. Nor does trying to understand and recount their perceptions and feelings mean absolving them of responsibility or forgiving them their actions in a brutal war of aggression. The picture that emerges from their personal observations is therefore subtle, complex, and contradictory in its message: ideology, self-interest, and historical perceptions are nuanced by personality traits. War indelibly imprinted the man in the front lines: “You have the feeling,” reflected one Landser, “that this ‘soldierly being’ will never end.” For the anonymous soldier, the real war was intensely personal, tragic yet ironic, a frightful harvest of emotions, agonizing yet sometimes magnificent, and, above all, deeply stirring. “There was the war,” Guy Sajer recalled, “and I married it because there was nothing else when I reached the age of falling in love.”8
If the everyday approach seems at times impressionistic and nonanalytical, it still touches on our ability to comprehend social and historical reality, in this case to portray and understand the core experience of war at its most basic level. It also says something about whether the theoretical abstractions with which historians of necessity operate are capable of grasping human phenomena made up of countless individual perceptions and actions. After all, there remains no better road to an understanding of human behavior than through the eyes and ears of actual participants. Their observations, feelings, and horrors are original, not watered down by analysis or trite entertainment. Too often, however, historians so hunger after the analytical and explanatory that they lose contact with the mysteries and dynamics of individuals and groups which constitute history. Thus the authentic, personal side of history, the insight into the human soul, spirit, and behavior, is sacrificed for the sake of some nebulous conjecture or, equally repugnant, some effort to mold the historical record to fit one or another ideological doctrine. In either case, the personal is renounced for the impersonal, and in the case of war the actual killing and bloodletting done and suffered by human beings gives way to the sanitized intellectual exercise of evaluating strategy and tactics. Since the average soldier is too often consumed by the great events of history, the approach of everyday history seeks a sensitivity to the human tragedies entwined in these impersonal cataclysms, yet one that is perceptive and accurate without becoming softhearted.
In studying the harsh and terrible circumstances faced by the anonymous soldier, one can learn not only something of the effect of war on the individual spirit but also something of life: the cruelty, horror, and fear that hollow men on the inside, as well as the compassion, courage, spirit of comradeship, and steady endurance with which the spareness of life is overcome. Not the least of the paradoxes of war is the fact that though war brings out the worst in us, it also elicits our best qualities. The story of the Landser is thus not merely a chronicle of the human heart in conflict with itself; it contains as well universal elements central to all of us. “Too many people learn about war with no inconvenience to themselves,” Guy Sajer complained. “They read about Verdun or Stalingrad without comprehension, sitting in a comfortable armchair, with their feet beside the fire, preparing to go about their business the next day, as usual. One should really read such accounts under compulsion, in discomfort…, from a hole in the mud. One should read about war in the worst circumstances, when everything is going badly…. One should read about war standing up, late at night, when one is tired.” The reality of war will continue to remain largely inaccessible to those who have not experienced it firsthand, but by learning something of the anonymous soldier they can at least glimpse the full dimensions of war, with all its complex and ambivalent range of emotions. “The substance of my task,” Sajer maintained in writing his memoirs, was “to reanimate, with all the intensity I can summon, those distant cries from the slaughterhouse.”9 War is vile, but the chronicle of the Landser shows that not all who fight wars are vile.
As Peter Knoch has pointed out, however, much has been contested about the concept of everyday history. Basic questions have been posed. Can one properly speak of an “everyday” life in war? Aren’t war and everyday life mutually exclusive? In fact, isn’t war the precisely opposite phenomenon of any meaningful conception of everyday life? At first glance, it appears difficult to overcome these objections. Still, the very length of German involvement in World War II, almost six years, led many Landsers to adapt to a war environment. The average soldier could not simply step out of his human existence but, instead, lived in a world that became routine and “true” to him. In addition, as their letters and diaries illustrate, many of these men were not reduced to a state of unreflective consciousness but sought to understand the essence of the everyday life of war. Moreover, as Detlev Peukert has argued, everyday history has no object of its own but seeks to legitimize the independent experiences of its subjects, to mediate between individual life experiences and impersonal historical analysis, and to provide a perspective on various life-styles and differing areas of social reality. Peter Borscheid, in fact, emphasizes that the everyday life of war does not remain in an isolated world that can be studied in laboratory fashion. Rather, war itself is a catalyst for significant social change, so there exists a complex and dynamic relationship between the life of men at war and the more general everyday life of those in civilian society.10