Posted Sep 30, 2022, 6:06 AM
We Germans is a powerful, disturbing novel. Made possible because its author, Alexander Starritt, benefits from the necessary hindsight: from a German mother and a Scottish father, he is a British citizen, he grew up in Scotland and now lives in London. In this story, presented as a fiction, he imagines the confessions of an old man, Meissner, a soldier in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War, to his grandson, Callum, who lives in England.
Unable to recount orally the four years of horror spent on the Eastern Front, the old man decides to record his memories in a letter that the young man will discover after his death. The novel is in two voices: as a counterpoint to his reading, Callum delivers his thoughts and his own memories of this beloved grandfather, despite the weight of the story.
Meissner was drafted into the Wehrmarcht in 1940 out of high school, he participated in the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Taken prisoner in Austria in 1945, he was sent to a Soviet detention center near the Black Sea and released in 1948. Back in Germany, he met the woman of his life and became a pharmacist in a village near Heidelberg.
Bath of savagery
He did not participate in the deportation of the Jews, but he assumes: “Each of us says to himself: I did not found the Nazi Party; I didn’t declare war on anyone, I didn’t send anyone to the camps. But ‘we’ did it.” More than this collective guilt, a feeling of shame torments him. For all crimes committed. And those on the Eastern front, just like all the abuses of the IIIe Reich, make you nauseous.
Meisner focuses his story on the year 1944, when the German defeat is no longer in doubt. It plunges us into a bath of savagery. The scene where the Feldgendarmes torture their prisoners before leaving their HQ recalls the last images of the hardcore film by Pasolini Salo or the 120 days of Sodom. The man at war, decerebrated by a deadly ideology, draws a blood red line on his humanity. And even if he stayed away from the worst atrocities, the hero of Alexander Starritt knows that he was an actor.
“We, the Germans”, Alexander Starritt, translated from English by Diane Meur, Belfond, 203 p., 20 euros.
