Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier's Letters from the Eastern Front (review)

Konrad Jarausch, the distinguished historian who edited this book, is the son of Konrad Jarausch, the German soldier whose letters compose most of it. The two never saw each other in person, as the father had to return to his unit three days before the son's birth and died in the occupied Soviet Union five months later. For many years, out of a mixture of resentment of his father's absence and rejection of his worldview, the younger Jarausch avoided close examination of the hundreds of surviving letters written from his father's postings in Germany, Poland, France, and the Soviet Union between the time of his call-up in September 1939 and his demise in January 1942.

After his retirement as Director of the Center for Contemporary Historical Studies at the University of Potsdam in 2006 freed up his time and the lingering controversy in Germany over the extent to which Wehrmacht troops had participated in Nazi war crimes provided motivation, the younger Jarausch did an about-face and embarked on "a curious voyage of discovery that tested [his] loyalties as a son and [his] professionalism as a historian" (pp. vii-viii). The initial result, "Das stille Sterben . . .": Feldpostbriefe von Konrad Jarausch aus Polen und Russland 1939-42, appeared in 2008. The English-language offshoot differs from its predecessor in two important respects: it contains about half as many letters, and its title and the editor's introductory essay, "In Search of a Father," grapple more directly with the issue of the father's complicity.

The editor explains the shorter length of the English translation by saying that "interest in the minutiae of the German war machine is limited in the United States" (p. x), but one wonders whether another sort of adjustment to audience may have played a part. Contemporary American or British readers are unlikely to find the elder Jarausch, especially as he presents himself in the first two-thirds of the book, accessible or appealing. A schoolmaster in civilian life, he was a bookish, dutiful, humorless, pious, priggish, reserved, and sickly soldier. It is no surprise that the recurrent themes of these chapters are "isolation" and "loneliness," since he preferred reading religious tracts or Greek philosophy in the original to whiling away off-duty hours listening to the radio, playing cards, or trading stories with his bunkmates. Clearly, he suffered from the emptiness of military routine and the coarseness of his comrades, but the empathy he arouses on those scores is offset by his reflexive religious fatalism and his incongruous vacillation between pursuing an officer's commission and seeking to be excused from military service altogether. Tellingly, the book contains twelve illustrations of his somewhat owlish visage, including several from the prewar years, but only one shows him smiling. In short, he embodied North German Protestant bourgeois austerity, inwardness, and status-consciousness in such off-putting fashion that Anglo-American readers surely would turn away if the book's initial sections were any longer.

The elder Jarausch's politics also are musty and alien, though they generate insights. The dramatic turning point in the book, and the moment at which this reviewer began to soften toward the elder Jarausch, comes with a letter of February 16, 1941. In that letter the father, a proponent of a Greater Germany with roughly the dimensions of the Holy Roman Empire, considers the challenges ahead for his nation. "I would be more at peace if I knew that these tasks could be restricted to the Central European space," he writes; ". . . I hope we don't overreach" (pp. 220-21). An ironic foreshadowing of what soon would kill him, the soldier's remark demonstrates that he sensed more amiss with National Socialism than the deification of the Volk (an approach he rejected on religious grounds) (p. 21) and helps explain why he despaired of the Nazi New Order so quickly. Within a month of being...