Generation in Kesseln. Das Soldatische Opfernarrativ im westdeutschen Kriegsroman 1945–1960 von Norman Ächtler (review)

In the 15 years since W.G. Sebald’s essays on Luftkrieg und Literatur helped to spark a renewed interest in representations of German suffering in the Second World War, historians, Germanists, film scholars, and others have been engaged in a lengthy process of re-assessing the ways in which German society ‘came to terms’ with the catastrophe of defeat and national shame before the rise to dominance of a Holocaustcentred culture of contrition from the early 1960s onwards. The contributions to this endeavour, particularly in the English-speaking world, are too numerous to mention, and contain much innovative work. However, the precedent set by Sebald’s (ultimately untenable) claim that the bombing of German cities had failed to find representation has arguably led to a rather binary interpretation of literary texts, films, and so on where these deal with the Second World War: the question often asked seems to be, ‘does it portray German suffering and victimhood, or does it not?’

Although by no means the stated starting point for Norman Ächtler’s substantial study of West German war novels until the beginning of the 1960s, the author’s approach to his material offers an antidote to this rather reductive approach. Any reader familiar with the texts that Ächtler analyses in detail here will hardly be surprised to learn that they represent ordinary German soldiers and middle-ranking officers as victims of the National Socialist war machine. Especially in those texts which tend towards the popular end of the literary market, such as works by Hans Hellmut Kirst, this point is driven home so explicitly that it would be hard for the reader to miss. What is most interesting about Ächtler’s study, however, is his ability to demonstrate the cultural and historic specificity of the ways in which the nature and significance of German soldiers’ victimhood was constructed in the wake of the Second World War, whether in the Unterhaltungsliteratur of an author like Kirst or the writing of high-culture figures like Ernst Jünger. Ächtler’s concern is not to establish whether the suffering of the Frontgeneration was represented in literary texts, since there can be no doubt that it was; rather, he is concerned to show how it was represented and why it was represented in that way.

The range of Ächtler’s scholarship is considerable. In the first part of the book, he draws on a wide range of theories of narrative and narrative psychology in order to explain how the narration of particular experiences, as well as the mobilisation of specific literature techniques in the service of such narration, served a social function in stabilising the identities of former combatants. Denied recourse to traditional notions of martial sacrifice on account of the revelation of Nazi crimes, soldiers’ experiences of suffering threatened to become meaningless, the author argues (53). By telling stories about the war, and by telling those stories in a particular way, this suffering could become meaningful and, just as importantly, soldiers could be absolved of responsibility for other aspects of National Socialism, in particular the Holocaust. As Ächtler argues, the persuasive nature of these compensatory narratives, which resonated beyond literature itself, contributed to the myth of the ‘clean’ Wehrmacht which persisted until the Wehrmachtsausstellung of the 1990s.

Ächtler argues that the Kesselschlacht referred to in his study’s punning title, and which found its prototype in the German defeat at Stalingrad, provided a metaphor for the situation of German soldiers and, by extension, ordinary Germans more generally. Defining it as a chronotope in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense, Ächtler convincingly proposes that soldiers in the Kessel, surrounded by the enemy but also threatened by fanatics and incompetent military leaders on their own side, found themselves in a ‘tragic’ situation in Hegel’s sense (65–8): they had sworn oaths to fight and obey, but the case for surrender or desertion was equally strong given the unjust nature of the...