“An intelligent book against forgetting. Extremely topical.”
Der Bund, Bern
In the spring of 1994, Dieter Wellershoff takes a cure at Bad Reichenhall, where he spent the last winter of the war as a wounded soldier in a military hospital. This renewed encounter with the past, half a century after the end of World War II, acts as a catalyst in making him look back: He once again recalls how he experienced and survived the last two years of the war as a 17 to 19-year-old soldier who had enlisted voluntarily.
His process of remembering leads him back to occupied Holland, from there to Berlin and finally to the Eastern Front, where he is wounded and just barely manages to escape his company’s collapse. Stays in military hospitals in Upper Silesia and then Bad Reichenhall follow, then the Germans’ last stand on the Oder River in the spring of 1945 and the flight west, into American captivity. The external arenas of the war are juxtaposed with the universe of thoughts and feelings of a young man, who records his disconcerting and harrowing experiences with great attention and unsentimental accuracy. The result is an unusual book about war with a dual point-of-view: direct, overwhelming experience and considered historical overview.
