I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Stella Powell-Jones, artistic director of Jermyn Street Theatre. This was for Ink Pellet – the bi-monthly arts magazine for teachers for which I write most of the copy. In passing, Stella told me that her Scottish/German husband, Alexander Starritt, is a novelist. His debut novel We Germans, inspired by his own grandfather, was published in 2020. It tells, she explained, the story of a German army conscript. I thought it sounded interesting and told her I would read it. So I did and here we are. We obsessive readers find interesting books via many routes: they come out and demand to be read wherever we are and whatever we’re doing.
Normally I shy away from anything involving WW2 and or cruelty/torture/violence but I’m really glad I read this one because it comes at events from a totally unfamiliar point of view. We are a very long way, in every sense, from digging for victory, Vera Lynn and the Dambusters March in this novel.
It takes the form of a long letter, written in old age, from Meissner to his grandson Callum with occasional interjections and reflections from the latter in present day. Meissner serves on the Eastern front and is for a long time part of a tiny feral group working its way across Eastern Europe between Russia and Germany without a commanding officer. It’s ugly and it’s dangerous.
Meissner witnesses, and is sometimes party to, some appalling atrocities. He is long haunted, for example, by arriving at a settlement to find all the inhabitants, irrespective of age or sex, hanged in the trees like bats or pendulous fruits. And the horizontal crucifixions, the victims’ bodies arching like pinned frogs as they scream, will stay with me for a very long time as they do with him. Sometimes Meissner and the men he’s with, shoot people for food. It’s not personal. It’s sauve-qui-peu. Callum tells us that when his “opa” was finally released from camp imprisonment after the war, he’d been away eight years and weighed seven and a half stone despite his six foot two height and broad shoulders.
Having had many years to reflect on what happened and what they did, Meissner – who served in the Wehrmacht, or Nazi combined forces, but was never a Nazi or Nazi sympathiser – ponders the gulf between personal and collective responsibility. And that’s the nub of what this novel is about. He sees himself as a good man. Once he’d planned to go to university and become a scientist. After the war he married a woman who worked in the office at the prison camp, with whom he enjoyed a fine marriage which he believes offset some of the horror which preceded it. He has raised a family, has always been kind and decent to others and has achieved financial success. But is any of this enough to atone for some of the evil he was once part of? After all he was there even if he was never an instigator. There is, of course, no answer.
It is well known that, in real life, most people who’ve lived through such horrors simply don’t talk about them to their loved ones. My grandfather served in France from 1914 and my father piloted aircraft in RAF’s Coastal Command in the 1940s. Neither talked much about the nitty gritty and how I wish now that I’d attempted to draw them out. What is unusual about Starritt’s character, Meissner, is that he is telling his grandson exactly what happened, what he saw and what he did without fudging any of the dreadful details – as if he wants to cleanse himself by getting it off his chest as one might to a confessor. And Callum, meanwhile, channels and processes it as he recalls visits to his grandparents in Germany as both child and adult and tries to relate his Opa’s experience to his own. It’s a moving, thoughtful, unusual novel – and one of those books which dents you so that you will always look at certain things differently.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: How Not To Be A Political Wife by Sarah Vine
