Thursday, September 16th, 2010 Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier's Letters from the Eastern Front, 1939-1942

Description

Konrad H. Jarausch has written or edited more than three dozen books on modern German or European history. Starting with Hitler’s seizure of power and the First World War, his research interests have moved via the social history of German students and professions to German unification in 1989/90, with historiography under the Communist GDR, the nature of the East German dictatorship, as well as the debate about historians and the Third Reich. More recently, he has been concerned with the problem of interpreting 20th-century German history in general, the learning processes after 1945, the issue of cultural democratization, the caesura of the 1970s and the transformation of the Humboldt University, 1985-2000. At the same time he has been involved in discussions about quantitative methods in history, problems of postmodernism, and questions of European memory culture. Currently he is beginning to work on a history of the ambivalent face of European modernity in the 20th century.

“The significance of this wartime correspondence lies in the ambivalent role of its author as reluctant accomplice in and clear-eyed witness of important aspects of the war in the East. Although too old to engage in actual fighting, Konrad Jarausch was close enough to the front to provide detailed descriptions of German occupation policy in Poland, graphic comments on the training of new recruits, and shocking accounts of the mass death of Russian POWs, somewhat neglected by the burgeoning Holocaust literature. At the same time, he had the leisure to record sustained reflections on the historical meaning of the war, the prospects of the fighting and the (im-)morality of the German cause that go beyond the usual concerns of soldiers, voiced in letters home. Especially, his conflicted attitude, hoping for and wanting to participate in a German victory while increasingly noticing and being repelled by Nazi brutality, sheds fresh light on the contradictory feelings of decent professionals who supported the war. Finally, his discovery of solidarity with Russian POWs also offers an inspiring example of the possibility of recovering a shared humanity amid catastrophe.”