FOREWORD 
FOREWORD War “is not an occasional interruption of a normality called peace,” wrote the distinguished literary scholar, Princeton professor of English Samuel Hynes. Instead, “it is a climate in which we live.” Thus “we are curious” about war—indeed “more than curious, we are engaged and compelled by it.” But because war is so sprawling a human phenomenon, we are intimidated by its sheer size and ubiquity in history. So, observed Hynes, we “seek the reality in the personal witness of the men who were there.”
Most all of the published individual testaments, whether in the form of memoirs, diaries, autobiographies, oral interviews, or collections of letters like this volume, have concerned high command or combat, “the actual killing”—but neglecting, as Hynes has written, the “important but noncombatant business of war-making that takes place away from battlefields: the planning, the code breaking, the quartermastering, the acts of diplomacy and government, which command the labors of so many people . . . all necessary, honorable tasks.” In studying war narratives, Hynes concentrated on combat, seeking documents that spoke “with a voice that is stubbornly distinctive, telling us what it was like for this man, in his war, the particular. . . the human tale of war.”
This collection of letters by Konrad Jarausch, covering the first years of World War II in Poland, Germany, and Russia, possesses this distinctive human and personal quality. This correspondence covers the important experience behind the lines away from combat, providing insight into modern war from the perspective of a highly educated, thoughtful, noncommissioned officer keenly observing his surroundings and candidly expressing, mostly to his wife, his moods and feelings, his worries, and his larger thoughts about the war. We learn not only how German soldiers lived in the years from 1939 to 1942 but also what so many tens of thousands were doing, thinking, feeling, and experiencing.
Konrad Jarausch was far from a typical soldier, yet so much of what he saw and felt, and the way he reported it, was typical of the soldier experience in modern times. He details his movements and changes of location and the modes of transportation. He recounts the comings and goings of the people around him almost as though keeping a record for future reference. He succumbs to the slavery of military routine, like soldiers all the way back to ancient times: the barrage of orders, the daily tasks, and for the twentieth century, the bureaucracy and mind-numbing paperwork. The monotony of schedule was especially difficult for Jarausch because of his education and restless, reflective mind. But that intellect gave him the ability to recreate most vividly what soldiers have always faced: the tediousness of their lives and their constant fatigue.
Like for so many soldiers, for him writing could be a release from the frustrations of long hours of waiting, followed by frenetic activity. Jarausch could lose himself in communicating with friends and loved ones, describing realistically his environment and conversing through prose about what he was seeing and experiencing, how it affected his outlook on his previous life or his plans for the future. The landscape of Poland and the character of the farms, buildings, and towns caught his eye at the beginning of the war. Like most soldiers he was outdoors far more than in civilian life, so he commented on the weather and the terrain. A beautiful day could raise his spirits and momentarily relieve the discomfort of extreme heat or cold, or rain or snow. But always there were the obstacles weather threw up in the way of armies, even away from the combat, particularly mud or frozen ground. Weather always made soldiers obsess about shelter. Being behind the lines, that was rarely a problem, but the conditions were nevertheless primitive, sometimes sleeping several to a room in commandeered public buildings. Lack of privacy often wore down this bookish noncom who liked to spend his spare time reading and thinking, and who did not connect to other soldiers who spent their off duty time in idle chatter (often on subjects that a person of his background found almost always superficial and all too often distasteful), or card playing.
Like other soldiers, however, Jarausch was subject to swings in mood and a nagging gloom that he mostly kept out of his correspondence with his wife but that still crept into the tone or the subject of his writing. The prospect of leave, or promotion (especially becoming an officer), and at times the possibility of being released from service because of his age or physical condition, often led to false hopes. Rumors and worries captured his attention: promotion or transfer, leave to return home, news that might mean the war would end and he could be demobilized led to endless speculation. Sometimes he would be enervated by the stress or by his duties. He would become lackadaisical as bureaucracy robbed him of energy and motivation. The physical strains wore him down, particularly the long marches when he served in a training regiment back in Germany. He would have to fight off the loneliness, and always, always the separation from his family ached in his heart. The birth of his son, while a joy, intensified the longing for his wife and home. “Being apart in this manner does eat away at one’s spirit and energy.” The limited, focused, routinized world of the soldier dominated by repetitive duties even without the stress of danger could deaden even as intellectual and self-contained a man as he.
If the contents of these letters are similar to those of other soldiers in other wars, the quality of their descriptions and the cumulative picture that emerges of one individual’s military experience is not. Konrad Jarausch was a most singular reporter and observer, a shy, sensitive man who read constantly (Karl Marx and Aeschylus in the original Greek) and expressed great joy at finding books. He strove to learn Russian when in charge of a kitchen feeding Soviet prisoners, using precious spare time, ignoring his fatigue, to study with the help of Russian tutors. He differed in age, education, interests, and temperament from his comrades. He had an unusual eye not only for the people and lands he encountered but also for their psychology and culture. He contextualized what he saw in larger political and cultural terms, worrying, for example, about what might become of the great cities of Warsaw and Paris given the destructiveness of modern armies. His richly drawn pictures and personal empathy put us inside his mind and let us see with his eyes, and experience with his feelings, the war behind the lines and in the training establishment of the German army during its first and most victorious years of World War II. One senses in these letters an earnest, mature, responsible man caught up in a grand historical event that he understands but increasingly laments, as the reality of what is happening to him and to others, and to his own decency and humanity, weakens his beliefs in National Socialism and German superiority.
While the brutality and depravity common to combat are absent from Jarausch’s experience, an increasing sense of fatalism creeps into his letters—the same kind that infected so many battlefield soldiers. Aware that at his age he could not keep up with his younger comrades, recognizing that he would not become an officer or have the luck to be demobilized, he nevertheless worked diligently to do his duty and to see to the people under his care. This is not the typical picture of German soldiers American readers have come to expect, either from the classic narratives of combat published in the 1960s—the famous Last Letters from Stalingrad, or the memoir of the Alsatian youth who served in an SS division, The Forgotten Soldier—or some more recent memoirs and films that have tended to spread blame for the many atrocities of the eastern front across most all the German forces.
What makes these letters different from other testimonies is their growing realization of being caught up in a transformation of warfare that turned the fighting in the East into an ideological “war of annihilation.” While still rejoicing in the initial German victory, he began to worry about the political consequences of the reprisals, shootings, and ethnic cleansing during the Polish campaign. Jarausch also noted with disgust the progressive Nazification of the troops, reinforced by the tough combat training of young recruits that obliterated the humanistic scruples of the older officers. While not describing the “Holocaust by bullets,” he recorded not without sympathy instances of appalling ghettoization, physical exploitation, and killing of the Jews that he encountered during the course of his duties. And finally the letters reveal an underlying conflict of conscience due to their writer’s becoming aware of his own responsibility for the horror of guarding Soviet prisoners. Controlling them with too few guards, providing food when there was too little to keep so many from starving to death, pointed to a personal complicity that called the justification of the entire war in question. Although by 1941 Jarausch was already inured to much of the difficulty of soldiering, his personal role in as well as the general immorality of the warfare against Russia troubled him so much that he was ready to call it “more murder than war.”
In the end, these letters transmit a deep sense of tragedy, for in the reading one notices Jarausch’s growing mental as well as physical fatigue, his understanding that the war would go on for a very long time, and that he like so many thoughtful people were being forced into a callousness that he neither foresaw nor ever accepted. His essential decency never left him. His disillusionment with National Socialism grew along with his sympathy for the defeated prisoners whom he was charged to feed but could not adequately help. In the end, Jarausch succumbed to disease but never to that sense of dread or the loss of compassion that affects so many soldiers, or to the degradation that affected so many caught up in the mass killing that characterized the war he fought. Judging by his letters, he remained to the end a caring man, and in doing so gives us hope that even in a desperate war, it is possible for people to resist the forces and the circumstance that rob us of our humanity.