Sajer, Guy Der vergessene Soldat

Born in Alsace to a French father and a German mother, Sajer was seventeen years old when he was drawn into the maelstrom of the Second World War in 1942. He then found language again earlier than others and left behind a document that is still uniquely captivating today. It comes as close as the simple stringing together of words allows to the horror of war and the helplessness with which the individual soldier faces his all-rolling over roller. If everything seems like a great adventure to the young friends, Sajer and Halls, at the beginning, hunger, cold, fear and the unleashed violence of the war in Kursk, Kharkov and Bjelgorod soon bring them back down to earth. But this war has already taken them over completely and there is no turning back. The tide begins to turn in the East, and the German soldiers in Russia begin a tough, hard and cruelly fought retreat that leads the friends across Romania and Poland to Memel on the Baltic Sea, where they experience the bloody inferno of doom. In the end, the profoundly human nature of the great suffering remains as something larger and more resonant than even the documentation of the time and the war. Sajer brings this to light from his memory, and we do not want to know, nor can we, what infinite effort it may have cost him.