Heart-wrenching, disgusting and depressing. A great autobiography about the eastern front of world war 2 that doesn't pull any punches.
For anyone who still thinks America or Britain saved the world in ww2, read this gruesome account of the fighting between the Soviets and Germans where the outcome of the war was actually decided.

I read it for the third time. A haunting story of what this half-French, half-German soldier went through in fighting for the Nazi army during the catastrophic collapse of their eastern front in Russia.

War is one of those things that, unless you were a participant, you aren't really equipped to talk or think about except in the most abstract terms. Even our morality about war tends to be based on such abstractions. This means that for those who have never experienced war, the emotional realities of the subject remain as impossible to comprehend as what the experience of death must be like. And for those who were there, especially those on the front lines, trying to put into words what they encountered and what they felt is equally impossible. A seemingly unbridgeable chasm exists between these two worlds, it is no wonder that such a wealth of literature exists dealing with war as subject matter. War is ineffable, and isn't that what a good author does? Tackle the ineffable? Try to put into words that which words fail to adequately describe time and again?

Sajer's memoir of his experiences as a French-born German soldier on the Eastern Front is powerful. Not only because we are hearing from a man who was on the front lines of the most brutal war in the history of the world, or because we are exploring a perspective that history has sought to bury, but because Sajer offers himself up so fully, so nakedly, as he struggles to describe what cannot be described, and attempts to retain his humanity while being rolled over by a machine designed to destroy it. The Forgotten Soldier is a heartbreaking work, but it is also funny, and full of life, and utterly human in its approach. You may marvel at Sajer's stunning recall for tiny details or you might curse him for forgetting the big ones; regardless, you will be drawn in to this tale, which is told as masterfully as any work of literature before it.

Time and time again I was staggered by how naked and vulnerable Sajer allows himself to be, but even more I was amazed by how humble he is, and what a good job he does letting his own story take the back seat to the stories of others when necessary. Throughout The Forgotten Soldier, Sajer makes it clear that he believes his mission as a writer is not one that can be accomplished, but still he makes every effort. You can feel how much it hurts him to relive this time, but you also get the sense that not trying to explain it hurts him far more. I don't know that this particular anguish is unique to soldiers; I imagine that anyone who has dealt with traumatic events struggles with the same problem of needing to make others understand while feeling utterly incapable of doing so. But in the case of soldiers, there also exists a number of elaborately constructed fictions about who soldiers are and what heroism means; these fictions, which are ideological in nature, intensify the surviving soldier's anguish, because now, not only is he attempting to explain events and traumas so beyond the pale of everyday life, but he also must call into question all of our assumptions; he may even be faced with the task of calling into question our entire understanding of history. Sajer offers much insight into these questions, but it is clear that doing so brings him no comfort. Men like Guy Sajer wish that the fictions were true. They wish that it could be the way we thought it was. But they aren't, it can't be, and trying to hold in the truth isn't an option, because the truth will fester inside of you like a cancer. For Sajer, the need to explain and get it all out is compulsive.

Lucky for us, he's damn good at it. His prose is at times poetic and warm; at others, hard and cold, depending on what it needs to be. Sajer knows exactly which techniques to employ when, and--whether he realizes it or not--how to make us feel exactly as we need to feel. On this count, The Forgotten Soldier ranks not simply as a great memoir, or as a great war story, but as one of the great works of literature. Sajer's lone volume may not be as well known as some of the other works that make up the canon, but it is just as rich and masterfully constructed, and it saddens me that The Forgotten Soldier is not more well known than it is. There may be no other book that better captures the psychology of the soldier at war, with such raw emotionality and in such vivid prose. The only other author I can think of that is on the same level is [a:Tim O'Brien|2330|Tim O'Brien|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1232136886p2/2330.jpg], particularly his ground-breaking short story collection [b:The Things They Carried|133518|The Things They Carried|Tim O'Brien|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1297915473s/133518.jpg|1235619], which takes a metafictional approach to the war story, driving home the point that capital-T Truth and straight, unadorned fact are not always one in the same, a lesson that Sajer's most vocal critics would do well to learn.

The Forgotten Soldier was first published in 1965, and concerns events that happened over 20 years previously, when the author was a teenager living in France who was drafted into the German army. The memoir has since become the subject of much criticism by historians who question much of the historical detail, especially with regards to troop movements and dates. Supporters of the work argue that historical facts of strategic troop movements can be found elsewhere, and that the strength of this particular work is in the emotion and the visceral experience, and I'll have to agree. The Commandant of the US Marine Corps must also agree, since this was on his official reading list in 2013.

This isn't exactly an easy read, but it hit me so much harder than I'd expected. Sajer maybe doesn't have the writing chops of Cather or Steinbeck, and even apologizes a few times for his "inability" to do his topic justice in prose--and I have in fact been tempted to take a shot of scotch each time I encountered the simile "like an automaton" (maybe it sounds less weird in the original French?)--but then I'll stumble into some little gem of poetic self-awareness that wows me. I think he's at his best when he doesn't appear to be trying.

We're thrown in with Sajer and his companions when they first arrive on the Eastern front, and there isn't really a chance to get to know the characters befor things start to happen to them--I suspect this is why it took me a while to get emotionally involved (but when I did...dang). Since he starts out in a transportation batallion as a truck driver, Sajer's introduction to war is surprisingly gradual, and he is emotionally shattered by the first (comparatively small) wartime effects he sees. He's utterly convinced that he's a coward, but his teenage naivite rubs off quickly. He doesn't exactly grow numb to his surroundings, but sort of alternates between cynicism--especially around even younger untested, brainwashed & eager teenaged boys--and determination to empty his head of anything that is not in his immediate surroundings or in the immediate present. At some point he seems to realize that the only thing he's really fighting for is self-preservation. It's like watching a kid shrivel emotionally and die intellectually, if that makes sense. The battle scenes do go on a little long, though, and it's the kind of book that requires significant mental breathers.

The part that really got me, though, is when Sajer meets his father (a Frenchman, who fought on the French side in the Great War) during a brief leave to Berlin. The father's awkward sadness with what his son has become is just devastating. On the other hand, he doesn't stray too far away from humor, either. There's a great scene involving his scrawny & underfed teenaged self, a handful of eggs, and a strapping farmer's wife...yeah, just go read it.

I was curious about what happened to Guy Sajer after the war--and it turns out that, interestingly, he became a very prolific cartoonist. There's a lengthy entry on him on the "Lambiek Comicopedia" (http://www.lambiek.net/artists/m/mouminoux_guy.htm) and it looks like he did everything from cute kids cartoons to some pretty racy-looking pulp, mostly under the pennames Dimitri Lahache and Mouminoux. Looking through some of the images, there is a lot of material reflecting his war experiences, such as:

Though certainly not all of it:

Anyway, fascinating stuff.

removed my fantasies of going to war
made real certain aspects of war which seemed to have been stuck in kind of cultural memory but not elaborated on

one of the most real books i've read, both for love and for fear/terror

kind of suffered some amnesia in reading the second half as I missed pieces of how he ended up in this or that village, or where the tanks came from, or whatever, but this seemed appropriate

not enjoyable, but very glad I read this