Je ne trouve donc rien à redire au concept de notre culpabilité collective ; simplement, il ne résonne pas en moi. L’idée que je sois coupable de choses que je n’ai jamais vues, et auxquelles je ne pouvais rien, ne me semble pas satisfaire aux normes de la justice naturelle. Ce que je sens en moi, par contre, c’est une honte inextirpable.
(p. 69).

Chacun de nous se dit : Ce n’est pas moi qui ai fondé le parti nazi ; je n’ai déclaré la guerre à personne, moi, je n’ai envoyé personne dans les camps. Mais nous l’avons fait.
(p. 124).

Nous, les Allemands, un titre qui pourrait paraître pompeux voire usurpé lorsque l’on sait qu’il a été écrit en anglais. Mais il serait faux de rester sur cette impression et de passer à côté de ce livre dont la lecture m’a emballée. L’usurpation, d’abord… Alexander Starritt est un auteur de langue anglaise, certes, mais avec une double nationalité, écossaise et allemande, comme le petit-fils du livre d’ailleurs, petit-fils qui reçoit une longue lettre posthume de son grand-père, ancien soldat allemand sur le front de l’Est pendant la seconde guerre mondiale. Nul doute qu’Alexander Starritt a mis beaucoup de lui-même et de son histoire personnelle dans ce roman. Le caractère pompeux, ensuite… Eh bien non, le titre reflète avec une grande exactitude ce que ce roman tente de faire et ce qu’il fait, à mon avis très bien.
Car dans cette longue lettre qui est comme une confession, et au cours de laquelle le petit-fils se permet des inserts pour commenter certains passages, pour les préciser, ou pour les éclairer d’une lumière différente en racontant l’héritage de cette guerre pour sa génération (avec en plus la distance que lui donne sa double nationalité qui le place à la fois du côté des vainqueurs et du côté des vaincus, du côté des gentils et du côté des méchants), le grand-père, Meissner, raconte un épisode de la guerre, de sa guerre, celle du front de l’Est, une avancée victorieuse éclair puis un lent reflux de petites défaites en petites défaites. Cet épisode est peu glorieux, c’est le moins qu’on puisse dire, mais, au fond, au vu de toutes les horreurs perpétrées pendant les guerres et pensant cette guerre en particulier, c’est bien peu de choses.
Mais le fait de raconter ses souvenirs est pour l’ancien soldat Meissner l’occasion de revisiter plus qu’un fait de guerre. Il se demande ce qu’il fait là, quelle est sa part de responsabilité dans tout cela. Ce à quoi il a participé directement et ce à quoi il n’a pas participé directement. Et c’est là que le titre prend tout son sens, dans ce va-et-vient entre responsabilité individuelle et responsabilité collective.
Et comme si ce thème n’était pas assez complexe, Meissner, qui écrit une lettre qu’il sait posthume, s’interroge aussi sur la façon dont on peut continuer à vivre avec tout cela, en articulant encore une fois sa réflexion entre le niveau individuel et le niveau collectif. Il s’interroge sur ce qui reste, de la responsabilité, de la culpabilité ou de la honte.

C’est un texte extrêmement riche, donc, dont la lecture demande une certaine concentration, mais cette profusion de thèmes est très bien maîtrisée et à aucun moment je ne me suis sentie perdue dans cette lecture. Le livre est court (seulement 158 pages dans mon édition électronique), et donc particulièrement dense, mais c’est une lecture passionnante à chaque instant, et pour moi une très belle découverte de cette rentrée littéraire étrangère.

Un grand merci aux éditions Belfond pour m’avoir permis de lire ce livre, via netgalley.

When a grandson asks what he did during the war, Meissner gives a brief and irritated answer, but after his death, a letter is found addressed to his grandson. This is that letter. Focusing on a specific event during the final days of the war, Meissner writes about his eight years lost to service in the German Army, from the first heady days to his years in a Soviet work camp. But mostly he describes when he and a small group head out to find food while on retreat in Poland, acting on a rumor that a village has a hidden cache.

Alexander Starritt has written a deceptively straight-forward narrative with a depth that reveals itself slowly. Honest and unsparing, Meissner is uninterested in defending himself. There's a lot going on in this brief novel, and the focus on the ordinary German soldier was different enough to make this one noteworthy. ( )

The genre of war memoir has a sub-genre where the grandson/daughter finds a stack of old letters and photographs long forgotten, or perhaps interviews them 80 years later, and turns it into a book by the soldier but really a product of the younger relative. These memoirs by their nature open questions about the nature of truth, perspective and reliable narrator. As it happens these are the same things modern literature is concerned with. Starritt took it a step further and created a war memoir by a grandson about his German relative that is completely fictional, yet also completely believable. The mind spins a little, but you have to wonder, what is the point, why not just read one of the real memoirs. Starritt though is interested in more than mimicking a war novel, he goes into deeper questions of what it means to have fought on the wrong side of history, and likewise to have a relative who did, and he does so with a light literary sensibility. It's not an experimental work or difficult to read. A few scenes will probably stick with you - for me it will be attacking a tank while riding a donkey and holding a bayonet like a lance - which sounds unrealistic but makes sense in the book with the surreal nature of war. This is a short and kind of fun but also rewarding story. ( )

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We Germans by Alexander Starritt is a novella which follows a long letter a German grandfather written his grandson about his thoughts on fighting on the wrong side of the war in World War II against the Russians. Mr. Starritt is a Scottish-German novelist, journalist and entrepreneur

This novella is told from the viewpoint of both the grandfather and the grandson. When the grandfather was alive, his grandson, now in England, asked him about the war and fighting on the wrong side. After the grandfather’s death, a long letter is found telling of his experiences on the Eastern Front knowing that Germany is going to lose the war, and deservingly so

This novella reminded of the famous scene, later a meme, from the British comedy show That Mitchell and Webb about Nazi soldiers that ask “are we the baddies?”. While We Germans by Alexander Starritt is not as direct, the realization is clear as the grandfather pontificates on his reflections on war.

The grandfather and his three friends are in the midst of retreating from Russia, witnessing atrocities committed by their own forces against the Russian population and their own forces. The grandfather talks about his feelings of guilt and lies, coming to the realization that he’s been on, what basically amounts to, a fool’s errand.

This is a thought provoking book, as it goes into why an obviously evil regime was embraced by millions of Germans, as well as a person who is suddenly confronted with a good, hard look into a mirror and doesn’t like what he sees. I think that the questions on lack of guilt and shame are very relevant in today’s political climate around the world.
Maybe those questions never even went away?

The grandfather, Meissner, and his exhausted companions are living a nightmare for two and a half years. Somehow barely surviving, committing war crimes and treason as they make their way back home in order to live another day. Meissner is a small cog in the machine of war, he’s just a grunt, not part of killing squads, had nothing to do with the Holocaust, but his realization that he is no only on the losing side, but on the wrong side as well, is crystal clear.

This is not a war journal per say. The author’s descriptions are vivid, the characters are humanized and colorful. While Meissner does come across as a sympathetic figure, he is by no means a lovable one.

Among the grandfather’s profound analysis there are comments from his grandson, which I found to be clumsy and an exact opposite to the grandfather profound pontifications. There are some validity to the story, his struggles as grandson to a German soldier living in England could not have been easy, but by and large I found them to be a distraction.

I enjoyed reading this book and its attempt to come to terms with the banality of evil. There are many other books, fiction and non-fiction, which talk about the subject, ranging from the German high command’s realization that all is lost, to ones like this where the grunt on the field realizes that. ( )

An ARC copy via netgalley

(published in the UK in May)

In this novel a British grandson annotates the moving letter of explanation by his German grandfather, describing a key incident from his participation in the retreat from the East. The chaos and dehumanization of a terrible campaign are movingly told. Less effective (at least for me) was the philosophical debates on the nature of German guilt vs shame. For me, less telling/ exploration/ reiteration of the point would have been more effective, but still, recommended if you enjoy thoughtful historical fiction. Similar in tone to The Reader.

"It’s sometimes said that the war in the East, its cruelty, the genocide, was like hell or like the apocalypse. I’ve felt those things. But really all they mean is that it exceeded our power of comparison." ( )