Eisensteinian historical montage

Today Medievalists.net shared a good summary of a 2006 article by Donald Ostrowski in which he examines the actual historical evidence for the Battle of Lake Peipus and finds that the one fact everyone “knows” about the battle is almost certainly made up.

The Battle of Lake Peipus was fought in April 1242 between a Crusader coalition led by a suborder of the Teutonic Knights and a Russian force from Novgorod led by Prince Alexander Nevsky. After an initial cavalry assault by the Knights, Alexander drove them back, winning the battle and thwarting the attempt to conquer Novgorod and bring the Orthodox Christians there under the authority of the Latin or Catholic Church.

The “one fact everyone ‘knows’” that I mentioned above concerns the way Alexander was able to win and the fate of the Teutonic Knights. Look the Battle of Lake Peipus up and you’ll certainly find descriptions of the way the Knights, charging across and even fighting on the frozen lake, drowned in large numbers when the overstressed late spring ice broke up beneath them in the latter stages of the battle. Hence the battle’s better-known name: “The Battle on the Ice.”

But it turns out that most of the details related to the frozen lake date from much later than the battle itself, with—in a process that will be familiar to anyone who has had to work with medieval chronicles—more and more detailed and elaborate accounts being recorded later, often much later. And the breaking up of the ice specifically originates not in any historical source but in a movie: Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 propaganda epic Alexander Nevsky.

Eisenstein was a Russian filmmaker who worked for decades making historical dramas for the Stalinist Soviet state. He was also a film theorist, experimenting with intellectual montage techniques to convey story and meaning and—most importantly for a propagandist—evoke emotional reactions. He had a good eye for an exciting sequence, and Alexander Nevsky’s battle on a frozen lake and the wicked Germans’ plunge into the icy depths is among his best. But not his most famous.

That Eisenstein invented this vision of the battle is isn’t exactly news, at least to anyone who has studied this region and period. Note that Ostrowski’s Russian History article dates from 2006. William Urban, in The Teutonic Knights: A Military History, first published in 2003, is also circumspect about anything ice-related, and quotes part of the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle which describes the dead and dying lying “on the grass” after the battle. No frozen sinking corpses here.

But there’s another dimension of the gradual elaboration and fabrication of the story. Urban:

The battle has become undeservedly famous, having been endowed—for twentieth-century political considerations—with much more significance than it merited in itself, through Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, and the stirring music of Sergei Prokofiev. Indeed, although this movie is a reasonably accurate portrayal of some aspects of the battle, especially the costumes and tactics, and gives us an impressive sense of the drama of medieval combat, other aspects are pure propaganda. Certainly the ancestors of today’s Estonians and Latvians were not dwarfs, as the movie suggests, nor were they serfs. Master Andreas was in Riga, and thus could not have been taken prisoner by Alexander himself and ransomed for soap. The Russian forces were mainly professionals, not pre-Lenin Communist peasants and workers facing the equivalent of German armoured columns; the Germans were not proto-Nazis, blonde giants who burned babies alive. In short, many scenes in Alexander Nevsky tell us much more about the Soviet Union just before Hitler’s invasion than about medieval history.

Alexander Nevsky is a great movie, though, and, as Urban notes, Prokofiev’s score is fantastic. I have it on CD. Here’s a sample from the scene in question.

But this isn’t the only historical myth created by Eisenstein and spread with the imprimatur of the Comintern. By far his most famous film, the silent propaganda classic Battleship Potemkin, which depicts a 1905 mutiny of Russian sailors in the Ukrainian port of Odessa as a proto-Soviet uprising crushed by the cold-blooded Tsarists, features as its climactic sequence a massacre of newly liberated and class-conscious proles on a long elegant staircase. “The Odessa Steps” is one of the most famous scenes in cinema history, a continuous series of stunning, unforgettable images, and has been imitated and alluded to many, many times.

But the massacre never happened. Per Roger Ebert, in a “Great Movies” essay on Battleship Potemkin:

That there was, in fact, no czarist massacre on the Odessa Steps scarcely diminishes the power of the scene. The czar's troops shot innocent civilians elsewhere in Odessa, and Eisenstein, in concentrating those killings and finding the perfect setting for them, was doing his job as a director. It is ironic that he did it so well that today, the bloodshed on the Odessa Steps is often referred to as if it really happened.

Both of these myths—the breakup of the ice under the Teutonic Knights and the massacre on the Odessa Steps—illustrate the unique power and danger of historical cinema. These are inventions by a director following the rule of cool which, as Ebert notes, is a director’s job. But as Urban suggests above there is plenty of shady ideology working alongside those artistic considerations. More importantly, these made up stories are now the entire story for many people. As Chesterton put it in a line I’ve shared here before, “A false film might be refuted in a hundred books, without much affecting the million dupes who had never read the books but only seen the film.”

Medievalists.net’s summary post caught my eye not only because I love the subject and period as well as Eisenstein, but because matters of historical truth in filmmaking are always on my mind. After all, think about the Battle on the Ice sequence in Alexander Nevsky and how influential it was, then watch—or perhaps rewatch—this scene from last year’s Napoleon.

Falsehood, if introduced through film, can have a very long life.

History must be written forward

From the introduction to the late Steven Ozment’s A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People, in which Ozment briefly recapitulates several conflicting approaches to the study of German history. Against one widespread approach that sees all of German history as preparation for the arrival of Hitler and explains everything with that destination in mind, historian Thomas Nipperdey

believed that reliable history must be written forward chronologically, from past to present, not from present to past, as so much postwar historiography was inclined to do. It is one thing to know the end of a story and to be moved by it to learn the whole story, and quite another to tell that story from its known outcome. “In the beginning was Napoleon,” Nipperdey deadpanned in the first line of a multivolume history of Germany. . . . If 1933 is taken as the first page of modern German history, it will most likely be the last word on it.

One could think of this German historiographical situation as a shadow form of Anglo-American “Whig history,” which views all of history as a providential march toward the democratic institutions, liberal laws, free markets, and individualism of Britain and the United States.

But as Herbert Butterfield pointed out almost a century ago in his critique of Whig history, the basic mistake to such an approach is to search for and synthesize only those historical elements that contribute to that linear, progressive narrative. It’s too tidy. The real picture is much, much more diffuse and contingent. Ozment, again summarizing Nipperdey:

The larger lesson of these critiques of post-World War II historiography is twofold. Reading history from present to past is reading into it rather than learning from it. And equally distorting is the belief that history can be read as black and white. It is, as Nipperdey described, “homogenous, ambivalent [and] filled with contradictions that can never be resolved. Reality is not a system in which everything is uniformly arranged [but is] moved along by conflicts other than those a ‘continuity perspective’ selects—conflicts that do not fall neatly into progressive/anti-progressive or democratic/undemocratic categories.” 

Or, as I constantly take pains to remind my students, “History is complicated.” Good stuff from a valuable introduction. I look forward to the rest of the book, especially since Ozment embraces “the Tacitus challenge” to provide a view of Germans and Germany that reaches back two millennia to their encounters with Rome.

I’ve written about Whig history here many times before, in the context of presentism here, on useable pasts and what historians are actually good for here, and most recently here.

What are you doing here?

I’m currently reading Thomas Nevin’s Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914-45. In his chapter on the Weimar Era, Nevin describes how, after several years of writing for nationalist military magazines and other right-wing outlets, Jünger branched out in the intellectual company he kept:

He was friendly to the national Bolshevist Ernst Nieckish, to the Bohemian anarchist Erich Mühsam, to the putschist Ernst von Salomon, to the national socialist Otto Strasser, to the communists Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Toller. These men could get together in a room and talk in a civil way. It is facile to conclude they were united in opposing the republic. In fact, strong in intelligence, they were political weaklings.

One sympathizes.

This is a rich cross-section of Weimar political persuasions, with these men belonging to groups that were sometimes literally fighting each other in the streets. Indeed, the left-wing Nazi Otto Strasser and the anti-Nazi nationalist Ernst von Salomon were veterans of the Freikorps. (Von Salomon lightly fictionalized his experiences in The Outlaws, which I read two years ago.)

Nevin goes on to describe the regular salons Jünger and others would hold throughout 1929:

Regularly on Friday evenings . . . Jünger and brother Fritz met at the home of Friedrich Hielscher on Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse. These gatherings usually included von Salomon, the publisher Rowohlt, Otto Strasser, the expressionist writer Arnolt Bronnen, and Vormarsch illustrator Paul Weber, soon famous for his prophetic drawings depicting Nazism as a cult of death.

Again—so far, so Weimar, especially when you look into some of the lesser-known figures and find that peculiar cocktail of playwrights, businessmen, and neopagans that could only make sense in that time and place. But then, just before describing how Joseph Goebbels himself began attending these meetings with the express aim of winning Jünger over to the Nazis, Nevin casually tosses this in:

The American novelist Thomas Wolfe also attended.

I, like Jim Halpert, have just so many questions.

In all seriousness, this was a great surprise, and something unexpected and new to look into. I’ve already had this out-of-print Wolfe biography, which gives good coverage to the years he spent in Germany, where Look Homeward, Angel was apparently a huge hit, recommended by a co-worker and Wolfe relation.

A reminder that one of the purest and strangest delights of studying history is stumbling across connections between seemingly separate things you’re interested in, connections that throw both subjects suddenly into a strange new relief—in this case, Ernst Jünger and interwar Germany and the Southern literary world of the same period.

The world of the day after tomorrow

As we close out 2022, here’s Ernst Jünger in 1922:

We have become old and comfortable like the elderly. It has become a crime to be or to have more than others. Now, unaccustomed to the strong intoxicants, men and power have become an abomination to us; our new gods are the masses and equality. If the masses cannot become like the few, then let the few become like the masses. Politics, theater, artists, cafes, patent leather shoes, posters, newspapers, morals, the Europe of tomorrow, the world of the day after tomorrow: the thundering masses. Like a thousand-headed beast, crushing all that does not allow itself to be swallowed up, envious, parvenu-like, cruel. Once again, the individual was defeated, and didn’t his own representatives betray him? We live too close to each other, our great cities are grating millstones, rushing torrents that grind us against each other like pebbles. Too hard, the life; don’t we have our flickering life? Too hard, the heroes; aren’t these flickering screen heroes enough for us? And how beautifully they flow, smooth and silent, these stories. You sit in the cushion and all the nations, all the adventures of the world swim through your brain, as light and gestalt as an opium dream.

This comes from War as an Inner Experience, a short collection of essays elaborating on some of the themes latent in Storm of Steel, and it is striking how closely in anticipates the concerns and arguments of the longer and more sophisticated The Forest Passage, published almost thirty years later. It is also striking how closely this description of Jünger’s world before and after the war resembles the world of a century later with its angry levelling, its conformity, its politics of envy, its proud and corrupt urbanism, and most especially its retreat from the real and the difficult into the easy and imaginary. Excessive screentime is not a new problem.

This passage prompted a lot of thinking on my part, but I only have time for a little of it here. It occurs to me that one could respond a couple ways to what Jünger writes here:

• A person of one persuasion might—ignoring the present-tense in the passage—say, “How prophetic! Look at how bad things have gotten!”

• A person of the opposite persuasion might say, “Things haven’t gotten worse! That you perceive this as applying to 2022 just proves that some people will always be speaking doom no matter how good things get.”

To which I say You’re both right—things have gotten bad, and we have not fallen from a golden age—because a century is too short a perspective from which to be viewing the trends between Jünger’s time and our own. Things have been bad in many of the same ways for a very long time. The problems of 2022 are different from those of 1922 not in kind, but in degree.

The Forest Passage was the first book I finished reading in 2022, making this passage of War as an Inner Experience a nice thematic bookend. So that I don’t end this year of blogging on too dour a note, let me refer back to a post from January about The Forest Passage, where I quote Jünger’s 1951 prediction of what kind of men the modern world would produce—as well as the beginnings of a remedy:

[M]an is suffering a loss, and this loss explains the manifest grayness and hopelessness of his existence. . . . Giving this man an inkling of what has been taken from him, even in the best possible present circumstances, and of what immense power still rests within him—this is the theological task.

I’ve returned to this line and meditated on it many times this year. Living so that the gray and hopeless modern man will feel “what has been taken from him”—let this be our hope, motto, and prayer for 2023.

Notes on rereading Storm of Steel

Ernst Jünger as a Private early in the war, as an Iron Cross recipient in 1916, as a highly decorated officer wearing his Pour-le-Merite postwar, in 1920

Last week I ran across the following meme. It perfectly captures the chief contrast between two of the great authors produced by the First World War—Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front, and Ernst Jünger, author of Storm of Steel—as well as the perspectives of their books:

I laughed, of course, and gleefully reshared it with the caption “I never get tired of recommending Jünger to students precisely because they aren’t prepared for this.”

The “this” being the fundamental mismatch between what they expect thematically, didactically, from a harrowing war story and what they actually get from Storm of Steel. They’ve all gotten the canned antiwar messaging of high school reading lists (All Quiet being one of the books that created the template for a genre that hasn’t changed much in a hundred years), and have absorbed the structure or arc of any basic antiwar story without even realizing it.

But here’s a memoir, I tell them, in which the author essentially spends 300 pages telling you: The war was a continuous, 24/7, 365-day-a-year horror show. It was terrible from beginning to end. It was hell. And I loved it.

They don’t know what to do with that. And yet they always end up responding strongly to the long excerpt I have them read from the chapter on Guillemont.

But beyond being amusing, this meme got me wanting to reread Storm of Steel, something I’ve been intending to do for years. So the day I ran across this, I got exactly that edition* off my shelf and started reading. Four days later, I had already finished.

The following isn’t exactly a review, more a series of notes or observations as I reread it all the way through for the first time in ten years.

Tone

The most striking thing about Storm of Steel is its tone. I say striking because it takes hold of the reader immediately and strongly affects him all the way through—and yet it is difficult to describe. Google Ernst Jünger or Storm of Steel and take a few minutes looking at the jarring difference of opinions on his work. You’ll find people accusing it of being pro-war or jingoistic and others describing it as clearly antiwar. Neither opinion is based on any overt statement in the book, because Jünger never raises political questions and has nothing to say about the causes of the war or the justness of the techniques with which it was waged.

And so readers have to fall back on what he describes and how he describes it. That’s where his remarkable tone comes in.

I struggle to describe it myself. There is no one word for it. I’ve seen people describe it as cold or inhuman. These are flatly wrong, and critics who describe the book this way are usually assuming something about Jünger personally and projecting that onto the book. Dispassionate suggests itself, though Jünger describes plenty of high emotion, from elation to terror, and even describes himself weeping on multiple occasions.

Perhaps the best word is forthright. Jünger’s narration and descriptions, analytically observed and cataloged with his entomologist’s eye,** are bracingly, disturbingly forthright. He tells but does not explain, much less praise or condemn. These concerns lie outside his purpose, which is to relate what he lived through and what it was like. And he narrates everything in the book with the same unflappable forthrightness, whether his rookie mistakes on sentry duty, the miserable conditions of trench life, the joy of finding an abandoned store of wine, the variety and effects of British and French grenades, the corpses of the dead, the death of a little girl killed by British shrapnel, the excitement of going over the top, the terror of hand-to-hand combat, the experience of being hit by shell fragments, caught in barbed wire, shot through the chest.

All of these are narrated so bluntly, so matter-of-factly, that they seem to need no literary adornment, though Jünger was a skilled craftsman and carefully worked over his diaries to produce this book. The result is uniquely horrifying—and thrilling.

That’s the subject of the meme above, in which Remarque reacts to the horror in the expected, clichéd way, and Jünger decidedly does not.*** I think that’s also why so many people interpret Jünger so differently. War described this unflinchingly shouldn’t be exciting… should it? What do we make of someone who finds that he enjoys and excels at something so horrible? Hence the accusations of coldness or inhumanity, or, further, of jingoism or fascism or social Darwinism or worse.

Sympathy

But actually reading the book, one finds enjoyment of danger and conflict without bloodlust. Jünger describes killing plenty of enemy soldiers—often point-blank, intimately—but just as often he passes up the chance to kill an enemy. Interestingly, this happens more often in the later, wilder, more violent passages of the book from Operation Michael (Spring 1918) onward, and, in one episode late in the war, Jünger explicitly contrasts himself with a ferocious stormtroop leader he joins in an attack. Jünger, you might be surprised to learn by this point of the book, is invigorated by someone yet more eager than himself.

Similarly, Jünger takes no joy in destruction for its own sake. While never editorializing or effusively emoting over it, it is clear that the destruction of whole towns and villages and the annihilation of landscapes is a bad thing. And every time he encounters his enemies outside combat, he looks upon them with sympathy and even respect. Likewise with the French or Flemish civilians in the rear—he shows no disdain, no exploitative greed, no animosity whatsoever, and always interacts politely and even familiarly. Most often the civilians appear as friendly or affectionate figures, and Jünger presents their evacuation when the war reaches their homes as unfortunate. Again, without explicitly saying so.

Thrilling or horrifying? Ja.

All of which only brings us back, again and again, like Jünger himself, to the combat. And it is thrilling. Seldom have I read a true story with as much continuous excitement as when Jünger goes into the line with his company, endures British and French bombardment, gets stranded far ahead of the German lines and shoots his way out, is surprised by but manages to defeat a British Indian colonial unit far larger than his own, or, especially, when he begins the breathtaking, overwhelming assaults in the Spring 1918 offensive, with his men rushing over battlefields that have sat immovable for three years.

It is also horrible, with the destruction of lives by shrapnel, bullets, gas, infection, artillery—powerful enough simply to vaporize some men—and dumb accident all presented bluntly, in unstinting detail, like a naturalist describing lions taking apart a zebra. It could provoke what some on the internet call mood whiplash, but somehow Jünger conveys all of this to the reader as a sensible, coherent, unified experience.

One suspects that it really could not be thrilling without being horrible—and vice versa. This is a tension Jünger clearly felt and that Storm of Steel makes the reader feel like no other book, all of which is part of Jünger’s forthrightness. Most other war novels and memoirs skew toward the horrible; a few, mostly from long ago, toward the thrilling or exciting or even the morally uplifting.

Jünger refuses easier understandings of what he lived through. His work suggests that the people horrified by war are right. And so are the people thrilled by it. Throughout Storm of Steel, Jünger is describing a state, a condition, and how do you rage against a state? War just is.

Philosophizing

One gets all of this from reading between the lines, from letting the Storm pass over you, so to speak, and listening to the lightning and feeling the wind and the pelting rain. Jünger describes bluntly but doesn’t preach, at least not most of the time. There are isolated passages of reflection in which Jünger drifts into what Mark Twain—brutally but, to be frank, accurately—described as “the sort of luminous intellectual fog” of German philosophizing,† but he avoids the world-historical opining of Remarque or other explicitly antiwar authors.

One thinks of Dalton Trumbo’s novel Johnny Got His Gun, which begins as a brilliant modernist stream-of-conscious story and ends as a straightforward Marxist sermon, or the unfortunate Willy Peter Reese, who was killed on the Eastern Front during World War II and left behind an unfinished memoir so densely packed with philosophical and poetical musings as to be almost unreadable for long stretches.‡

The edition of Storm of Steel I read this time includes a short foreword by Karl Marlantes, veteran of Vietnam and author of the brilliant novel Matterhorn based on his experiences as a Marine platoon commander. Marlantes is the perfect person to introduce Jünger. Like Storm of Steel, Matterhorn is vividly and painstakingly descriptive and avoids overt philosophizing or didactic messaging, deriving its power from the forcefulness with which it presents what happened. Both have an absorbing, dreamlike quality once they take hold of the reader. In some places, both are a fever-dream.

Marlantes’s verdict on Jünger, with whom he feels an affinity despite also being separated by a vast gulf: he was “a different breed of man: the born warrior.”

Conclusion

Like I said, this is more a grab-bag of notes, observations, and meditations than a straightforward review. Like the war Jünger fought in and wrote about, Storm of Steel is fundamentally impossible to summarize and can only be described, and is therefore prone to misinterpretation. One has to experience it. And I strongly recommend experiencing Storm of Steel to everyone.

Notes:

*I do not own any German edition of the original, In Stahlgewittern, though that is on my wish list. This edition is the Michael Hofmann translation of Jünger’s last revision of the book in 1961. There is an online fan culture for the “original” 1929 English translation of Jünger’s second revision, though that translation is rife with inaccuracies and most widely available in a print-on-demand reprint that is apparently loaded with typos.

**The memoir that I think offers the closest point of comparison in tone and style to Storm of Steel—while still being a very different book—is EB Sledge’s With the Old Breed. Tellingly, both men became zoologists after the war.

***A further contrast between the two books that I’ll just drop here: Linguistically, their titles also suggest a key difference in tone and perspective. Remarque’s book, in German, is Im Westen nichts neues, i.e. “Nothing new in the West.” Im Westen is in the dative case, suggesting stasis and therefore pointlessness. Nichts neues, nothing new, is the book’s central, bitter irony. But Jünger’s title, In Stahlgewittern (a Gewitter is a thunderstorm), is in the accusative case, which in German suggests movement (one stands in a room datively, but goes in[to] the room accusatively). Grammatically, the title could just as accurately be translated Into the Steel Storm. This is precisely Jünger’s journey in the book, and where he takes the reader.

†To see more of Jünger in this mode, read Copse 125, a memoir in which he expanded upon one specific monthlong stretch in the trenches in the summer of 1918. The contrast is striking. I read it this past spring.

‡I read Reese’s book A Stranger to Myself a few years ago, also in a translation by Hofmann. Interestingly, where Hofmann includes as footnotes passages from Reese’s diaries—which, like Jünger, he had used as the raw material to construct a memoir—they are much more vivid, direct, and concrete than the memoir he based on them.

Polarization

Chapter 8 of The Holy Roman Empire: A Short History, by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger describes how rivalries and warfare between the Empire’s members (most importantly Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, and Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II, Habsburg rulers of Austria), philosophical trends like Enlightenment liberalism, and external events like the French Revolution fatally atrophied the Empire, turning its institutions sclerotic and captive to the ulterior interests of its own elite.

The chapter is called “Political Polarization.” Here’s Stollberg-Rilinger’s concluding paragraph:

With the deaths of Frederick II in 1786 and Joseph II in 1790, the political situation in the Holy Roman Empire became thoroughly polarized. The Austrian-Prussian dualism affected every aspect of the Imperial constitution, and its opposing gravitational pulls, combined with the cynical confessional politics of both sides, tore apart the Empire’s institutional fabric. The weaker Imperial members could not extricate themselves from this polarization and had to choose sides. The powerful Imperial members had long ceased to base their authority and legitimacy on the Empire and consequently had no interests in the Empire as such. Thus, when the continuing existence of the Empire served their particular goal, they supported it, but when it did not, they showed no qualms in attacking or abusing it. At the end of the eighteenth century, all that was needed for the ultimate collapse of the Empire was one final external push.

Let the reader understand.

Virtue twisted

Siegfried’s death in a promotional still for Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924)

For the past several days I’ve been rereading the Nibelungenlied in Burton Raffel’s verse translation. This Middle High German epic, the story of the hero Siegfried, his marriage to Kriemhild and murder at the hands of her brother Gunther and his henchman Hagen, and her ruthlessly exacted revenge, is an adaptation of ancient Germanic legends for the age of chivalry. An earlier Norse version is preserved in The Saga of the Volsungs. But more on that below.

People rightly emphasize the roles of honor, vassalage, loyalty, and treachery when they look at the story of the Nibelungenlied. Knowing Siegfried’s fate from the beginning—the author makes heavy, Moby-Dick-style use of foreshadowing—it is easy to read Gunther, Hagen, and company as thoroughgoing villains, evil from the start. But what has struck me most on this reading are the admirable qualities of virtually everyone—at first. Even the awkward confrontation between Siegfried and Gunther’s court upon his arrival in Worms, when Siegfried greets the man whose sister he hopes to marry by asserting that he will take over his kingdom, is resolved without bloodshed. Game recognize game. Genuine friendship, celebration, and chivalrous and honorable victory over old enemies is the result.

Only later, when Gunther enlists Siegfried’s aid in a hopeless attempt to win Brunhild as his wife, do things start to go wrong. But what exactly, other than the famous hatred that erupts between Brunhild and Kriemhild, has gone wrong? And why do things continue worsening right up until the slaughter that ends the poem?

Here’s the passage that really got me reflecting, the opening quatrain of Adventure 16, “Wie Sîfrit erslagen wart”—How Siegfried was slain:

Usually bold, now brazen, Gunter and Hagen set
their treacherous trap, pretending a hunting trip to the woods.
Their knife-sharp spears were meant for boars and bears, they said,
and great-horned forest oxen. Clearly, these were courageous men!

“Usually bold, now brazen” is the half-line that caught my eye. It turns out to be Raffel’s gloss or amplification of the original (“Gunther und Hagene, || die réckén vil balt” is straightforwardly “Gunther and Hagen, the very bold knights”), but it neatly underscores the role of perverted—that is, twisted—virtue in the Nibelungenlied.

The villainy that runs through the poem runs through it from beginning to end, but only because the villainy morphs out of what begin as the characters’ virtues. When we meet them, Siegfried is powerful, courageous, and a loyal friend; Gunther is a generous and trusting (and trustworthy) lord and host; even Hagen’s bluntness is an asset. And all of them are mighty men, not only physically strong but vil balt, as they demonstrate over and over.

But these virtues, improperly subordinated, begin to twist and warp with the poem’s central act of deception—the winning of Brunhild. Gunther, like Siegfried, has heard of a beautiful and wealthy woman far away whom he desires to marry. Unlike Siegfried, Gunther has neither the confidence nor the abilities necessary to survive the warrior triathlon the superhuman Brunhild demands of all her suitors. And so he asks Siegfried for help, implying that he will allow Siegfried and Kriemhild to marry if he does. Once arrived in Brunhild’s kingdom, Siegfried pretends to be Gunther’s servant and dons his cloak of invisibility, beating Brunhild handily at all her games while Gunther pantomimes the actions required. An aggrieved Brunhild returns to Worms to be married to Gunther, and Siegfried and Kriemhild happily wed.

You can already see a downward spiral here, and, sure enough, this deception requires yet further deceptions—not only on Gunther’s embarrassing wedding night but for years to come. The heroes’ virtues buckle and twist under the pressure of their repeated bad choices until they become vices.

Thus Siegfried’s loyalty to Gunther and love for Kriemhild allow him both to exploit and to be exploited and end with him seeming, to us, hopelessly naïve, literally racing into the trap his enemies have set for him on that hunting trip. The prudent, generous, and courtly Gunther transforms into a cowed, easily swayed, guilt-ridden man willing to countenance murder to appease his wife. Kriemhild’s love for her dead husband leads her to abandon their son and to seek the utter destruction of her brothers’ kingdom. And Hagen’s intelligence and forthrightness twist into power-obsessed cunning and utilitarian cruelty. In the alchemy of the plot, boldness transmutes into brazenness and honor into brutality. The last casualty listed in the poem, even after Kriemhild herself has been struck down, is êre—honor.

The role of virtue, especially the destructive power of virtue twisted, is the thing that most substantially sets the Nibelungenlied apart from an earlier version like The Saga of the Volsungs. This stems from the circumstances of its composition. In The Mind of the Middle Ages, Frederick Artz describes how the anonymous author of the Nibelungenlied

worked over early Germanic legends and other tales about the Burgundians and the Huns of the fifth and sixth centuries and combined with these the style of chivalric romance newly introduced from France—a strange mixture. There is more here of court manners, of women, of love, and of Christian ideas than in Beowulf, the Norse stories, or the French chansons de geste. The poet was a man of genius and from these divergent materials he produced a masterpiece.

There is a lot to be said for this summary, but for the purposes of this post I want to concentrate on the role of “Christian ideas.” Where the Norse stories of Sigurð feature doom or fate, an unyielding destiny to which the heroes must conform and willingly surrender themselves when the time comes, the murders and climactic bloodbath of the Nibelungenlied are unambiguously the result of character and choice—of strong men and women whose virtues have been twisted out of shape by deception. pride, and hatred. This is a thoroughly and vibrantly imagined picture of a world that is itself twisted under the weight of sin.

The Nibelungenlied, viewed from this angle, can be taken as a thoroughly Christian synthesis of the old Germanic stories imbued throughout not with the fatalism of the Norns but with an understanding that the world is fallen and sin has tainted everything, even our virtues.

More if you’re interested

Raffel’s verse translation is good, not least since it is one of the only recent attempts to render the odd, complex verse of the original into an English equivalent. I first read the Nibelungenlied in AT Hatto’s prose translation for Penguin Classics, which is still worthwhile and has some good appendices. Most recently I read a new prose translation by William Whobrey for Hackett Publishing, which has more scholarly apparatus than either Raffel’s or Hatto’s and includes the Klage, a short sequel to the Nibelungenlied by another unknown poet.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Nibelungenlied, don’t rely on knowledge of the Volsungs or Wagner, both version of the story being quite different from this one, as I mentioned. You might check out this fun summary of the poem I discovered a few years ago, which reenacts the story 1) surprisingly thoroughly and 2) hilariously using Playmobil.

Breakout at Stalingrad

German prisoners march out of the ruins of Stalingrad, January 1943.

Three years ago I read Unknown Soldiers, by Väinö Linna, one of the best and most powerful war novels I’ve ever come across. Unknown Soldiers follows a company of Finnish machine gunners through the Continuation War, a three-year war against the Soviets that ran parallel to the German invasion of Russia. Following some initial successes and some years of sitting tight in trenchlines, in the final third of the book the war turns against the Finns and the story becomes one of pell-mell retreat, of sacrifice to buy time and save lives, and ever increasing desperation. The characters suffer, fight and run, scrape together whatever they can to survive, and all too frequently die.

Take that feeling of desperation, the weight of unavoidable, inescapable impending defeat, stretch it out to six hundred pages, and shift the scene from a largely forgotten war to one of the most famous battles in history, and you have Heinrich Gerlach’s Breakout at Stalingrad.

Encirclement

Gerlach’s novel tells the story of a handful of men from the intelligence section of a German division’s staff. The most prominent among them is Lieutenant Breuer, whom we meet in the first chapter as he returns to the front outside Stalingrad after a trip to the rear. Through Breuer we get to know various other officers in the middle rungs of divisional leadership, and through his driver, the kindhearted and optimistic Lakosch, we meet a number of the enlisted men who work as drivers, cooks, and mechanics for headquarters. The cast is large and wide-ranging, including the divisional commander, a newly promoted colonel; haughty Sergeant Major Harras, a man more concerned with the finery of his uniforms than with discipline or combat effectiveness; Padre Peters, a hardworking chaplain; and the officers who distribute food and pay and who command the division’s small contingents of tanks, antiaircraft guns, and other defensive measures. The commander of the Sixth Army himself, General—later Field Marshal—Paulus, even appears a few times, as does Hitler, a faraway figure in more than one sense, a man detached from and cold to the reality of what is about to happen at Stalingrad.

Our meeting with Breuer comes at an inauspicious time—mid-November 1942. The rumor, to which Breuer is privy as a member of the division’s intelligence section, is that the Russians are massing their forces along the Don River north of the city with the apparent intent of cutting off the German army there and encircling them.

Exactly that happens. The Russians attack in overwhelming numbers, and despite manful resistance, Breuer and the rest of the German army begin a constant retreat. In a skillfully described series of incidents through the middle of the book, Gerlach describes the Germans pulling up stakes and falling back to new defensive lines only to have these collapse, leading them to repeat the process. Little things go awry, and thanks to the slow accumulation of details with each retreat, we first sense and then see these tactical withdrawals turn into chaotic routs.

The Russians complete their encirclement quickly and the supply lines fail. The Germans run short of food, ammunition, and medical supplies. They eat their draft horses and every farm animal they come across before turning to civilians’ pets and strays. The Luftwaffe attempts an airlift that proves only partially successful, bringing in not nearly enough supplies and flying out only the most desperately wounded, the most important, and the most devious. As the Russians close in on the airfields the planes themselves come under attack, and even getting a pass to board a flight out is no guarantee of escape. At one point Breuer, having been wounded in the eye, finally has a chance to get out via cargo plane, and the suspense and desperation of the scene is unlike anything I’ve read in other war novels.

The final act of the novel takes place in Stalingrad itself, which Breuer and company have slowly withdrawn toward for weeks before they actually enter. The city is a tomb, full of the shells of buildings, which are themselves full of wounded and dying men. The conclusion plays out here, in these contested ruins, and even the clearly approaching end of the siege can prove no comfort—the men go on dying right up to the moment they are captured, even after the city’s surrender. Plans to escape, using German-allied Romanian troops or Russian collaborators for cover, come to nothing. The wounded linger and die. Soldiers freeze to death in their foxholes. Others go insane. And those that live to be captured can look ahead and see nothing but Soviet captivity.

What makes Breakout at Stalingrad great

You might notice that, while I describe a broad sequence of events above, I do not exactly summarize a plot. Like many other war novels, Breakout at Stalingrad is episodic, a reflection of the actual experience of these events—about which more below. What makes this a great novel is not its plotting, but Gerlach’s attention to three things.

First, Gerlach peoples this novel with vivid and interesting characters. Breuer, the character with whom we spend the most time, is an effective everyman, a dedicated soldier without much interest in politics and a whole lot to live for, and who is nevertheless burdened by terrible premonitions. His driver, Lakosch, is a hopeful true believer in the Nazi cause—which, as he understands it, is anti-Bolshevism, a cause to which he is committed owing to his miserable youth as the child of Socialist parents. The disillusionment of both characters—symbolized by different things for each man, like the moment Lakosch has to abandon his beloved but now broken down Volkswagen field car—provides two of a dozen or so fully realized character arcs in the novel.

A few of these arcs prove surprising. In the final chapters of the novel, Breuer finds himself awaiting his fate with an officer of a much more ideological mindset than himself, and in the quiet before catastrophe they have a chance to reflect that their conversation would have been impossible for both of them when the siege began. Stalingrad has changed both of them, a wry realization. But not all of these arcs are redemptive or result in any kind of epiphany. Sergeant Major Harras leads a two-month career of utter villainy, and like him some of the convinced Nazis among the German officers only fall lower and lower as the siege gets worse and they commit themselves more and more totally to either victory or annihilation.

The most powerful and haunting character to me was the chaplain, Padre Peters, a rare religious character in this kind of fiction who is treated seriously and depicted as sincere, who works himself to exhaustion and psychological collapse. The incident that awakens him from his fugue state near the end of the novel is one of the most moving and haunting depictions of religious devotion and the power of the scriptures and the sacraments that I’ve ever read.

Second, Breakout at Stalingrad abounds in vivid, carefully selected details, which is the lifeblood of realistic fiction. Gerlach’s descriptions of combat, of the sudden appearance of Russian tanks or the steady approach of a horde of Russian infantry across the snow, of the wounds and frostbite and infections and ramblings of the pitiful final survivors of the battle, of the way a half-mad crowd of men press forward toward the hatch of a cargo plane, and—throughout—the rapidly changing mental states of these exhausted and overextended men are gripping. This novel does what all the best war novels do—shows what it was like—and does it exceptionally well.

Finally, Breakout at Stalingrad is full of terrible irony. This is not to say that Gerlach’s tone is cynical, though he certainly presents the entire story as a bitter critique of Hitler’s leadership, Nazism, and the whole Nazi project. The characters, who are so vividly drawn, will be marked by this experience for life, provided they survive.

Gerlach’s irony does not stem from his tone or treatment of the story but from the story itself. Unwelcome surprises and awful turns of events occur throughout. A general who is thankful that his pilot son is flying cargo planes in some other part of Europe, Lakosch and his love for a stray dog he has adopted and keeps miraculously well fed, Harras and his attempt to blow up a wrecked aircraft to deny its use to the Russians, the trust of the more fervently Nazi or simply patriotic officers in their leaders back home—all have terribly ironic outcomes brought about by the situation at Stalingrad itself. Even the very first chapter, in which we meet Breuer and Lakosch driving through the night, is by the end an ironic memory: their trip down that road is the last time that that road into—or out of—Stalingrad will be open to any of them. It’s masterfully done, and the irony with which Gerlach generously sews the story only adds to the weight of the characters’ impending doom.

The story of Gerlach’s novel

A final, external factor that makes Breakout at Stalingrad interesting is the story of the novel itself. Gerlach was, like Breuer, a low-ranking intelligence officer at Stalingrad and was among the hundreds of thousands of men captured when Paulus capitulated. Held in prison camps in Russian for years even after the war’s end, Gerlach spent time with many other survivors of the siege and, by the end of his captivity in 1950, he had written the manuscript of Breakout at Stalingrad. But before he could be released and repatriated, the Soviets went through his papers. They confiscated the manuscript.

Following his return, Gerlach eventually decided to write his novel again, and used hypnosis to assist his recall of the original manuscript. This second “remembered” version of the novel was published in Germany as Die verratene Armee in 1957, as The Forsaken Army in 1958. It was a hit, and enjoyed great success throughout his lifetime. He died in 1991.

Then, in 2012, a German professor of literature doing research on leftist German writers in a Moscow archive stumbled upon something remarkable—the confiscated original manuscript of Gerlach’s novel. The professor, Carsten Gansel, edited and published the newly rediscovered novel in 2016, a quarter century after Gerlach’s death.

The English translation I read includes a 150-page appendix by Gansel recounting Gerlach’s wartime experiences and imprisonment and discussing the rediscovery of the manuscript itself. The chief draw of Breakout at Stalingrad is and must be the novel itself, and so while you won’t be missing anything if you don’t look into this remarkable background story, it is worth reading for its own sake. I, for one, am thankful that Gansel happened across the manuscript and that he saw it into print.

Conclusion

Is Breakout at Stalingrad an anti-war novel? I don’t know. Certainly no one would choose to live through the things Gerlach describes, and certainly Gerlach depicts the battle as a waste of brave men caused by the cruelty of far-off leaders. But the strength of whatever message Gerlach has for us lies in its story, in its characters and the things that happen to them. It condemns the war without sermonizing, like Johnny Got His Gun or All Quiet on the Western Front in its more hamfisted moments; shows the disintegration of human minds and souls without filling the story with men who are already degenerates, like The Thin Red Line or The Naked and the Dead and their casts of perverts and psychopaths; and brings us into moments of extraordinary pathos, tragedy, camaraderie, and—just occasionally—heroism without the cloying phoniness or sentimentality of so many war movies.

As I mentioned above, Breakout at Stalingrad accomplishes one of the most important things a novel of any kind, but most especially a war novel, sets out to do: create that dreamlike state of vicarious experience that conveys what it was like. Drawing on his own experiences and those of his fellow survivors of Stalingrad, Gerlach carefully constructed this novel around a diverse set of believable characters and freighted their stories with shocking and often bitterly ironic incidents that show us, the readers, the brutality and waste of the battle. Like Linna’s Unknown Soldiers, the result is not only a great war novel, but a great novel, a story we could all stand to learn from—and can be grateful we didn’t live through.

Barbarians teaser reaction

There are a lot of movie trailers I’m pretty excited about right now: No Time to Die, Daniel Craig’s final Bond outing, which looks great and has some genuinely beautiful cinematography just in the trailer; Death on the Nile, Kenneth Branagh’s second sumptuous and classically-styled entry in his Hercule Poirot adaptations; Dune, which despite—a very strong despite—Timothée Chalamet, looks utterly fantastic; and Mank, which doesn’t actually have a trailer yet, but it’s a David Fincher film about the production of Citizen Kane so I’m already on board.

But I’ve been too tired and busy this semester to post about any of those. What’s gotten me excited enough to get me off my duff and write a blog post is a completely unexpected teaser for a Netflix limited series, Barbarians.

Barbarians, based on the very stingy teaser trailer dropped by Netflix a few days ago, retells one of the most famous stories from ancient Rome—the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Fought in what is now northwestern Germany in AD 9, the battle destroyed three Roman legions in a trap sprung by an ostensible ally, the Roman-educated Germanic chieftain Arminius. The Romans’ German allies under Arminius lured the army, which was commanded by an inept general named Varus, into a militarily indefensible position and then turned on them. Ambushed while strung out in column through the dense, marshy forest, the Romans were picked apart and annihilated in detail. The emperor Augustus, only five years from his death at the age of 75, supposedly cried in anguish for Varus to “Give me back my legions!”

In keeping with my usual format for trailer reactions, a few notes and observations:

• The teaser certainly focuses on the battle aspect. IMDb tells me this is a six-episode series, so Netflix is definitely trying to sell us on the action first. I’ll be curious to see how much more of Arminius’s story the series tells. Let’s hope for a proper trailer soon.

• The Romans’ weapons and armor look surprisingly good although, again, this teaser doesn’t give us much. Most of the infantry are shown in what modern historians call the lorica segmentata, remains of which have indeed been found on the battlefield. The Kalkriese face mask, found on the battlefield by modern archaeologists and conjectured to be a ceremonial Roman cavalry mask, makes an appearance. I geeked out.

• But then there are some Germans with horns on their helmets. If we owed nineteenth century opera costumers royalties on this hooey they’d have some very, very rich descendants.

• Not a fan of the Uruk-hai facepaint. This may be based on an offhand observation about one Germanic group in Tacitus’s book Germania (see below), but that’s describing a tribe that lived in modern-day Poland, not the region the battle actually took place in. The wideshot of Arminius and his serried ranks of Germanic warriors standing at the edge of the forest looks like a shot from the beginning of Gladiator, which is not a good thing.

• Lots of inexplicable fire in the rather abstract battle shots we get in the trailer. We’ll see. Let’s just hope they don’t include any fire arrows.

• Even worse is the inclusion of a standard-issue Hollywood warrior chick (cf. Knightley, Keira in Arthur, King). This is one of the great sword-and-sandal action movie clichés of the last thirty years—second only to fire arrows. Germanic women did play an important role in battle, but it wasn’t as kickass fourth wave feminists covered in mud. It’s tiresome and silly. Stop it.

• Lots of fur, rough fabrics, unkempt hair, and subdued colors for the Germans. Let’s hope this is just due to the selection of clips for the teaser, most of which come from the battle itself. Otherwise, given the other items above, this is looking like another ancient movie full of mass-produced Movie Barbarians™. But I hope not. My ancestors may have run around naked, sacrificed people, and worshiped trees, but they did like bright colors and personal grooming.

• Much, much better, and definitely working to the movie’s advantage, is the atmosphere. The gloom and murk of the forest are exactly as described by the Romans, and the miserable weather that always played a role in Rome’s campaigns in Germany looks to be on full, glorious display here.

• Related: I love what we see of the cinematography here. Again—gloom, atmosphere, shallow depth of field. Bring it on.

• So far I haven’t mentioned that this is a German movie, in German—and Latin. As far as I can tell the German is modern Hochdeutsch, though. Still great to have a polyglot movie to reflect this aspect of the ancient world.

• That this is a German production is interesting in itself, and makes me wonder how precisely they will handle the Arminius story. Arminius has been used as a heroic symbol of German nationalism since the 19th century, and heroic nationalism is not something Germans do nowadays. This teaser has, as another site has put it, “serious Gladiator vibes.” I wonder if they will tread carefully in this regard, trying to avoid potentially stirring up old nationalistic images of the barbarian warlord, or attack into the ambush, so to speak, telling the story as straightforwardly action-packed and heroic without drawing direct attention to the Pan-German uses to which the story has been put. We’ll see, but this is a meta level of historical interest that could make Barbarians extra rewarding.

So there’s definitely some Hollywood stuff in here, even glimpsed in snatches in this very short teaser, but there’s also a lot of great-looking material. If the authenticity of the setting, costumes, and reconstruction of the battle are top notch and, very importantly, crafted to support a well-written—and, hopefully, accurate—story dramatized through good performances, it could more than outweigh the nonsense.

Barbarians has potential. Here’s hoping.

More if you’re interested

In the meantime—while we wait for a proper trailer and for the show itself—a few reading and viewing recommendations:

Wikipedia actually has a good list of primary and other ancient sources on the battle. Among the most detailed are the accounts of Tacitus, Cassius Dio, and Paterculus. Tacitus also wrote about the Germans more generally in Germania, sometimes regarded as the first ethnographic study. These are good reading. As I tell my students, ancient historians are still good to read because, unlike the authors of modern textbooks, they were obliged to be interesting.

The Battle that Stopped Rome, by Peter S. Wells is one of the authoritative books on the subject, with comprehensive but lucid explanations of the archaeological evidence that helped historians find the original battlefield and a good explanation of the significance of Arminius’s victory in Roman history.

The story of the location of the battlefield after almost 2,000 years is a fascinating one in itself. Here’s a short version of the story from Smithsonian.

Osprey Publishing has two excellent books on the subject: Teutoburg Forest, AD 9, by Michael McNalley, and Roman Soldier vs. Germanic Warrior: 1st Century AD, by Lindsay Powell, part of Osprey’s Combat series that offers detailed comparisons of the two belligerent sides and a series of illustrative case studies. Both books feature gorgeous, lavishly detailed paintings by Peter Dennis, along with the trademark maps, photographs, and informative sidebars of Osprey guides.

For a blast from the past, you can also watch the History Channel’s “Decisive Battles” episode on the Teutoburg Forest, recreated using the Rome: Total War gaming engine, on YouTube here.

A Time of Gifts

Patrick Leigh Fermor, author of A Time of Gifts, in Greece just after World War II

I'm not sure where I first heard of Patrick Leigh Fermor's book A Time of Gifts, but I'm grateful that I did. The first passage I ever read of it was a lavish and beautifully written description of his visit to Munich's Hofbräuhaus in January 1934, less than a year after Hitler came to power in Germany. Fermor so immediately evoked the time and place and atmosphere—from the appearance of the obese, beer-swilling masses to the sheer noise of eating and singing—that I had to read the rest. I finally started it over the weekend.

A Time of Gifts relates Fermor's adventures, at the age of 18, through Europe. Expelled from school, restless at the thought of a career in the army, and bored with formal education, Fermor decided to hike his way across Europe, alone. He borrowed a few pounds from friends, kitted himself out in London, and took a steamer to the Hook of Holland, where he landed in December 1933. His goal: Constantinople, at the other end of the continent.

I'm about halfway through. Fermor has traveled up the Rhine, cut diagonally across southern Germany via the Neckar and over the Danube, and has just arrived in Salzburg. It's a pure delight.

Fermor based this book on his memories, notes, letters, and diaries of 1933-34 but wrote and published it in the 1970s, and he brings that longer perspective to bear on a number of occasions. (Examples below.) After his trip, he did serve in the British military, fighting in special operations on Crete and living in caves between guerrilla strikes. His most famous exploit was kidnapping a German general. He went on to a life of further adventure and worldwide travel, but the war looms largest over A Time of Gifts. Many of the places and people he meets along the Rhine, Neckar, and Danube in the early 1930s would be irreversibly changed—if not destroyed—within a decade. 

This hindsight lends A Time of Gifts a powerful sense of nostalgia and pathos. Fermor's youthful exuberance, naivete, and awkwardness are humorous and fun to read about, and his willingness to laugh at himself immediately wins one over. But over and over, turning his reminiscences bittersweet, are the offhand comments, asides, and footnotes about what survived the war and what didn't. Sic transit gloria mundi. 

Below I've copied a few of my favorite passages of A Time of Gifts so far. Please do check out the whole book. I've enjoyed it immensely so far.

* * * * *

One fun thing, for me, is that I've been to a number of the places Fermor describes. Here he narrates his approach, moving upriver along the Rhine, to Cologne, the first sign of which, even today, from fifty miles off on the Autobahn, is the twin spires of the Kölner Dom:

After a first faraway glimpse, the two famous steeples grew taller and taller as the miles that separated us fell away. At last they commanded the cloudy plain as the spires of a cathedral should, vanishing when the outskirts of the city interposed themselves, and then, as I gazed at the crowding saints of the three Gothic doorways, sailing up into the evening again at close range. Beyond them indoors, although it was already too dark to see the colours of the glass, I knew I was inside the largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe. Except for the little constellation of tapers in the shadows of a side-chapel, everything was dim. Women knelt interspersed with nuns and the murmured second half of the Gegrüsset seist Du, Maria rose in answering chorus to the priest's initial solo; a discreet clatter of beads kept tally of the accumulating prayers. In churches with open spires like Cologne, one could understand how congregations thought their orisons had a better start than prayers under a dome where the syllables might flutter round for hours. With steeples they follow the uprush of lancets and make an immediate break for it.

Here Fermor, with wry wit, describes finding himself in church in Coblenz with a bunch of Nazis:

It was the shortest day of the year and signs of the seasons were becoming hourly more marked. Every other person in the streets was heading for home with a tall and newly felled fir-sapling across his shoulder, and it was under a mesh of Christmas decorations that I was sucked into the Liebfrauenkirche next day. The romanesque nave was packed and an anthem of great choral splendour rose from the gothic choir stalls, while the cauliflowering incense followed the plainsong across the slopes of the sunbeams. A Dominican in horn-rimmed spectacles delivered a vigorous sermon. A number of Brownshirts—I'd forgotten all about them for the moment—was scattered among the congregation, with eyes lowered and their caps in their hands. They looked rather odd. They should have been out in the forest, dancing round Odin and Thor, or Loki perhaps.

Fermor reaches another German town, one I know pretty well—Heidelberg—just before the new year. This is as perfect a description of the sensory joy of thawing out after a day in the snow as you can find:

This was the moment I longed for every day. Settling at a heavy inn-table, thawing and tingling, with wine, bread, and cheese handy and my papers, books and diary all laid out; writing up the day's doings, hunting for words in the dictionary, drawing, strangling with verses, or merely subsiding in a vacuous and contented trance while the snow thawed off my boots.

Fermor is at Zum roten Ochsen, the Red Ox, a famous Heidelberg Inn that's still in operation. He stays for a few days at the behest of the generous owners, Herr and Frau Spengel, and tours the town, University, and Heidelberg Castle with their son, Fritz:

Frau Spengel insisted that it was absurd to set off on New Year's Day; so I spent another twenty-four hours wandering about the town and castle and reading and writing and talking with this kind and civilized family. (My sojourn at the Red Ox, afterwards, was one of several high points of recollection that failed to succumb to the obliterating moods of war. I often thought of it.)

And appended to this paragraph is this footnote:

After writing these words and wondering whether I had spelt the name Spengel right—also to discover what had happened to the family—on a sudden impulse I sent a letter to the Red Ox, addressed "to the proprietor." A very nice letter from Fritz's son—he was born in 1939—tells me that not only my host and hostess are dead, but that Fritz was killed in Norway (where the first battalion of my own regiment at the time was heavily engaged) and buried at Trondheim in 1940, six years after we met. The present Herr Spengel is the sixth generation of the same family to own and run this delightful inn.

I could post many, many more, but I'll conclude with the longish chunk from Munich that first brought my attention to Fermor and his work:

I had expected a different kind of town, more like Nuremberg, perhaps, or Rothenburg. The neo-classical architecture in this boreal and boisterous weather, the giant boulevards, the unleavened pomp—everything struck chill to the heart. The proportion of Storm Troopers and S.S. in the streets was unusually high and still mounting and the Nazi salute flickered about the pavement like a tic douloureux. Outside the Feldherrnhalle, with its memorial to the sixteen Nazis killed in a 1923 street fight nearby, two S.S. sentries with fixed bayonets and black helmets mounted guard like figures of cast-iron and the right arms of all passers-by shot up as though in reflex to an electric beam. It was perilous to withhold this homage. One heard tales of uninitiated strangers being physically set-upon by zealots. Then the thoroughfares began to shrink. I caught a glimpse down a lane of Gothic masonry and lancets and buttresses and further on copper domes hung in convolutions of baroque. A Virgin on a column presided over a slanting piazza, one side of which was formed by a tall, Victorian-Gothic building whose great arched undercroft led to a confusion of lesser streets. In the heart of them stood a massive building; my objective, the Hofbräuhaus. A heavy arched door was pouring a raucous and lurching party of Brownshirts onto the trampled snow.

I was back in beer-territory. Halfway up the vaulted stairs a groaning Brownshirt, propped against the wall on a swastika'd arm, was unloosing, in a staunchless gush down the steps, the intake of hours. Love's labour lost. Each new storey radiated great halls given over to ingestion. In one chamber a table of S.A. men were grinding out Lore, Lore, Lore, scanning the slow beat with the butts of their mugs, then running the syllables in double time, like the carriages of an express: "UND—KOMMT—DER—FRÜHLingindastal! GRÜSS—MIR—DIE—LORenocheinmal". But it was certain civilian figures seated at meat that drew the glance and held it.

One must travel east for a hundred and eighty miles from the Upper Rhine and seventy north from the Alpine watershed to form an idea of the transformation that beer, in collusion with almost non-stop eating—meals within meals dovetailing so closely during the hours of waking that there is hardly an interprandial moment—can wreak on the human frame. Intestine strife and the truceless clash of intake and digestion wrecks many German tempers, twists brows into scowls and breaks out in harsh words and deeds.

The trunks of these feasting burghers were as wide as casks. The spread of their buttocks over the oak benches was not far short of a yard. They branched at the loins into thighs as thick as the torsos of ten-year-olds and arms on the same scale strained like bolsters at the confining serge. Chin and chest formed a single column, and each close-packed nape was creased with its three deceptive smiles. Every bristle had been cropped and shaven from their knobbly scalps. Except when five o'clock veiled them with shadow, surfaces as polished as ostriches' eggs reflected the lamplight. The frizzy hair of their wives was wrenched up from scarlet necks and pinned under slides and then hatted with green Bavarian trilbys and round one pair of elephantine shoulders a little fox stole was clasped. The youngest of this group, resembling a matinee idol under some cruel spell, was the bulkiest. Under tumbling blond curls his china blue eyes protruded from cheeks that might have been blown up with a bicycle pump, and cherry lips laid bare the sort of teeth that make children squeal. There was nothing bleary or stunned about their eyes. The setting may have reduced their size, but it keyed their glances to a sharper focus. Hands like bundles of sausages flew nimbly, packing in forkload on forkload of ham, salami, frankfurter, krenwurst and blutwurst and stone tankards were lifted for long swallows of liquid which sprang out again instantaneously on check and brow. They might have been competing with stop watches, and their voices, only partly gagged by the cheekfuls of good things they were grinding down, grew louder while their unmodulated laughter jarred the air in frequent claps. Pumpernickel and aniseed rolls and bretzels bridged all the slack moments but supplies  always  came through before a true lull threatened. Huge oval dishes, laden with Schweinebraten, potatoes, Sauerkraut, red cabbage and dumplings were laid in front of each diner. They were followed by colossal joints of meat—unclassifiable helpings which, when they were picked clean, shone on the scoured chargers like calves' pelvises or the bones of elephants. Waitresses with the build of weight-lifters and all-in wrestlers whirled this provender along and features dripped and glittered like faces at an ogre's banquet. But all too soon the table was an empty bone-yard once more, sound faltered, a look of bereavement clouded those small eyes and there was a brief hint of sorrow in the air. But succour was always at hand; beldames barged to the rescue at full gallop with new clutches of mugs and fresh plate-loads of consumer goods; and the damp Laestrygonian brows unpuckered again in a happy renewal of clamour and intake.

I strayed by mistake into a room full of S.S. officers, Gruppen- and Sturmbannführers, black from their lightning-flash-collars to the forest of tall boots underneath the table. The window embrasure was piled high with their skull-and-crossbones caps. I still hadn't found the part of this Bastille I was seeking, but at last a noise like the rush of a river guided me downstairs again to my journey's end.

The vaults of the great chamber faded into infinity through blue strata of smoke. Hobnails grated, mugs clashed and the combined smell of beer and bodies and old clothes and farmyards sprang at the newcomer. I squeezed in at a table full of peasants, and was soon lifting one of those masskrugs to my lips. It was heavier than a brace of iron dumb-bells, but the blond beer inside was cool and marvellous, a brooding, cylindrical litre of Teutonic myth. This was the fuel that had turned the berserk feeders upstairs into Zeppelins and floated them so far from heart's desire. The gunmetal-coloured cylinders were stamped with a blue HB conjoined under the Bavarian crown, like the foundry-mark on cannon. The tables, in my mind's eye, were becoming batteries where each gunner served a silent and recoil-less piece of ordnance which, trained on himself, pounded away in steady siege. Mass-gunfire! Here and there on the tables, with their heads in puddles of beer, isolated bombardiers had been mown down in their emplacements. The vaults reverberated with the thunder of a creeping barrage. There must have been over a thousand pieces engaged!—Big Berthas, Krupp's pale brood, battery on battery crashing at random or in salvoes as hands adjusted the elevation and traverse and then tightened on the stone trigger-guard. Supported by comrades, the walking wounded reeled through the battle smoke and a fresh gunner leaped into each place as it fell empty.

Hugely enjoyable book. Pick it up if you're at all interested in travel, Europe, or just a good memoir.