A Stranger to Myself. Willy Peter Reese.
From the journals of a young German soldier in the disastrous campaign in, and retreat from, Russia,1941-1944. He was a well-read student of literature, and his writing has a literary, almost flowery, style not usually seen in American war memoirs. But no style can obscure the dehumanizing effects of war, especially industrial war, mechanized war. By the end Willy cannot bear being home on leave; he feels simultaneously destroyed by the war, and only alive when he is in the war. His isolation is intensified for us as we read because not a single person is named or distinguished: not his vague girlfriends, not his fellow soldiers. None of the soldiers has a continuing identity ("sickly Erhard" or "that ignorant fellow from Silesia") from one incident to the next. They are just soldiers. The whole thing has a sort of floating fever-dream feel to it. That must be appropriate, for a book about man's greatest sickness. The author was missing and presumed killed in 1944.
