wounds were so severe that they had been unable to move at all. Only one, a German, in despair at slowly dying of starvation yet nursing hopes of being found if he could only hang on a little longer, had resorted to a desperate measure: he took the only thing left of his meager rations, a cube of condensed pea soup, dissolved it in his own urine, and drank it.
Kurt had arranged to have Hasenclever assigned to his unit, so in the midst of the war, even as they were deployed in France, eastern European Galicia, and the Balkans, the two imagined the directions German literature might take after hostilities ended. Riding the Orient Express back from Macedonia on leave, Kurt would stop off in Vienna to visit Kraus, a loud and consistent critic of the conflict—one of the few among German-language intellectuals of the time.
It’s hard to fathom the enthusiasm with which Germany greeted the outbreak of war. In an act of mass self-delusion, Germans across the political spectrum believed this common call to sacrifice would help Wilhelmine society bridge its many differences. Almost no one foresaw the duration of the stalemate or the scale of the slaughter. Shortly after its end, one of Kurt’s authors, Joseph Roth, declared the war a “great annihilative nothingness.”
The Kurt Wolff Verlag would be the only major house in Germany to refuse to publish pro-war literature. But like most of his countrymen, Kurt at the outset seemed open to victory by arms and tried to suppress his doubts. In December 1914 he wrote from Ghent:
I drive into the darkness and light my pipe. I think about my conversations with the military authorities, of the report of my female spy this morning, of the war and how we will win a victory over France. And suddenly all those with whom I so often, so bitterly, argued over these past months seem to be right: We must continue on over the rubble of these countries, and there must be misery and distress among our enemies and in enemy territory, and they must feel this bitter, unrelenting war, feel it until the hunger for peace is so great that the cry for the war’s end becomes so loud and penetrating, and so unanimously does the wailing rise, from Liège to Reims, from Namur to Lille, from Brussels to Calais, and also in the east, that it mingles with the groans of the exhausted in the trenches at the front, all of it swelling into a hurricane, into a raging, incessant sound that will ring in their ears in Bordeaux, Le Havre, and Petersburg, until they give up.
The young officer, pictured here, seemed to be writing for an audience beyond my grandmother, who had moved in with her mother in Darmstadt and to whom he sent his dispatches. In November 1914 he noted that a British torpedo had roared up the beach at Ostend, Flanders, ripping a hole in the dining room of the Majestic Palace, a hotel then billeting German officers, killing two as they ate their breakfast. The attack held two lessons, concluded Kurt, who noted that the Majestic Palace was built by British investors: “The British simply assume that German officers take their breakfast at only the finest hotels; and the blood of German officers seems to be of more value to them than British capital.”
But as the war progressed, his diary began to betray disillusionment. The first hint came that same month while he was still in Belgium. “I do not know if the weather has made me melancholy,” he wrote. “But all at once I found myself in the bleakest, darkest mood as I reflected on this country and its history. What great potential lies in the fertile soil here, what riches were accumulated from trade by sea and over land, from fishing, from the breeding of horses, cattle, flowers, lacemaking, and much else—and over and over again, this land and its people have suffered from war. And now this war has impoverished everything once more, a war that the Germans have delivered to their country.”
In December he wrote that he had been reading War and Peace:
I don’t want to go off on a literary digression here, but only quote a passage I’ve read many times, and which, it seems to me, should serve as an epigraph for the hundreds of books that now appear, or will appear, touching off millions of reviews. . . . : “Rostov knew from experience, from Austerlitz and the campaign of 1807, that men always lie when describing military exploits, as he himself had done in recounting them; furthermore, he had experience enough to know that what happens in war is entirely different from how we imagine it or relate it to others. . . . But he didn’t express his thoughts, for in such matters he had also gained experience. He knew that this tale redounded to the glory of our arms, and so one had to pretend not to doubt it.”
And then: “I must relate a story here, to free myself of it, of what unfolded on January 17, 1915. It is one story of many. Such things and occurrences are slowly but surely destroying my nerves. They (taken together) seem almost to have a more lasting effect on me than thoughts of many of the other horrors that war brings.”
The incident he recounted took place in a military courtroom presided over by a German judge. A Belgian district administrator reported that a stable boy had witnessed a soldier in a feldgrau (field-gray) uniform, with regimental number 207 stitched on his epaulettes, steal a farmer’s horse.
“Sir, I must warn you against using the word ‘steal’ when referring to a member of the German army,” the military judge said.
“In Germany this may be called something else,” the Belgian bureaucrat replied evenly. “Here in Belgium we call it ‘stealing.’”
At that, the judge ordered the district administrator jailed, and Kurt privately renders his judgment:
When I think of isolated incidents like these, and what thousands of decent Belgians living among such barbarians will think and say, and swallow and swallow, and hold on to, hold on to . . . I find it hard to take. . . . I nurse feelings of shame while walking down the street the next day . . . [at] all those who accept these things as standard operating procedure, who cheerfully, blithely, confidently, with a sense of relativism and the heady feelings of the conqueror, stride steadily and proudly along, thinking that everything is just as it is, as it can be, as it must be, as it should be.
Out on the town seven weeks later to celebrate his twenty-eighth birthday, Kurt and three comrades capered about the alleys and squares of Ghent. Eventually they came upon the Gravensteen, the castle of the counts of Flanders, where they woke the guards to be let in.
We climbed up on the ramparts and looked down on the beautiful, sleeping city, whose sons are yonder on the Yser, with no connection to, no news of, their fathers, who have been left behind, bitter and full of grief. . . . But at least this beautiful, imposing city with its proud cathedrals still stands. . . . Here it smells not of war, fire, destruction, and putrefaction but of home and stone, water and fish, healthy, alive, with the promise of spring.
What will spring bring—? The end of the Battle of the Nations, the great Peace of the Nations? It’s strange that this age of great deeds has also become a time of eternal question marks. . . . Why, when, how much longer, for what?
World War I has been called a conflict “that sloshed back and forth like waves in a basin: the trigger lay in the East, the escalation in the West, but the greatest destruction ultimately occurred, again, in the East.” In April 1915, Kurt found his unit redeployed to Galicia, where this picture was taken, for a spring offensive against Russian forces.
From Gorlice, southeast of Krakow, he devoted a telegraphic entry to what he called “a day in the war”:
Dust, columns of troops, supply trains, Russian prisoners, dust, shouting: Polish, Russian, Austrian, German, Hungarian, Czech, dust, columns marching, columns at rest, mobile messes, dust, vehicles in motion, wheelbarrows, artillery columns, broken-down vehicles, abandoned bivouac sites, fresh graves with and without crosses, the entrails of slaughtered cattle. . . .
Overturned
