Wine, women and ignoring the genocide

Four years ago Pushkin Press published a wartime memoir by German army officer Felix Hartlaub about his time in occupied Paris. Interestingly, Clouds over Paris barely mentions the Resistance, Vichy politicians such as Laval and Petain or the French Jews. It is a fascinating account of how normal war
can seem.

Notes from Fuhrer HQ is remarkably similar. Also by Hartlaub, and brilliantly translated by Michael Hofmann, it is also an extraordinary evocation of the normality of war, from German officers chasing young women in Ukraine to the eerily peaceful world of the Balkans. It’s a world away from the brutal war reportage of Vasily Grossman. Hartlaub’s account of Ukraine is a world of fields, woods and “heavy-headed sunflowers taller than a man”, stretching for miles and miles. There are no Jews and no Soviet partisans. Just Ukrainian peasant women and German soldiers, swimming and flirting.

Like Hartlaub, the young German officers in these four short chapters are strangely innocent. They chase women, drink heavily and almost never talk about Nazism. One older officer says nonchalantly, “I don’t suppose I clapped eyes on Hitler more than two or three times”. “Of course,” he goes on, “a solution had to be found for the Jewish problem, but the methods adopted were really...” It’s as if the war is far, far away. “The shrinking of the front lines,” another says, “and the vanishing of the cities, basically all that doesn’t affect us...” And yet he was talking about 1943.

There’s something else which is very strange about this book. Hartlaub himself is curiously peripheral, almost invisible. Hofmann makes an interesting reference to Hartlaub’s “short and strangely weightless life”. He was last seen alive in April 1945 in Berlin, on his way to rejoin his unit in Potsdam. His body was never found and he was officially pronounced dead ten years later, in 1955. Coincidentally, he was first published to acclaim in Germany in the mid-1950s. Perhaps there was something about his writing which the Adenauer years found reassuring. No Nazis, no Jews, no genocide. It was as if ordinary Germans had nothing to feel guilty about.
A bit of swimming and flirting.
No massacres.