A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War: Russia, 1941-1944 | 
 enlarge | Author: Willy Peter Reese
Creators: Max Hastings, Stefan Schmitz, Michael Hofmann
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $23.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  29 reviews
Sales Rank: 180421
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.8 x 0.9
ISBN: 0374139784
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.54217092
EAN: 9780374139780
ASIN: 0374139784
Publication Date: November 2, 2005
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Product Description
A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War, Russia 1941-44 is the haunting memoir of a young German soldier on the Russian front during World War II. Willy Peter Reese was only twenty years old when he found himself marching through Russia with orders to take no prisoners. Three years later he was dead. Bearing witness to--and participating in--the atrocities of war, Reese recorded his reflections in his diary, leaving behind an intelligent, touching, and illuminating perspective on life on the eastern front. He documented the carnage perpetrated by both sides, the destruction which was exacerbated by the young soldiers' hunger, frostbite, exhaustion, and their daily struggle to survive. And he wrestled with his own sins, with the realization that what he and his fellow soldiers had done to civilians and enemies alike was unforgivable, with his growing awareness of the Nazi policies toward Jews, and with his deep disillusionment with himself and his fellow men.
An international sensation, A Stranger to Myself is an unforgettable account of men at war.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 24 more reviews...
 War is Hell. Blah blah blah November 9, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I wanted a horrifying memoir of war. SOmething that would haunt me for years. Maybe my expectations were too high. Sure there are scenes of people cutting off feet so they cat get new boots, but I'm from Minnesota. I've spent months grabbing lost gloves from bus stops. If I was desperate for new boots I seriously doubt I'd have a problem with taking them off a dead guy; although as dead people on Minneapolis streets are a rare commodity this theory has yet to be tested.
Beyond that it's a lot purple prose and flower arrangements. Willy Reese might have grown into a competant writer had he lived. He might have mined this experience for some of the most horrifying novels of the 20th century. It could have been an All Quiet on the Western Front or a The Naked and the Dead: 50th Anniversary Edition but instead it's just a book about a guy who is in a war. He doesn't like it. He's not sure if he believes in G-d. He's horrified about most things.
And there are several false notes like when he breaks down crying toward the end of the book. There's nothing in that crying jag that seems genuine since this guy has presumably been at war for years. If he's going to cry about getting rescued or seeing his friends die he would have pulled that move early. It's pure literary flummory to gives us tears at such a late hour. SOunds more like he's trying to impress some woman with his sensitivity than him actually being at war.
So it's pretty much a badly written book by a guy who was one of the cogs in the machine of the worst crime of the 20th century. Boohoo. He's dead. Good.
 Deeply moved October 31, 2008
This book is very special for myself since it is really an extraordinary literature piece. Neither a tactic recording, nor a simple diary, but a deep and sharp introspection refer to an eternal topic: how war destroy an ordinary man. His text is florid but brutal and unbelievably precise. However, it's a very personal account, so my reading experience is also very personal, touching into my heart, and make me thinking about this world which never really gets peace.
If you are trying to find any military detail, dates, names, units, strategy or tactics, please just skip this book. If you like poetry, or you are fanscinated by pondering humanity and life, war and peace, you will be astonished at his brilliant prose, vivid description, then sigh for his disillusionment, painful soul, and a young, talent but ended prematurly life. I recommend it as a great anti-war book and an unusual precious work.
 A Stranger to Himself, But a Friend to the Rest of Us June 10, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Of all the countless memiors written by German veterans of the Eastern Front, A STRANGER TO MYSELF is the most unique I've yet read. It distinguishes itself from the "field gray flood" of nonfiction books on the Russian campaign in two very distinct ways: first, the author, Willy Peter Reese, did not live to see his scattered notes, many scribbled by the light of a cigarette, get published; he was killed in action in Russia in 1944. Second, Reese was not writing a mere litany of combat experiences and behind-the-lines hijinks but rather a deeply introspective, quasi-metaphysical self-portrait of a thoughtful young man in the midst of a war he neither agreed with nor understood.
Willy Reese seems to have been a rather tortured soul well before he was drafted into Hitler's army - he had a tendency to brooding and seems to have been somewhat anguished about the meaning of life, not to mention oversensitive to its vulgarity and cruelty. The military service did not sit well with him, and he nursed a deep disgust for the Nazis and their cult of anti-intellectualism and brutality. By the time he got to Russia he seems to have given up on the human race, which made what he saw and experienced there all the more horrifying for him.
Roughly 32 million people died on the Eastern Front between 1941 - 1944, the majority of them Russian civilians, and Reese himself survived long enough to see enough carnage for 1,000 lifetimes. He expected war to be horrible; what he did not expect was that he himself would willingly perpetrate some of this horror, and learn to do so with a smile on his face. Such was his transformation, from vaguely pacifistic poet to stone-faced hunter of his own species, that he came to feel that he had changed into someone that he did not know - a stranger to himself. Trapped between who he had been and who he was becoming, his only release ("spiritual morphine") came in writing down his experiences, notes which, after his death in combat, his mother would later organize into this book.
American war literature tends to be very straightforward, and so it's no surprise a lot of people feel that Reese was a pretentious pseudo-intellectual trying to impress his audience with his vocabulary and intellect. After all, many of the book's passages are taken up with philosophical contemplations of the meaning of existence, the human soul, the relationship of man to nature, and the cycle of life and death. And Reese is the sort who doesn't step over a rock, he picks it up and contemplates its place in the Scheme of Things, sometimes with a seriousness that may seem silly to a (further) Westerner. This will be very annoying to a lot of readers who want their "war" books heavy on the "war" and light on the half-mystical philosophizing, but what readers and critics must understand is that Reese was merely a product of his times and of his country. German education heavily stressed philosophy, history, mythology, and classic literature, and Germans as a rule have a very deep connection to nature. This tends to effect their writing, and it deeply effected Reese's. You can love it or hate it (or something in between), but you shouldn't view it as affected - it was quite genuine.
A STRANGER TO MYSELF is not without its gripping moments. Like one of his influences, Ernst Juenger, Reese often digresses into turgid rambling, but just like Juenger, these tedious passages almost always give way to beautifully written and vivid descriptions - when Reese describes the horrible fury of the Russian winters, the plagues of lice, the stench of decomposing corpses, the terrible exhaustion and thirst of a long march in the Ukrainian sun, the pathos of a dead soldier "whose rigored hands refused to yield his rifle", you feel these things as certainly as if you were experiencing them yourself.
A STRANGER TO MYSELF is an important book, one which approaches an unbelievably savage conflict from the perspective of a man who was quite aware of what the war was doing to him, but powerless to stop it. And that theme of powerlessness, of being swept along the currents of Fate by forces he did not understand, is part of what makes the book such a poignant and necessary read. The Eastern Front was a hell that only one in four of the German soldiers who served in lived to talk about, and while Reese did not survive, his voice rings very loud indeed.
This book was not written for entertainment February 18, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
This was a very interesting book that was written by an average soldier that had an above average intellect. This young man would have been "somebody" if he had survived the war. Unfortunately, he did not and these pages show his view of the war in the East. The book itself does jump around, but this can be understood since it is written by a 20 year old that is trying to understand something that can't be understood. War. Take it for what it is. These pages were written for himself in order to help him find his sanity. This should be taken into account before reviewing the item. You may not like its format or lack of combat detail, but it is about a soldier of intellect trying to search his soul. It is a moving book if you read it with an open mind. Indeed, put yourself in his boots and out of your comfortable armchair and how would you have done?
Viele Gruesse!
Soulful and poetic February 8, 2008
A young soldiers diary of his years on the Russian front. Ending near the time of his death it recounts the price humanity pays for war.
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