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:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 116434
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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Condition: Thank you for looking at Bookscorner1. May have shelf wear and remainder mark.
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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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 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.
 A German version of Red Badge of Courage. January 2, 2008
Ok, this book initially was slow going. Also, it was also unlike any of the German memoirs of the war such as the Forgotten Soldier. Reese was probably much too thoughtful for a regular infantry grunt in the German Army. Also, he mentions his comrades in only two or three entries. Reese talks about the inhumanity of war in Russia. Not only does he describe his unit's description of their brutality, he relates how war in general is inhumane to both civilians and the soldiers that wage it. There are some biting descriptions in this book of retreats that cost the Germans greatly. The loss of life is tremedous, and eventually the soldiers become desensitized to the brutality and loss of life. They make jokes when poking at dead partisans hanging from some trees.
This book reminds me of the Red Badge of Courage. The authors are both literate and highly sensitive people. However, for those interested in the conflict between Red Russia and Nazi Germany, this might be a less than satisfactory read. The loss of Reese in this conflict is sad, and makes a tragic ending, as he loved life.
"war as an aesthetic problem" January 2, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
More literary than military, more abstract than concrete, Willy Peter Reese's memoir of his experiences on the Eastern Front offers a window into the soul of a man as it and he are crushed by the brutalities of modern war.
Reese provides few details about the tangibles of the war. No comrades or units are named. No dates are given. Few geographical locations are mentioned. Battles are described in the vaguest of terms; the reader doesn't encounter 88s or Tigers, doesn't hear about tactics. For these things, we have to read Guy Sajer or Otto Carius. Instead, Reese is interested in something more subtle, more indefinable, more psychological: as he puts it, "war as an aesthetic problem," specifically, the problem of describing HOW a man experiences war, not solely WHAT he experiences -- how he perceives war and describes it, how his mind, body, and soul change.
As such, the book won't be for everyone, certainly not those who prefer to read about war's technical aspects. Still, Reese offers a unique perspective on the Eastern Front, on World War II, and warfare in general. At times difficult to penetrate, at others repetitive, it is nevertheless worth reading.
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