To Die In Spring
Ratings1
Average rating4
15
Ratings1
Average rating4
"The lunacy of the final months of World War II, as experienced by a young German soldier. Distant, silent, often drunk, Walter Urban is a difficult man to have as a father. But his son -- the narrator of this slim, harrowing novel -- is curious about Walter's experiences during World War II, and so makes him a present of a blank notebook in which to write down his memories. Walter dies, however, leaving nothing but the barest skeleton of a story on those pages, leading his son to fill in the gaps himself, rightly or wrongly, with what he can piece together of his father's early life. This, then, is the story of Walter and his dangerously outspoken friend Friedrich Caroli, seventeen-year-old trainee milkers on a dairy farm in northern Germany who are tricked into volunteering for the army during the spring of 1945: the last, and in many ways the worst, months of the war. The men are driven to the point of madness by what they experience, and when Friedrich finally deserts his post, Walter is forced to do the unthinkable. Told in a remarkable impressionistic voice, focusing on the tiny details and moments of grotesque beauty that flower even in the most desperate situations, Ralf Rothmann's To Die in Spring "ushers in the pos -- [Günter] Grass era with enormous power" (Die Zeit)." --
"The lunacy of the final months of World War II, as experienced by a young German soldier"--
Reviews with the most likes.
A poignant if unsympathetic view of World War II's final days in the European theater told through the eyes of a cautious young German man and his less cautious friend, both exerted to join the Waffen-SS in its final, doomed efforts against Russian and American forces, their experiences therein impacting each of their respective fates. Rothmann's writing is by turns terse and impactful with Whiteside's translation establishing a taut narrative rhythm, the seemingly smallest details magnified to searing effect. Not all horror comes at the behest of human mortality as the author is equally interested in the terror of a bomb impacting but failing to kill, debauchery amidst military defeat, alongside the more mundane streams of individual life being diverted into the river rapids of history and the churning effect those events had on a citizenry who had [or had not] believed in vain that they were serving some grander purpose than folly. I found the ending of the novel, as told from the point of view of the main German soldier's son following his father's death in old age, to be particularly sharp, narratively mirroring one of his father's journeys but which becomes a historical knell resounding through generations hence.
