Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters from the Eastern Front, ed. Konrad H. Jarausch

Abstract

A child is born in August 1941. A man dies in January 1942. He is the father of the child. They will never meet, because the world is at war. But both bear the same name: Konrad Jarausch. Years later, the son will examine what is left of his father: about 350 Feldpostbriefe, letters from the war which had been kept in an old leather suitcase. He will select, comment and edit them. The result is the book reviewed here. The author of these letters, Konrad Jarausch, born on 12 December 1900 in Berlin, was a typical representative of the German intelligentsia. A gifted student, he passed his Notreifeprüfung in the last year of the Great War, and went on to study German, History and Protestant Theology, from 1918 to 1925. Having passed his final exams and been awarded a doctorate he was appointed director of a centre for student teachers in Magdeburg. His wife, Lotte Petri, whom he married in 1933, was also a religious education teacher. They both represented the Protestant, Prussian and intellectual milieu that sympathised with the DNVP (German National Peoples’ Party) in the 1920s.