The Return of the Military Memoir: The Bundeswehr Deployment to Afghanistan and the Re-Emergence of a Literary Form

Andrew Plowman

doi:10.3828/mlo.v0i0.283

Abstract

This article examines the re-emergence of the military memoir in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) since the deployment of the Bundeswehr, the armed forces of the FRG, to Afghanistan as part of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in 2001. The resurgence of a literary form associated in the 1950s with the apologetics of officers of the Wehrmacht, Hitler’s army, and the construction of a usable Second World War past is striking. The article locates this phenomenon in a gap that has been growing since the mid-2000s between official claims about the deployment and soldiers’ perceptions of the reality on the ground. It also reads memoirs by Achim Wohlgethan, Heike Groos, Andreas Timmermann-Levanas and Robert Sedlatzek-Muller as examples of the soldiers’ dominant narratives – of the exercise of military skills and of trauma – to emerge from ISAF. These recent memoirs resemble more closely the texts by soldiers from other NATO forces and they offer a partial normalisation of a form with a problematic history in the FRG. In the face of ongoing suspicion on the part of German scholars, the article draws on a tradition of English-language scholarship to argue also for a normalisation of critical approach. What is needed is a method able to relate the texts to international scholarship about the form while remaining sensitive to the distinctive way in which, against the background of the form’s problematic history in Germany, they embody key values of the founding ideal of Bundeswehr of the soldier as a ‘Citizen in Uniform’. Tweetable Abstract: The return of the military memoir in German suggests the normalisation of a difficult form; critical approaches are urgently required to explore this.

Highlights

Beginning with Achim Wohlgethan’s Endstation Kabul: Als deutscher Soldat in Afghanistan (Destination Kabul: A German Soldier in Afghanistan, 2008), the late 2000s witnessed a proliferation of memoirs by soldiers of the Bundeswehr, the armed forces of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), about their participation in the NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan after 2001
A second cluster of texts features narratives of trauma, therapy and political action on behalf of veterans affected by their experiences of the deployment: Heike Groos’s Ein schöner Tag zum Sterben: Als Bundeswehrärztin in Afghanistan (A Good Day to Die: A Bundeswehr Doctor in Afghanistan, 2009) deals with four tours of duty in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2007 and their aftermath and Andreas Timmermann-Levanas’s Die reden – Wir sterben: Wie deutsche Soldaten zu Opfern der deutschen Politik werden (They Talk – We Die: How German Soldiers Become Victims of German Politics, 2010) covers service in Sarajevo in 1999 as well as Kunduz in 2006
The discussion of Timmermann-Levanas’s text touches on Robert Sedlatzek-Müller’s Soldatenglück: Mein Leben nach dem Überleben (The Luck of Soldiers: Living after Surviving, 2012), which draws on elements of all the earlier narratives in its story of the author’s service near Sarajevo in the 1990s and in Kabul in 2002, and his battle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)