German-Soviet War

The German-Soviet War is presented through Hans Reiter’s experience as an infantryman in the German advance into Soviet territory. Its significance lies not only in the campaign’s movements across the landscape, but in the narrative’s persistent uncertainty over what the soldiers see and who is responsible for the destruction around them.

The invasion and the 79th Division

The attack on the Soviet Union began on June 22, 1941. The 79th Division was attached to the 11th German Army; a few days later, its advance troops crossed the Prut and entered combat alongside Romanian forces, whose fighting spirit exceeded German expectations. The 11th Army had fewer human and material resources than the major formations of Army Group South and faced difficult terrain and a scarcity of roads. It also lacked the element of surprise that had favored other army groups.

The division was light infantry, moving under its own power, with mules carrying heavy equipment while soldiers marched and fought. The account emphasizes the physical form of this advance: repeated marches and forced marches rather than a rapid, mechanized sweep. The campaign’s pace is measured through the division’s successive crossings and the exhaustion of its men.

The advance across Ukraine

Reiter’s division crossed the Prut, fought across the steppes and hills of Bessarabia, crossed the Dniester, and reached the outskirts of Odessa. It continued onward as Romanian troops halted, engaging retreating Soviet forces before crossing the Bug. The route of the advance is thus rendered as a chain of rivers, battles, and movement deeper into Ukrainian territory.

The soldiers passed burned villages and granaries, while woods in the surrounding fields suddenly caught fire. The account sets these dark, burning woods against the seemingly immense wheat fields, making the advance’s destruction part of the landscape through which the men move. The fires recur as a question the soldiers cannot answer, rather than as an explained military action.

Uncertainty and the fires

Reiter asks who is setting the woods alight. Wilke, Neitzke, Kruse, and Sergeant Lemke have no explanation. The men deny that their unit set those fires, even as they acknowledge that they burned or bombed villages elsewhere. They speculate that another German battalion or a sapper unit may have encountered resistance, but none has seen German or Soviet soldiers in the area who could account for the blaze.

This uncertainty does not undo the surrounding evidence of destruction: villages have been burned, granaries destroyed, and the woods are visibly on fire. Instead, the scene separates what the soldiers can identify from what remains unknown. The division advances through a landscape altered by war while its men watch a fire whose cause they cannot establish.

Narrative significance

The campaign is told as a sequence of military facts, but its emphasis falls as well on the limits of those facts. Reiter’s unit has a defined route and role; the fires beside that route resist attribution. The contrast makes the war legible as both organized movement and unresolved violence, without supplying a single explanation for every act of destruction.

Elsewhere in the novel, the memory of war appears in very different contexts. The Swabian cultural promoter recalls meeting the young Benno von Archimboldi in a Frisian town just after the war, and describes the social and economic wounds that remained. Later, Archimboldi is imagined as a World War II deserter still on the run, an image invoked during speculation about his possible Nobel candidacy. These references place the German-Soviet campaign within a longer afterlife of wartime experience and public memory, without making the novel’s other histories interchangeable with it.