Kursk

Kursk is the battlefield where Leo Sammer’s son was killed, a fact that anchors Sammer’s changing account of his past in a specific family loss. It is not described as a battlefield scene; instead, Kursk enters the narrative through recollection, as a name bound to grief and to the work Sammer says he undertook in wartime Poland.

The Son’s Death

When Sammer, initially posing as Zeller, speaks of his family, he tells Reiter that his son died in the Battle of Kursk. The same account places the deaths of Sammer’s daughter and two young grandchildren in a bombing raid on Hamburg, establishing a family devastated across separate wartime events.

Sammer’s Account

Sammer later identifies himself as Leo Sammer and admits that some of what he has said is true and some is not. He clarifies that he was never in the Volkssturm and that his wife is alive, but confirms the central loss: his son died at Kursk. He remembers him as intelligent, serious, athletic, and fond of reading, qualities that make the battlefield death a personal absence rather than merely a military fact.

Loss and Wartime Administration

Sammer says he was an assistant director of an organization responsible for supplying workers to the Reich when he received news of his son’s death. He says that the news made him stop believing in the war, while his wife began suffering constant migraines. He nevertheless continued working, explaining that his methodical nature and tenacity helped him push forward; he says that work became a way to forget his misfortunes.

His account connects Kursk not only to bereavement but also to the machinery of wartime administration. After his promotion to head of the organization, its workload tripled: he had to supply workers to German factories and oversee the bureaucracy in a Polish town being Germanized. The contrast between the distant battlefield where his son died and the office where Sammer continued to organize labor makes private grief and institutional service coexist uneasily in his story.

A Loss That Returns

During a later night of foreboding, Sammer rides through town and falls asleep in the back seat of his car. He dreams that his dead son is shouting onward, a brief return that gives the remembered death a continuing presence in Sammer’s narration. Kursk remains the fixed point around which his claims of duty, endurance, and disbelief turn: it is the loss he cannot work away, even as he describes work as his means of forgetting.