Perekop is a battlefield and passage into the Crimean peninsula in the account of Hans Reiter’s wartime advance. The place is defined not only by fighting but by its unnamed villages, cleared streets, and the bodily disorientation Reiter experiences there; the campaign’s forward movement unfolds alongside his private desire for a bullet that would end his suffering.

Setting and Advance

After crossing the Dnieper, the division pressed into the Crimean peninsula. Reiter fought at Perekop and in several villages nearby, but he never learned the villages’ names. He knew them instead through their dirt streets, which he walked while clearing away corpses. The blankness of the place names contrasts with the physical specificity of the work: the advance is mapped through bodies and streets rather than through a lasting geography.

Civilians and the Work of Conquest

In the villages, Reiter ordered elderly people, women, and children to go inside and not come out. The scene gives the military occupation a daily, coercive form: civilian life is restricted by a command issued in the wake of combat, while the dead are removed from the streets. Perekop is therefore not simply a line on the campaign’s route; it is a place where the consequences of battle are handled and where the vulnerable are made to withdraw from view.

Reiter’s Body and Private Despair

The fighting and its aftermath are accompanied by episodes of dizziness. When Reiter stood up suddenly, a black fog rose before his eyes, flecked with granulated dots like meteors. Yet these meteors behaved strangely: they seemed not to move at all. The image turns a bodily symptom into an unsettled perception, interrupting the apparent clarity of a military advance.

At times Reiter threw himself into attacks on enemy positions without taking precautions. This conduct earned him a reputation for daring and bravery, but the narration distinguishes that public impression from his private purpose: he was seeking a bullet that would bring peace to his heart. His apparent courage thus carries a concealed wish for death. During one night in the campaign, he discussed suicide with Wilke, whose joking remark about good Christians and suicide left Reiter wondering whether it concealed a truth. The exchange does not resolve his despair; it gives it a moment of indirect expression.

Narrative Significance

Perekop’s significance lies in the contrast between the division’s outward progress and Reiter’s inward collapse. The advance continues through the peninsula, but the villages remain unnamed and the landscape is registered through corpses, orders, dizziness, and a wish for death. The motionless meteors sharpen that contrast: amid a campaign organized around movement, Reiter’s perception briefly freezes. The place becomes a threshold in the wartime narrative where conquest, civilian vulnerability, and the soldier’s private despair occupy the same ground.