Suicidal ideation

Suicidal ideation is a persistent but largely private condition in Hans Reiter’s wartime life, turning combat bravery into something more troubling than courage. During visits home, he thinks that life has become meaningless and considers suicide, but does not settle on a course; later, on the Crimean front, he repeatedly risks his life because he hopes to be killed. His thoughts are shaped by wartime fatalism, yet the narrative makes clear that the danger he faces is not only imposed by battle: at times, he actively seeks it.

Formation During Leave

While stationed in Romania, Reiter obtains two leaves to visit his parents. He spends time on the rocky shore and walking through the countryside, often reaching the diminished estate of Baron Von Zumpe, where the old gamekeeper’s shrugs offer little clarity about the war or the absent baroness. He also spends long stretches with his ten-year-old sister, Lotte, who adores him. Her devotion makes him laugh, but also intensifies his sadness.

In bed at his parents’ home, listening to them sleep, Reiter is overwhelmed by thoughts that everything is meaningless. He is careful not to make a decision, partly because he believes he would end up shot. His reasoning about suicide is tangled with the conditions of war: he imagines that people postpone it for convenience, leave their fate to others, and wait for what seems inevitable. The narrator notes that Reiter does not know that suicide rates are in fact highest during wartime. His thoughts therefore arise not from a settled theory but from a young soldier’s incomplete understanding of death, fear, and the future.

Seeking Death in Combat

On his leaves, Reiter also travels through Berlin in search of Hugo Halder, unsuccessfully. After returning to the front, however, his search for an end to his distress takes a different form. In villages near Perekop, he helps clear corpses and orders elderly people, women, and children to remain indoors. At times he feels dizzy and sees a dark haze speckled with points of light. In other moments, he throws himself into attacks without taking precautions. His companions interpret this conduct as daring and bravery; the narration gives it a more intimate explanation: he wants a bullet to bring peace to his heart.

Reiter’s conversation with Wilke makes the conflict between despair and the social rules of soldiering explicit. Wilke jokes that good Christians masturbate but do not commit suicide. Before falling asleep, Reiter wonders whether the joke contains a hidden truth. The reflection does not resolve his crisis: the narrative immediately states that his determination remains unchanged.

Repeated Exposure to Death

During the fighting around Chornomorske, Reiter risks his life at least three times. At a brick fortification near Kirovske, the company has no mortar rounds and calls for volunteers to storm the position. Reiter steps forward first. When fire comes from the fort and others drop or hesitate, he keeps running, despite bullets passing close to him. Voss pulls him down, but Reiter later rises and fires toward the position until soldiers on the other flank destroy it with grenades. The episode makes his willingness to face immediate danger concrete: he does not merely accept the risks of battle but advances into them.

His exposure continues in the assault on Chornomorske. After the first attack is repulsed, Reiter’s battalion advances in the next wave as the division’s artillery targets Soviet machine-gun positions. Reiter thinks he will die, and the nearby sea strengthens that expectation. The soldiers pass through a field and a garden, where an old man watches from a small window, then kill five Soviet soldiers dragging a field gun and continue forward. In this scene, the expectation of death is not an abstraction: it accompanies Reiter’s movement through a specific battlefield, even as the attack carries him onward.

Meaning and Limits of the Pattern

The recurring ideation places Reiter’s celebrated battlefield conduct in uneasy contrast with his private purpose. He earns a reputation for courage, yet the narration shows that at least some of this apparent fearlessness comes from a wish to die. Wilke’s words briefly interrupt that impulse by making suicide a subject of conversation, but Reiter’s resolve survives the exchange. The distinction between bravery and self-endangerment remains unstable: the same action can serve the military objective and express a personal desire for death.

The evidence establishes recurrence and persistence, not a final resolution. Reiter does not carry out suicide in these episodes; instead, he repeatedly places himself where he may be killed and continues fighting. That pattern connects the intimacy of the family home, where Lotte’s affection deepens his sadness, to the public violence of the front, where danger becomes a possible answer to it. The war supplies the circumstances and the means of risk, while Reiter’s thoughts give that risk a private, self-destructive significance.