Volkssturm

Volkssturm, the German wartime formation represented in the novel through former soldiers in an Allied prisoner-of-war camp, is given no extended institutional history. Its significance comes instead from a personal encounter: one former member, first known to Hans Reiter as Zeller, offers a restrained account of loss and postwar renewal, then identifies himself as Leo Sammer and casts doubt on his own testimony. The episode turns the remnants of the formation into a study of how war persists in names, stories, and concealed pasts.

Former soldiers in the camp

After the war, Reiter is held in the Ansbach prisoner-of-war camp, where he keeps apart from other German prisoners. The man sleeping beside him is about fifty, a former Volkssturm soldier who has grown a beard and speaks gently. By day, he often keeps company with two other former Volkssturm soldiers, with whom he walks and eats. Reiter sees him writing in pencil on scraps of paper, which he carefully puts away. Asked what he is doing, the man explains that he is trying to set down his thoughts, though it is not easy.

The man gradually begins speaking with Reiter at night. He says that his wife died when the Russians took Küstrin, their home, but that he holds no grudge: war, he says, is war, and after it ends each side should forgive the other and start anew. When Reiter asks how such a beginning could happen, he answers that it must start from zero, with joy and imagination. The repeated private conversations contrast with his quiet dignity in the camp’s daytime routines, giving his account the form of a tentative, intimate exchange rather than a public declaration.

Zeller and the problem of identity

The apparent steadiness of Zeller’s account does not last. As the camp’s visitors conduct checks and suspected war criminals are removed, he becomes increasingly nervous. His speech changes during their next approach through the alphabet: at night he talks rapidly, whispers, and imagines scenes in disordered succession. Reiter sees a growing division between the man’s composed public manner and his disturbed nocturnal speech, though he cannot determine what lies behind it.

One night, the man tells Reiter that his name is not Zeller but Sammer, and argues that this means he need not appear before the interrogators when they next come. He then names himself Leo Sammer and explicitly qualifies his earlier account: some things he has told Reiter are true and some are not. The revelation does not settle which details are reliable. Rather, the former soldier’s changing name and partial admission leave the reader with a testimony that is both a source of wartime memory and a warning against treating it as a complete, secure record.

Narrative significance

The Volkssturm soldiers are presented not through military action but through the afterlife of service: captivity, companionship, private writing, and the effort to speak about a war that has ended without making its past clear. Zeller’s appeal to forgiveness and a fresh start sits beside the camp’s checks for suspected war criminals and his own eventual retreat from a stable identity. The contrast makes reconciliation feel neither simple nor fully accomplished.

Sammer’s admission also links the formation’s presence in the novel to its broader interest in testimony. Reiter receives a vivid account of a dead wife and a proposed beginning from zero, but the speaker himself announces that the account mixes truth and untruth. The episode therefore preserves the human weight of the postwar encounter without resolving its contradictions; the Volkssturm remains visible through the uncertain speech of those who survived it.