Despite war and destruction, the letters often refer to nature and living conditions - something that is universal to all invading armies, and is interpreted as the expression of a longing for normality. In most cases, comments in the Red Army letters on the weather and first impressions made by the surroundings also seem to fulfil two functions. Firstly, they describe important survival conditions, and secondly, the soldier indicates - generally subconsciously - that he has retained civic ways of perceiving, or at least still recalls their structure. Peter Knoch spoke of a ‘contrasting experience of destruction and nature’ which belongs to daily life at the front.10
During their advance on German territory, the early melting snow with its inhospitable dampness and then the beautiful spring of 1945 offered the soldier suitable writing topics. Often in passing, sometimes in comparison, he would comment on the weather and recall how spring would blossom around his home at this time.
I know that it’s hot where you are, spring is on its way, sowing time is not far off. Here, spring is well under way. The trees are sprouting, the grass is getting green on the pastures and roads, the winter grain on the fields is like velvet. You can hear the birds cooing in the grove all day long. The evenings are wonderful, warm and quiet. Soon the lilac will bloom. That’s what it’s like here in May. But, you know, Zhenia, spring doesn’t have the same effect on people here as it does at home. Everything is different.
So wrote one soldier who had gone to the front as an eighteen-year-old volunteer, to his sister. In the main, however, they were short, sometimes stereotypical formulations, which could nevertheless signalize civic behaviour.
At the start of the battles the soldiers, bitter and triumphant, realized that German towns and villages were burning. ‘Automatically, you’re pleased to see Germany in such a state,’ wrote one artillery captain to his mother, one month before the major offensive. ‘Finally, it is experiencing for itself the old Russian proverb: “He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword”. Now it’s paying for everything it did to us.’
For many Red Army soldiers the advance was their first taste of foreign lands. ‘I’m seeing German towns and villages. I’d never have thought I would see all this,’ one twenty-year-old Muscovite wrote home at the end of January. Some letters reveal how exciting this aspect of the conquest was for the soldiers. Occasionally, thoughtful moments would occur, tied to short ‘escapes’ from military life - for instance, a short trip into safe territory. ‘We drove out towards a small hamlet [. . .], which was one kilometre from the sea. It was a disappointment - you couldn’t see the sea at all, and the countryside was nothing like countryside near a sea - just some fields, a dam. . .’ was one major’s description of his first contact with the Baltic Sea in January 1945. But the hard fighting and rapid marches prevented the vast majority of soldiers from seeing such sights. Also, the letters do not allow a final judgement on how preoccupied the soldiers were with the ‘tourist’ aspects of the victory march. ‘Scenery’ was a topic that was low on the list of priorities to write about. According to a soldier’s logic: as a survivor, one can describe it all much more accurately, whereas a dead man’s perceptions are of no interest to anyone anymore. Often they would hint at their surroundings and promise more descriptions later.
It is probable that the War did not only take most soldiers abroad for the first time; for many of them, especially the younger soldiers, it was also the first time they had ever left their home regions. Someone who had been at the front a long time had seen a lot of Otherness. Unfortunately, the letters discovered here offer no way of differentiating between the perceptions of a soldier with more experiences of the Other, and a young recruit who went directly to enemy territory from his home. The accounts in the letters are generally too meagre to be able to formulate from them culturally specific questions regarding the perception of Germany as an-Other world (from an apolitical perspective). By and large, descriptions of German scenery, towns and details of settlements found their way into the correspondence of the particularly keen and experienced writers.
Nevertheless, unprejudiced observations of even apolitical issues were difficult. The enemy villages were, at first, not only different but distasteful. It was the same time as the loud calls for retribution. An observer who enjoys the view of ruined enemy settlements will not develop much curiosity for its attractive features. ‘Everything here, beginning with the earth itself and finishing with the planted forests, the houses, everything here is dismal, and calls for retribution in the name of our home,’ according to one letter of a volunteer, born 1913, who had gone from the Caucasus via the Crimea and Ukraine to Eastern Prussia. And in another: ‘How foreign it all is here, the earth and the wood and even the sky. And even the air seems different. It all smells like Prussia.’
Only very slowly and with the increasing number of relatively peaceful occasions for observation, did Red Army soldiers develop the ability to discover unknown habitats and landscapes. Houses made of stone, beautiful villas, tiled roofs, castles and palaces, the Baltic Sea, beautiful mountain scenes. Every now and then they discovered peculiarities of ordinary buildings: the construction and function of cellars, the location of fields around the houses. As soon as they were billeted, they could take a closer look. ‘We aren’t fighting now,’ wrote one twenty year old just before the end of the War. ‘We’re near an old port, living in nice flats and in a very civilized way, like in a health spa. The village, a town really, where the owners of the urban factories and plants lived before us, is very pretty. Instead of fences they have planted bushes, and they’re interwoven so nice and tight that they’re much more secure than a fence.’ In another letter, the same author writes: ‘The houses are made of stone and all are sinking in greenery. Climbing plants are growing up the walls, and their pretty blossoms are blooming.
There are also big trees growing along the streets. So, when you walk along a road, it’s like walking through a tunnel.’
The conquerors displayed fairly typical ways of perceiving foreign worlds, similar to those shown both for peacetime and also for other more open peoples, more accustomed to travel: what fascinates one person, repulses another. And so one soldier at the end of March thought that
For the Russian eye this kind of life is boring, it just about suits the Germans; it’s not for us. The roofs are dull, high and pointed. Or take the animals: there are only colourful cows. The houses are all alike [. . .]. What else: the roads are good, the countryside is nice. But there is no place for my soul here. It leaves me cold, and I say, let it be pretty all around, the further I travel, the more I look with my heart back to you and to Russia.
A conspicuous amount of time was devoted to describing the cities. To have been in Berlin was a special event that one certainly had to write home about. Apparently the army leadership organized trips to Berlin for the troops as soon as the fighting was over. Seizing a car was also no problem for the victors, and so many soldiers found their way in groups to and through Berlin. The accounts of these drives or walks through the ruined capital were extensive. They generally began by declaring that Berlin had been utterly devastated.
All the soldiers wanted to see with their own eyes the streets and buildings of the Reich capital they knew so well from the press and films, and which had such a close association with Nazi rule: Unter den Linden street, the Brandenburg Gate, the Victory Column and the Reichstag. The letters reflect a mental mix of victorious euphoria, contempt for the vanquished enemy, the joys of life and hopes for peace. That the centre of Berlin had only houses of four or five stories was apparently remarkable. One announced triumphantly that the Berlin underground was no match for the Moscow metro. For one historian the Reichstag was ‘once a majestic and beautiful building’, but for a lawyer it seemed like ‘a huge, dismal building, nothing attractive, a dome on the roof and two, three bronze figures on horses in military poses’. Whereas the - relatively rare - observations of German towns and scenery began to be described more often and more comprehensively from late April 1945, descriptions of Berlin not only differed in their celebratory language and in their embedding within news of the victory, they were also the first peacetime letters and were now clearly more descriptive. They were based on perceptions free from the psychological pressures of conflict. This first flush of emotions was, therefore, accompanied by the start of a normalization of communication, i. e. Berlin became interesting simply for its cityness. It presaged the new, peaceful dimension of future observations, as the soldier became an individual ‘tour guide’ for the family.
World History
