Living Letters from the Dead

Heroes, said Pericles, have the whole world for their sepulchre, and in lands far from their own their record is enshrined in the hearts of men.

The doomed German soldiers who wrote these letters (Last Letters from Stalingrad, Coronet Press, $1.50) had no such consolation as the belief that their death would either save their country or be celebrated in song and story by generations to come. A few of them were sustained in their agony by the stoic tradition, as affirmed by the man who wrote to his wife: “We are Prussian officers who know what we have to do when the time comes”; others by faith in the eventual “resurrection of the German people” and pride in the heroism of the German soldiers “throughout the long hunger period.” But for the most part the letters reveal the tragedy of men who realized that “everything that is happening is for a completely senseless cause.” Only a few thought that they were starving and freezing and awaiting certain death, without even ammunition to make a last stand, for a cause worth dying for. In the words of one of them, they were “the dramatis personae of madness incarnate.”

FU

About the Author

Freda Utley

Featured Tags

Heroes, said Pericles, have the whole world for their sepulchre, and in lands far from their own their record is enshrined in the hearts of men.

The doomed German soldiers who wrote these letters (Last Letters from Stalingrad, Coronet Press, $1.50) had no such consolation as the belief that their death would either save their country or be celebrated in song and story by generations to come. A few of them were sustained in their agony by the stoic tradition, as affirmed by the man who wrote to his wife: “We are Prussian officers who know what we have to do when the time comes”; others by faith in the eventual “resurrection of the German people” and pride in the heroism of the German soldiers “throughout the long hunger period.” But for the most part the letters reveal the tragedy of men who realized that “everything that is happening is for a completely senseless cause.” Only a few thought that they were starving and freezing and awaiting certain death, without even ammunition to make a last stand, for a cause worth dying for. In the words of one of them, they were “the dramatis personae of madness incarnate.”