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I found the recent article in Army
History by Douglas E. Nash,"The
Forgotten Soldier: Unmasked," to be of
interest, but I would especially like to comment
on the reply by Edwin L. Kennedy, Jr. As a
professional historian myself, I have noticed
that in recent years something of a cottage
industry in debunking Guy Sajer seems to have
sprung up, an enterprise to which its adherents
bring considerable energy in criticizing Sajer
for errors in technical details although they
remain remarkably silent about the veracity of
the larger issue of the combat soldier's
existence. One might easily dismiss these errors
as being of largely irrelevant and trivial detail,
or as natural mistakes made by a man who was not
yet out of his teens when the events he
chronicled occurred, or as simple confusion
occasioned by the myriad changes that the Grossdeutschland
Division underwent in the last few
years of the war.
What I find of interest,
however, is the nature of Lt. Col. Kennedy's
reply, and here I am thinking not so much of its
flippant and dismissive tone, but of the
substance of his continued criticism of Sajer and
Nash. Kennedy appears to be arguing that although
he now admits that Sajer is an actual person, and
moreover one who indeed participated in the
events he described the numerous errors in his
account render his not an autobiography but a roman
à clef. This might well be true
from the perspective of a military history of the
traditional type, which sought to describe the
elements of strategy, tactics, logistics, and
military maneuver. As Sajer himself
emphasized in a letter quoted by Lt. Col
Nash, historians have asked me "questions of
chronology, situations, dates, and unimportant
details." Historians have harassed me for a
long time. All of us is unimportant. I never had
the intention to write a historical reference
book; rather, I wrote about my innermost
emotional experiences as they relate to the
events that happened to me.
This, it seems to me, is the key to
the controversy. Kennedy is criticizing Sajer,
not necessarily for the work he wrote, but for
the work he didn't write.
This is what leaves such an odd impression about
his reply, it is as if he were criticizing a chef
for making errors in a recipe, when the chef is
writing about the inner transformational
experience of the process of cooking.
Incidentally, this likely also accounts for why
Sajer did not reply to
Kennedy's inquiries, which he otherwise finds so
suspicious. Moreover, Kennedy himself
acknowledges that there are things that are
correct in The Forgotten Soldier. especially
those dealing with "the human dimension of
war." Isn't that precisely what Sajer tried
to convey? As Kennedy also admitted, Sajer's book
expressed "powerful evocations of [his]
experiences in the cauldron of combat." Are
reflective works about the inner experience of
war-a book like Glenn Gray's The
Warriors comes to mind to be deemed
valueless as history because they might contain
errors of detail concerning military minutiae? Or
should the magnificent writings of Primo Levi on
be nature of the concentration experience be
rendered invalid because of mistakes in details
of how the camp system was
actually operated? What does Kennedy think about
the value as historical artifacts of contemporary
documents such as diaries or letters of soldiers,
both of which provide insight into the human
aspect of war but often contain factual errors
concerning military details? No, Sajer certainly
did not write an official history of Grossdeutschland
Division, but then, he never claimed
to have. What he attempted to do, on the other
hand, was to write an account of the innermost
emotional experiences of a combat soldier, and
here even Kennedy, however grudgingly,
acknowledges his accomplishment.
In the absence of a service record for Guy Sajer
that substantiates his service in The
Grossdeutschland Division, skeptics
like Kennedy are not likely to be convinced. The
words of Sajer himself and the testimony of other
veterans as to the veracity of his observations
do, however, strengthen the case that The
Forgotten Soldier is genuine,
and not fiction. The larger, and to me more
intriguing, question is why some people find it
is so vital to prove, on the basis of a few
admittedly incorrect, if relatively minor,
technical details that Sajer's work is fictional,
even though he got all the larger human aspects
of the war correct?
Dr. Stephen G. Fritz
Professor of History
East Tennessee State University
(Author of Frontsoldaten)
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