Savage Sheep

“Probably the majority of human sheep see themselves in imagination taking great parts in the world's more impressive dramas, forming swift, unerring decisions in moments of crisis, cowing mutinies, allaying panics, brave, strong, simple, but, in spite of their natural modesty, always slightly spectacular.” So wrote Saki (H.H. Munro) in his short story, “The Sheep.” Perhaps one of the more chilling manifestations of the gap between life in the abstract and life in reality is illustrated by Willy Reese in A Stranger to Myself. It’s the unedited and therefore blatantly honest recollections of a German soldier, based on notes from his diary that he shaped into a memoir while on leave in 1944. The materials lay hidden for nearly 30 years, discovered by an elderly aunt and offered by his family in hopes, perhaps, of sharing the Nazi experience as the average German lived it and, perhaps, trying to explain the inexplicable. Reese, a sensitive and educated young man, found himself drawn into the realm of hatred and death that erupted in WWII. What is particularly gripping about this book is the way the unthinkable becomes acceptable to him, the way repugnance gives way to resignation. Not that Reese ever fully embraced either perspective. At the outset he made it clear he didn’t seek war, but found war instead seeking him: Nothing could be more antithetical to my nature than having to become a soldier . . . than having to learn the use of weapons with which I would fight one day for a view of the world that was repugnant to me, in a war I never wanted, and against people who were not my enemies. Like a condemned man, I hesitated on the steps to the scaffold and felt the sword graze my neck. The judge had broken the staff over me, and in my powerlessness I accepted his sentence. Toward the end of the diary, and of his life (he disappeared and was presumed killed during the last week of June 1944), Reese described the man he had become: “Carrion and horror had become my element. I was a soldier, a wicked warrior, a living corpse, as incapable of happiness and grief as of pity and love.” Because Reese’s life ended before the war did, we will never know whether the warmth of a peacetime home or the cold reason of the post-war world would have brought him to a place of repentance, or if he had been permanently honed to the point of inhumanity. Either way, it’s a book that must be read, because it’s a story that must be told. A reminder that not only can sheep be cowed and driven, they can kill as well.