Book Review: The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer

About:

The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer is a memoir of the author serving in the German army on the Eastern Front during World War II. Guy Sajer is the nom de plume of Guy Mouminoux, who is the son of a German woman and a French man.

• 566 pages
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ballantine
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0345025350

My rating for The Forgotten Soldier –5
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Thoughts:

I understand that even though this book is a memoir and an excellent one at that, it’s more of a historical novel. The key to the book is not facts and figures, but the relationship of soldiers to the horrors around them, describing real events and people masked by a façade of fiction.

The author writes about his experience as a French-German volunteer, in some of the most notable battles of World War II, but he’s seeing it all from the trenches. He has no idea what the big picture looks like, or what’s happening around him though. In fact, towards the end of the war he doesn’t even know that the Allies are a few miles away.

One of the aspects of The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer is the undercutting of the myth of the Aryan soldier. His mates are scared, not as athletic or the ideal Nazis as the movies of Leni Riefenstahl attempt to portray.

The book really takes off once the author joins the German Großdeutschland division. The tough training and comradery built with his comrades, most who never made it to the end of the war, as well as the descriptions of the harrowing conditions on the Eastern front, makes an engrossing read.

I kept wondering what was left unwritten. Being the Großdeutschland division and serving in Ukraine, he must have seen many atrocities. If not by the Wehrmacht, than certainly by the Untermenschen, and/or Einsatzgruppen.

This was a depressing, yet poetic memoir. He tries to be as honest as possible with himself and the reader. I certainly understand some of the historical errors, as soldiers in the trenches seldom see the pictures outside of their own, all encompassing yes small, piece of the world.

The book ends in an ironic note. After being taken as a POW by the British, he is released to go home to France, joins the French military and finds himself marching in a victory parade.

Buy  The Forgotten Soldier from Amazon.com*

Zohar — Man of la Book
Dis­claimer: I bought this book.
*Ama­zon links point to an affil­i­ate account, the money is usually spent on books