This Is Our Manifesto: Reflections of a German Soldier After Defeat

by WOLFGANG BORCHERT

1

HELMETS companies off, are helmets scattered. off: We’ve The companies, lost! The battalions, armies. The great armies. Only the hosts of the dead, they still stand. Stand like measureless forests: dark, purple-colored, full of voices. But the guns lie like frozen dinosaurs with rigid limbs. Purple with steel and ambushed fury. And the helmets, they are rusting. Take your rusty helmets off: we’ve lost.

In our discarded messtins thin children now fetch milk. Thin milk. The children are purple with frost. And the milk is purple with poverty.

Never again shall we fall in to a whistle and answer “Yessir” to a bellow. Guns and sergeants bellow no more. We shall weep, spit, and sing as we will. But the song of the roaring tanks and the song of the edelweiss we shall sing no more, for the tanks and the sergeants rage no more, and the edelweiss has rotted away to the singsong of blood. And no general calls us “Thou” before the battle. Before the terrible battle.

We shall never again have sand in our teeth with fear. (No sand of the steppes, no Ukrainian sand, and none from Cyrenaica or Normandy —nor the bitter angry sand of our homeland!) And never again the hot mad feeling in brain and belly before the battle.

Never again shall we be so happy to feel another beside us. Warm and there and breathing and belching and humming — at night on the advance. Never again shall we be as happy as gypsies over a loaf of bread and a pinch of tobacco and two armfuls of hay. We shall never march together again, for from now on all march alone. That is good. That is hard. No longer to have the stubborn grumbling other man beside you—at night, at night on the advance. Who hears everything too. Who never says anything. Who stomachs everything.

And if at night a man must weep, he can do so again. For he need no longer sing — with fear.

Now jazz is our song. Excited, hectic jazz is our music. And the hot mad frantic song, through which the drums race, catlike, scratching. And sometimes still the old sentimental soldiers’ bawl, with which anguish was out screamed and with which mothers were denied. Terrible male chorus from bearded lips, sung into the lonely twilight of dugout and troop train, overpitched by the mouth organ’s tinny tremolo.

Virile song of men — did no one hear the children bawling away their fear of the purple maw of the guns?

Heroic song of men — did no one hear the hearts sobbing as they sang, the grimy, the crusty, the bearded, the lousy?

Song of men, soldiers’ roaring, sentimental and high-spirited, virile and deep-throated, valiantly shouted by the youngsters, too. Does no one hear, beneath it, the cry for mother? The last cry of man, the adventurer? The terrible cry.

Our singing and our music are a dance over the abyss that yawns at us. And that music is jazz. For our hearts and our heads have the same hotcold rhythm: excited, crazy and hectic, unrestrained.

And our girls, they have the same hot beat in their hands and their hips. And their laughter is hoarse and brittle and hard as a clarinet. And their hair, it crackles like phosphorus. It burns. And their hearts have a syncopated beat, savage and sad. Sentimental. Our girls are like that, like jazz. And the nights are like that, the girl-jangling nights, like jazz, hot and hectic. Excited.

Who will write us new laws of harmony? We have no further use for well-tempered clavichords. We ourselves are too much dissonance.

Who will cry a purple cry for us? A purple deliverance? We have no further use for still life. Our life is loud.

We have no further use for a poet’s good grammar. We lack patience for good grammar. We need those with the hot, hoarse-sobbed emotion. Who call a tree tree and a woman woman and say yes and say no, loud and clear and without subjunctives.

For semicolons we have no time and harmonies make us soft and still life overwhelms us, for at night our skies are purple. And purple leaves no time for grammar, purple is shrill and unremitting and frantic. Over the chimneys, over the roofs, the world, purple. Over our sprawled bodies the shadowy hollows, the blue-snowed eye sockets of the dead in the ice storm, the violet-raging gullets of the cold guns — and the purple skin of our girls at the neck and a little below the breast. Purple at night the groans of the starving and the stammer of those who kiss. And the city stands so purple by the night-purple river.

And the night is full of death, our night. For our sleep is full of battle. Our night in its dreamdeath is laden with the noise of battle. And those who stay with us at night, the purple girls, they know it too and in the morning they are pale with our night’s anguish. And our morning is full of solitude. A solitude like glass. Brittle and cool. And quite clear. It is the solitude of man. For vve lost our mothers in the raging gunfire. Our cats and cows and the lice and the worms, they alone can endure the great icy solitude. Perhaps they are not so close together as we. Perhaps they are more with the world. With this measureless world. In which our heart almost freezes to death.

Why is our heart racing? From the flight. For only yesterday we escaped in desperate flight from the battle and from the gun-gullets. From the fearful flight from one shell hole to another — those motherly hollows— from that our heart still races — and still from fear. Listen within to the tumult in your depths. Do you shrink? Do you hear the chaos chorale of Mozart melodies and Herms Niel cantatas? Do you still hear the poet Hölderlin? Do you recognize him, drunk with blood, in fancy dress, and arm in arm with Baldur von Schirach? Do you hear the infantryman’s song? Do you hear the jazz and the Luther hymns?

Then try to live above your purple depths. For the morning that rises behind the grass dikes and the tarred roofs comes only out of yourself. And behind everything? Behind all that is what you call God—stream and star, night, mirror or cosmos, and Hilda or Evelyn. And behind everything you yourself are always standing. Icily alone. Pitiable. Great. Your laughter. Your grief. Your question. Your answer. Behind everything, in uniform, naked or costumed I know not how, tottering in shadow, in strange dimensions, now almost timid, now of unsuspected grandeur — yourself. Your love. Your fear. Your hope.

And when our heart, that pitiful proud muscle, can no longer endure itself—and when our heart grows too soft for us in those sentimentalities to which we are all abandoned, then we wax vulgarly loud. Old sow, we say then to her we love most. And when Jesus or the Meek One, who always pursues us in our dreams, says in the night: You, be kind! — then with an insolent lack of respect for our confession, vve ask: Kind, Lord Jesus, why? We slept in God just as well with the dead Ivans in front of our trench. And in the dream we riddle everything with our machine guns — the Ivans, the earth, Jesus.

2

NO, OUR vocabulary is not nice. But it’s fat. And it stinks. Bitter as TXT. Sour as the sand of the steppes. Sharp as dung. And loud as the noise of battle.

And we brag insolently away over our sensitive German Rilke heart. Over Rilke, our strange lost brother, who speaks our heart and unexpectedly moves us to tears. But we will conjure no oceans of tears—for then we would all drown. No, we will be coarse and common, grow tobacco and tomatoes, be noisily afraid right into our purple beds — right into our purple women. For we love the loud, noisy assertion, the one that is not of Rilke, which rescues us from the battle-dreams and from the purple depths of the night, of the blood-drenched fields, of the passionate, bloody women.

For the war has not made us hard — do not, above all, believe that — and not rough and not superficial. For we bear many world-heavy, waxen dead on our thin shoulders. And never did our tears sit so loosely upon us as after those battles. And therefore we love the blustering loud purple merry-go-round, the jazz hurdy-gurdy that blares away over our abysses, thudding, clownish, purple, gay, and even silly. And our Rilke heart — before the clown crows, we have denied it thrice. And our mothers weep bitterly. But they, they do not turn away. Not the mothers!

And we will promise the mothers:

Mothers, it is not for this that the dead are dead, not for the marble war memorial, that the best local stonemason builds in the market place — set round with the green of living grass and with benches for widows and cripples. The dead are not dead so that the survivors may live on in their parlors, filling them again with photos of recruits and portraits of Hindenburg. No, not for that.

Did the dead let their blood run in the snow, their living mother-blood in the wet, cold snow, so that the same schoolmasters who once so gallantly prepared the fathers for war may now make monkeys of the children? (Between Langemark and Stalingrad lay only one mathematics lesson.) No, mothers, not for this did you die in each war ten thousand deaths!

This we admit: our moral philosophy has nothing more to do with beds, breasts, parsons, or petticoats — we can do no more than be good. But who will measure it, this “good”? Our philosophy is the truth. And the truth is new and hard as death. Yet also as gentle, as surprising, and as just. Both are naked.

Tell your pal the truth, rob him in hunger, but then tell him. And never tell your children stories about a holy war. Tell the truth, tell it red as it is — full of blood and gunflash and screaming. Fool your girl at night, but in the morning, tell her the truth. Say that you’re going, and for ever. Be kind as death. Nichevo. Kaputt. Forever. Parti, perdu, and nevermore.

For we are no-men. But we do not say No in despair. Our No is a protest. And there is no peace for us in kisses, for us nihilists. For into the nothingness we must again build a Yes. Houses we must build in the free air of our No, over the abysses, the craters, and the slit trenches, and over the open mouths of the dead — build houses into the cleanswept air of the nihilists, houses of wood and brain and houses of stone and thought.

For we love this gigantic desert called Germany. More now than ever. And for Germany we will not die. For Germany we will live. Over the purple depths. This acrid, bitter, brutal life. We’ll take it on ourselves for this desert. For Germany. We will love this Germany as the Christians their Christ — for her sorrow.

We will love the mothers who had to fill bombs — for their sons. We must love them for that sorrow.

And the sweethearts who now push their heroes in wheel chairs, with no sparkling uniform — for their sorrow.

And the heroes, the Hölderlin heroes, for whom no day was too bright and no battle bad enough we will love them for their shattered pride, for their discolored, secret, night-watchman’s existence.

And the girl whom a company debauched in the park at night and who still says Scheiss and must now make a pilgrimage from hospital to hospital — for her sorrow.

And the soldier who will never again laugh.

And him, who still tells his grandsons the story of the thirty-one corpses at night in front of his machine gun or Granddad’s.

All those who are afraid and in sorrow and in humility, we will love them as the Christians love their Christ — for their sorrow. For they are Germany. And we ourselves are this Germany, too. And we must build this Germany again in nothingness, over abysses, out of our misery, with our love. For we love this Germany. As we love the cities for their rubble, so we will love the hearts for the ashes of their sorrow. For their burned pride, for their calcined hero’s garb, for their seared faith, for their shattered trust, for their ruined love. Above all we must love the mothers, be they eighteen or eighty-six — for the mothers must give us the strength for this Germany in the rubble.

Our manifesto is love. We will love the stones in the cities, our stones which the sun still warms, warms again after the battle.

And we will love the great sighing wind again, our wind, that still sings in the forests. And that sings also in the fallen beams.

And the yellow-warm windows with Rilke poems behind them.

And the rat-riddled cellars with purple-starving children inside them.

And the huts of cardboard and wood, in which people still eat, our people, and still sleep. And sometimes still sing. And even laugh.

For that is Germany. And her we will love, we of the rusty helmet and the lost heart here on earth.

Yes, yes, on this lunatic earth we will love again — love, ever and again.

Translated by David Porter