We Germans

Alexander Starritt

John Murray, £14.99

Review by Fiona Rintoul

WHAT is it with grandfathers? Sam Mendes’s film 1917 was based on his grandfather’s First World War stories. The conceit for Alexander Starritt’s second novel We Germans, which poses penetrating questions about war and guilt, is that an elderly German war veteran is relaying his experiences on the Eastern Front in 1944 to his Scottish grandson in a letter.

Callum Emslie does not receive his grandfather Meissner’s letter until after the old man has died. We Germans comprises the letter, annotated by Callum with (sometimes irritating) explanations in square brackets of phenomena non-Germans might not understand, interspersed with Callum’s own memories and observations.

Underpinning it all are – one assumes – the experiences of a real grandfather. For Starritt, who has translated Kafka, Stefan Zweig and Brecht into English, is himself half-Scots, half-German. Like Callum, he has a German grandfather who fought on the Eastern Front and who – like many German men of that generation – spent several years in Soviet captivity when the war ended.

Knowing this, it is impossible not to wonder if Callum is Starritt and Meissner Starritt’s grandfather. Callum tells how he asked his grandfather about Russia, hoping to get “hours of powerful oral history”, but the old man declined to provide “a colourful story of hardship in the Gulag”, revealing only that “the food will have been some kind of soup”. Is this memory or fiction? Or a bit of both?

In places, this tension between truth and fiction rather crushes the book. I found parts of We Germans somewhat hard to swallow (I had the same problem with Mendes’s film). There was then always the nagging question of whether these things “actually happened”.

This raises another question. How reliable is our grandfathers’ testimony? How fudged by a need for self-exoneration, how moulded by war stories heard since? And even if their testimony is infallible – which at this remove seems unlikely – does it translate into meaningful fiction?

In We Germans, the climactic scene of horror reads like a quick round-up of Nazi atrocities. Rape, check. Senseless brutality, check. Drunkenness, check. I don’t know if this scene happened or not because I wasn’t there. And I don’t know if anyone’s grandfather said it happened. What I do know is that on the page it has all the narrative power of a shopping list.

Other scenes, by contrast, are beautifully understated. Eating a Greek meal that is too much for him, Meissner remembers the “matkas” (mothers) whose buried jars of pickles he and his comrades stole.

“It sometimes feels as if they’re standing there in some shadow of the restaurant, still watching me from the sidelines. If the postal service could carry things through time and not just space, I’d be able to send them more food than they’d ever seen. And I would.”

The book’s greatest achievement is that is does not judge (though Callum sometimes does). It lays out Meissner’s story – with his attempts both to face and avoid his guilt – and lets us make up our own minds. And if Meissner wishes he’d been sent West instead of East, because his shame would then be of a lighter hue, his grandson understands how kind his times have been to him.

“World history impinges on some lives more than others. Because I was born in the 1980s and not the 1920s, the worst my times have done to me is lose me my first job, in the 2008 financial crisis; they’ve never sent me to Russia to dig holes and kill people.”

We Germans tackles issues such as collective guilt and Germany’s silent suffering after the war with sensitivity and nuance. But, like 1917, it also underlines the near impossibility of stepping into our grandfathers’ shoes. The harder we swim towards them, the further off they drift.