Cultural Memory and the ‘‘Soldiers’ Tale’’ 111
be faced out of duty to one’s nation. And then, the writer insisted,
after peace is restored, ‘‘I have firmly resolved, if I do come back, to
do everything in my power to prevent such a thing from ever hap-
pening again in the future.’’ These sentiments, voiced by Franz Blu-
menfeld, a student of law killed on the Somme at age twenty-three in
1914, were repeated time and again by the men whose letters Witkop
collected. To Karl Josenhans, a student of theology killed in the
Argonne in 1915, aged twenty-three, war was ‘‘a degrading thing,’’
and though Germans were not to blame for it, its cruelties were
‘‘sickening.’’ To Robert Otto Marcus, a medical student from Mu-
nich, this was not war at all, but ‘‘abominable, cruel, wholesale
assassination . . . unworthy of human beings.’’ Richard Schmeider, a
student of philosophy in Leipzig, told his parents that ‘‘there are
moments when even the bravest soldier is so utterly sick of the whole
thing that he could cry like a child. When I heard the birds singing at
Ripont, I could have crushed the whole world to death in my wrath
and fury.’’ Here is the mental world of thoughtful German soldiers,
utterly remote from the worship of war.
The second representation of the soldier which emerges out of
these letters is deeply romantic and sentimental. Walter Roy, a stu-
dent of medicine from Jena, wrote his parents a farewell letter before
the attack in which he was killed in April 1915, thanking them ‘‘for all
the sunshine and happiness in my life.’’ Ludwig Franz Meyer wrote a
poem to his mother on the Eastern Front, saying that whatever
hardships he faced, his mother had most to bear. Willi Bohle wrote
home in April 1917: ‘‘Darling Mother, darling little Mother, and you
too, my brother and sister, I am ready to endure anything for your
sakes, so that you may never see what ruined villages and shell-
destroyed fields look like; so that you may never learn what the word
war really means.’’
The third representation is that of the Christian soldier. Re-
ligious sentiment appears regularly in Witkop’s collection. Heinz