Summary Of The Forgotten Soldier By Guy Sajer

Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier is a work notable not only for its vivid and uncompromising account of his experience as a member of the Wehrmacht in World War II, but also for its subtle and incisive commentary about the very nature of war itself. What is perhaps most intriguing about Sajer’s novel is his treatment of the supposedly “universal” virtues present within war such as professionalism, patriotism, camaraderie, and self-sacrifice. Sajer introduces a break between how war is thought about in the abstract and how it has actually been conducted historically.
Sajer’s depiction of professionalism in the Wehrmacht is perhaps the most likely place where mainstream thought concerning war comports with its actual practice. Sajer notes that even in the twilight of World War II when his unit,

the Gross Deutschland division, was half-starved, under-armed, and preparing to confront the Russian army, he and his comrades would continue to awaken every morning with a near-silent unity, lacking “bells or bugles, [or] even a whistle.” (Sajer 246) This rigidity and conformity to military training is present throughout his work. However, Sajer ends up providing us with a different perspective on what this professionalism amounts to. After awakening in this quiet military fashion, Sajer shifts his focus from the threat facing he and his comrades to the German uniform that each is wearing. To him, the uniform of the Wehrmacht does not merely cloak a civilian in military garb but transforms ordinary men into soldiers, whose outward appearance of homogeneity actually conceals a deeper individuality, one contained in the particular creases of each man’s garb and even the clanking sounds of their equipment as they move (Sajer 246-247).
This individuality is fully constituted in the mutual recognition by each soldier of one another and the peculiarities that differentiate them from one another. This shared differentiation is what happens when they call each other “Kamerad” (Sajer 247). However, bound up within this notion of the “Kamerad” and the individuality of the soldier is something that sheds national identity: what is transcendental about the individuality of the soldier is the same experience of being “stripped to the essentials”, reduced to a “violent desire to live (Sajer 247). Stripped to their essentials, the Gross Deutschland are merely unified in a mutual desire to survive in the face of Total War; their individuality as men can no longer be contained or disguised by the simplicity of the uniform.
It is in this unique treatment of the notion of professionalism that Sajer lays bare the true “professional” soldier: each bears the formal signifiers of the popular conception of professionalism (the uniform), but “none stayed for long at a regulation angle” (Sajer 247). This transformation into the soldier, then, is something truly transcendent: he becomes a true professional, a man stripped to the bare essentials whose individuality is achieved by an exposure to the dehumanizing effects of war and through recognition by others who have endured the same. The “true” professionalism of the soldier is won through experience, not assimilated through training or ideological regimen.
This notion of professionalism, then, necessarily contains the concept of camaraderie. The professional is bound up in a paradox: the individual with the group. But ultimately, this sameness, when examined further, is constituted by a mutual individuality, a collective of unique individuals. And it is on this basis that each soldier in the Wehrmacht is able to call his fellow soldiers “Kamerad”, not because they are unified under the banner of National Socialism but because they see in one another each their own distinctness, a peculiarity that gives shape to the otherwise formless nature of Total War that renders them invisible and sacrifice-able as individuals.
Sajer plays with the concept of ‘self-sacrifice’ in his novel as well. When the Gross Deutschland arrive at a farm in southern Poland, Guy Sajer observes the newest recruits to the Wehrmacht, boys thirteen to sixteen years in age, being paired alongside older, seasoned veterans as old as sixty-five (Sajer 254). This strikes Sajer as being particularly tragic not only because the young boys cannot possibly understand the nature of what they are being called to do but also because they are, in all likelihood, going to die in the coming fight with the Russian army. Sajer wonders if his nation is heroic or insane and ultimately concludes that, whatever the answer, these conscripted children will make “the absolute sacrifice.” (Sajer 254)
Sajer’s comparison of the old soldiers to the young conscripts highlights a contradiction in the notion of self-sacrifice that we associate with those in the military. These children, being marched to an almost-certain demise, lack the autonomy that is essential to allow someone to sacrifice on others’ behalves. The young conscripts know not the nature of the task before them and are unable to internalize the military discipline and training that allows soldiers to realize the scope of their responsibilities (Sajer 254). In essence, Sajer is delineating between those who have choice in war; some soldiers have the ‘luxury’ of choice, while others are sacrificed at the behest of the state. This is not to denigrate or detract from the lives of those who have died in war but, rather, to distinguish one of war’s most tragic aspects: those who are forced to self-sacrifice, i.e. commanded to die.
This helps explains why Sajer would inquire as to whether Germany was “heroic or insane”: forgive them, for they know not what they do. Unlike the “option” to leave the Russian Front given by Captain Wesreidau, Sajer viewed these children as cattle to the slaughter (Sajer 161).
Another particularly important aspect of Sajer’s novel occurs in the evolution of his own sense of national pride, which is Sajer begins his account with a description of the pride he feels in his new military clothing received at the barracks in Chemnitz (Sajer 5). Almost immediately, however, it is revealed that Sajer cannot fully integrate himself among the other soldiers as his Alsatian upbringing and French accent set him apart from the other full-blooded German soldiers (Sajer 5). At several points throughout the novel, his heritage becomes a point of contention, setting up a thematic conflict between Sajer’s own attempt to find pride in the nation for which he risks his life and the many cruelties that this same nation exposes him to in the course of waging war.
Sajer’s first doubts are manifest when he finds himself under Russian artillery fire south of Voronezh.

Sajer describes the pride he felt at Chemnitz—and continues to feel—but struggles to reconcile with the ragged image of himself and his comrades under such incredible duress (Sajer 49-50). Sajer recounts how, soaked in rain and mud and subjected to ongoing artillery fire, he felt “like nothing.” (Sajer 50) This description exposes a break in the sense of significance he felt in the eyes of Germany while at Chemnitz, a significance that seemed to abandon him as he traveled deeper into Russia.
Sajer’s sense of patriotism was even further undermined while trying to hold the Dnieper River in Russia. Fellow soldier Lensen, drunk from imbibing medical alcohol in the wake of a minor victory against the Russians, announces his distaste for Sajer’s mixed-heritage and, as a result, makes Sajer realize that his companions have “rejected him” in spite of all of their shared miseries and hardships (Sajer 207). Sajer questions his own worthiness to fight for Germany and ultimately concludes that he will never again find joy in reciting the German songs he once loved so much (Sajer

207).
It is at the end of the novel that Sajer’s examination of his own sense of patriotism reaches its conclusion. After having been captured by English and American forces, Sajer explains how the Wehrmacht soldiers simply acquiesced to the minor humiliations subjected by their captors. They had long since started thinking of themselves less as German troops and more as simply half-starved men, who were overly joyous at even the possibility of receiving the slightest comfort (Sajer 295). As Sajer explains, “It was clearly depressing for these crusading missionaries to find so much humility among the vanquished.” (295) This depiction shows that Sajer had finally shed the last of his patriotism, something that was never rewarded by his compatriots or the nation he loved. It was a hollow construct, something meant only to fuel obedience and fealty, not to sustain a human being in the most inhumane conditions.
The Forgotten Soldier does more than simply deconstruct the supposedly transcendent virtues of war. It also contributes a harrowing account of how war inflicts psychological traumas that persist with soldiers for the rest of their lives. In particular, Sajer recounts how the daily physical presence of death all around him disrupts his sense of life’s value and the very notion of civilization itself.
Outside the context of war, death’s presence in society is obscured. One of the most unsettling realities of war then, to Sajer, is his daily confrontation with death. He explains that he could “smell the presence of death […] the smell when its proportions have reached a certain magnitude”, a testament to the sheer technological capacity of humankind to kill (Sajer 57). This ever-presence of violence, ironically, becomes the source of what Sajer describes as his last remaining motivation when his sense of national pride and patriotism left him: survival. In a brief aside, Sajer concludes that the war had offered him the most intense motivator of all: the desire to live when surrounded by death (Sajer 184). This perverse observation, he explains, went on to haunt him following the war when he realized how the monotony of peace could never provide a similar passion or intensity for anything as he felt during his three years with the Wehrmacht (Sajer 184).
​Sajer’s account reveals, during his first encounters with the bodies of dead soldiers, how different reactions to death seem to strip away any notion of the sanctity of life. When tasked with getting rid of the bodies of dead Bolsheviks in Belgorod, each soldier expresses different feelings about the situation. The veteran soldier Sudeten shows what can only be called disinterest at the fallen even to the point where he takes up eating in their very presence (Sajer 122). Sajer, on the other hand, feels noticeably sick after the experience, explaining that he thinks he is going to vomit (Sajer 122). This is only after a third soldier begins laughing while dragging a decapitated body from a ruined building. These varying experiences of death and the attendant callousness that must to develop to cope with its ubiquity in war seems to call into question the very sanctity of life itself. As Sajer comments later in the novel, death—not life—becomes their fixation: “we alternately hate death and long for it.” (Sajer 261)
​Even in death, however, the people exposed to war are often afforded no dignity. Earlier in the novel, Sajer and his comrade Hals experience a train car transporting Russian prisoners utilizing the corpses of their fellow soldiers to provide them with shelter from the elements (Sajer 17). Only moments after Sajer and Hals express their mutual horror over the sight, they witness several of the bodies fall off to the side of the train as it moves down the tracks without stopping (Sajer 17). Seeing the unceremonious dumping of the corpses, Sajer is instructed to assist in their burial, eventually learning that the Wehrmacht is unable to match many of the bodies with a civilian identity (Sajer 17). As a consequence, Sajer helps inter the corpses in what amounts to a large unmarked grave by the side of the railroad tracks.
​This maltreatment of the dead is also observed by Sajer in the disparity between how Germans and Russians were each buried. Sajer observes:
In fact, many more Russians and Germans had been killed. However, insofar as was possible, the soldiers of the Reich were given decent burials, while each orthodox emblem marked the grave of ten or twelve Soviet soldiers. Our journey through across this boneyard naturally did not make us feel any warmer. (Sajer 27)
The value of German life over Russian life was inscribed in the very rituals used by the Wehrmacht to bury the dead. It was no matter of mere ideological difference; the dehumanization of the enemy in both life and death exposes a more sinister aspect of the practice of warfare.
​The ongoing disregard for life taking place around Sajer culminates in what is perhaps the book’s most horrifying episode. While holding the line in Boporoeivska, Sajer witnesses the Soviet army deploy “a human wave of Mongols” to cross a series of minefields (Sajer 221). Unable to disarm the mines but wanting to preserve their tanks, the Russian army utilized its standing reserve of unarmed humans to run into the fields to try and explode as many mines with their bodies as possible. Having witnessed the Soviet reduction of human life to standing reserve, mere weapons of flesh and blood, it is no wonder that Sajer’s reaction is trivial, happy that the cold will freeze the exploded bodies quickly and spare him the fetid smell of death (Sajer 221).
​Sajer’s depiction of brutal nature of the violence on the Russian front coupled with the deprivation of any dignity for the dead both help explain why he titled the epilogue “Try to forget.” Even in environment of Total War that resulted in the dehumanization of the enemy and untold suffering inflicted on all parties involved in the war, one aspect embedded in the very ethos of the Gross Deutschland division is particularly troubling. Sajer witnesses a speech by a captain before going into battle in Belgorod who says: “You must learn to support suffering without complaint, because you are German.” (Sajer 28) Sajer and the Gross Deutschland division must not merely tolerate suffering in the name of the Third Reich but they must support it. Sajer was not only a spectator to the violence that took place during the Wehrmacht’s campaign in Russia, he was also a participant and, consequently, complicit in the suffering that so many endured.
​This feeling of complicity in the violence enacted by the Gross Deutschland is precisely why Guy Sajer closes his novel with the statement that he must forget himself. This is not to say that he must literally be forgotten, for to obscure history is to pave a way for its return. Rather, Guy Sajer’s confession is one that highlights the truly problematic situation of the soldier in wartime. Caught up in a conflux of state politics, violence on an unfathomable scale, and a desire to survive, to what extent can we hold those who are conscripted into war responsible for the actions of entire nations?