Heinrich Böhl My enthusiasm and disappointment in Germany

Roman Belya; He is an outstanding storyteller who recounts the adventures and sufferings of the Wehrmacht during the occupation of Romania, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

    Fate has granted this country's writers the privilege or punishment of participating in a conflict that sought to avoid the death of civilians. It was the biggest event in centuries. It was a brutal battle between the Soviets and the Germans.

    When troops marched into Russian or German cities, the civilian population suffered from the soldiers' cruelty and women were raped. In the East, mature girls and eighty-year-old women had fallen into disgrace. Rape is a weapon in war, in all wars, and Pain talks about it in her novels.

And this is the spindle on which Trummer Literature (literature from the rubble) turns, the soldiers who return from the front to find their houses destroyed but their beds warm.

    Their wives became American mistresses, as Wickhart's Draussen vor der Thur proves, one of the most impressive novels of the last century despite its brevity. The lame, the maimed, the one-eyed and the crippled return. Only a few brave writers dared to publish the suffering of the German and Russian Holocausts.

Almost fifty million people. Since history is always written by the winners, this part of the film is not interesting as it costs another six million and the numbers don't seem accurate or exaggerated to me. And I won't say that because the Neo-Inquisitors would send me to the stake. The Hollywood epic erases this part of history. Wickhart committed suicide. Pain, on the other hand, tries to survive by becoming a carpenter in his city of Munich, submitting stories and his work to magazines, breaking with the Catholic Church before becoming a bestseller in post-war Europe. In 1973 he received the Nobel Prize.

Determined and dispassionate, he tells us his bitter memories of this catastrophe. He had always been a lone wolf, and being among wolves taught him to howl with the pack. Howling Wolf.

And the epics are defeated. Neither the British, nor the Americans, nor the Russians talk about the catastrophe with the epic tone of the novelists of La Escombrera's generation.

Since in Spain we are always fighting against the tide, paradoxically it was the victors and not the vanquished who gave Castilian literature an epic character that the Reds did not have, except in a few special cases, such as that of Barea's “La Forja”. un Rebelde” or Ramon J. Sender in the chronicle of del Alba, so much so that today our novels are stale, vulgar, Mandarin and almost extinct.

They lack the “pathos” and military zeal (today the infantry honors their patron saint) to die or win. Although I graduated from the Faculty of English Philology, I have always been fascinated by the German language because of its syntactic features, the hyperbaton, the verbs composed of postpositive prepositions and the fact that the semantic meaning of a sentence is only revealed at the end Phrase can be captured.

I spent my childhood among soldiers who belonged to the Blues, Spanish militarism has always remained true to the Prussian spirit, and in Bohl's novels we find school teachers promoted to sergeants or corporals and painters commanding a company of pioneers and the Achieve Victory Iron Cross.

I also worked as a language consultant at the University of York and taught Spanish at a comprehensive school with over a thousand students whose main subject was German after English and French.

My students knew more about Goethe and Höldering than about Cervantes, even though they lived in a city like Hull that had been destroyed by the Luftwaffe.

When I returned to my homeland, I entered German Studies in Complutense.

I sat back in those crab chairs like I did thirty years ago. It was a disaster. There was no longer any trace of the Germany I admired. In addition, the German language department was headed by the Bolshevik Serrolaza, who ordered the teachers to search me.

I left the forum out of boredom.

Today I write German well. What I can't say about the spoken language, which seems barbaric to me: it feels like they're barking.

I also don't understand today's Germans, who no longer have anything to do with the war heroes of my childhood who were called Hans, Wilhelm or Frieda. The good guys in the movie became bad guys, but mi