a collection of the essays of the most popular Soviet WWII correspodent, Ilya Ehrenburg, has just been published. Many of these articles haven't been reprinted in 60 years, and I'm sure very, very few ever appeared in English. They're very short -- I'm going to translate them and post them here if anybody wants them.... Chris Doss
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Sure that would be great. But make certain you put the date and possibly the name of the battle or location, if it is mentioned.
There is a two volume history (Hitler Moves East, Scorched Earth) from the German side, by Paul Carell that covers most of the battles and numerous squirishes. The hard bound version has both large and small maps with plenty of place names and battle diagrams. So I could match Ehrenburg's Russian account with the German maps and historical narrative.
Carell gives a pretty exciting account. He picks a few personal tales of courage or desperation or endurance (both German and Russian), and matches them with the grand scale view to try to give a vivid and lively record. But it lacks that pressing and unknown immediacy of being directly on the ground. I would love to discover any mistakes Ehrenburg makes about the turn of events when he doesn't know the outcome. There is something really magical about those moments. They open history for me.
I think it was Carell who mentioned the rail line from Odessa to near Marburg---which is how I learned that Leo Strauss's memory of Russian Jews living in barns around Marburg from the 1903-6 pogroms could come from immigrants who got off the trains from Odessa for a couple days rest right in Strauss's childhood backyard. His father sold farm equipment and I imagine the old man taking his very young son with him on some of these sales trips where local farmers had weird strangers staying a few days in their barns.
[The importance to the later Strauss was, this was how he discovered he was Jewish---that he had some unknown link to these people, who I imagine he was horrified by as a child. `I am related to Gypsies in barns...?' The ultimate problem (as I see it) with Strauss is how could he have turned into a quintessential reactionary, when his childhood and youth were peppered with events like these?]
The other thing that would help make these war accounts more real is a brief description of the location---if you've been there or know it. From the first volume of Carell, I imagine Russia to look like the US midwest, mostly flat, low rolling hills, small towns connected by long rail lines, an occasional forest in otherwise agricultural dull-drums.. I got the same impression from Turgenev's Sportsman's Sketchbook which reminded me more of Mark Twain than just about anybody except maybe short sketchs of Stephan Crane.
CG