Das stille Sterben … ” Feldpostbriefe von Konrad Jarausch aus Polen und Russland 1939–1942. Edited by Konrad H. Jarausch and Klaus Jochen Arnold. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh. 2008. Pp. 387. Cloth €29.90. ISBN 978-3-506-7654-8

摘要

eltanschauungen. A further one could be as travel writing. The editors of this important, comprehensive documentation employ it for the first two purposes; limited samples for the third are below.nThe book is organized in three parts. After an explanation of the editing process, the prolific historian Konrad H. Jarausch (pp. 20–44) outlines the search for his father, Konrad Jarausch. The latter died while on military duty, so that he never knew the son. The younger Jarausch reveals his mother's attempt to expand the departed's reputation, and some of his own anguish at being expected to match a mythical father, including career choice pressures to follow his father's theological studies. In his “Vatersuche,” the younger Jarausch traces his father's slow distancing from the Nazi regime during 1941, as well as the son's distancing from his parents' values. They had been fairly typical middle-class Protestants who approved National Socialist expansionism even if they had reservations about its attitude toward Christianity. The father-search led to “no uncritical hero worship” but to a “critical appreciation” (p. 44), with the son asserting that the father went “from perpetrator to sympathizer [vom Mittäter zum Mitleidenenden].” Unfortunately, no examples are provided on where the son stood on the issues of his day (Vietnam, Iraq, cluster bombs) when he contrasts his “transnational-democratic” values to the nationalist German failings of his father's generation (p. 45). Though a footnote mentions the father's membership in the Nazi teacher organization as well as welfare and air defense leagues, party membership seems not to have been checked, and the delay in publication is only partially explained. Some 270 pages of lengthy letters precede a list of Konrad Jarausch's publications and a bibliography. Interspersed are three sections of very relevant photos and too few maps.