6 SOMERVILLE MAGAZINE
Beyond Good and Evil:
Alexander Starritt discusses ‘We Germans’ In 2021, Alexander Starritt won the Dayton Peace Prize for his second novel We Germans. He joined us to discuss the challenge of depicting the realities of war and why he donated his prize money to fund a new sanctuary scholarship at Somerville.
O
ne day in the early 1960s, Alexander Starritt’s mother and grandparents jumped from a moving train into West Berlin. In doing so, the family began a journey familiar to millions of displaced people today, leading from the precarious, hand-medown existence of the refugee to a settled, if unrecognisable, life in a new world. However, when I meet Alexander Starritt to discuss We Germans, he is keen to emphasise that it’s the history leading up to that fateful leap which dominates his second novel – as well as the dangerous tendency of history to repeat itself unless individuals make a concerted effort to do things differently.
We Germans considers what happens when human beings kick out the supports under the edifice of civilisation.
We Germans is written as a letter from a German soldier to his grandson, recalling his years on the Eastern front. It’s inspired by the experiences of Starritt’s own grandfather, beginning when the narrator, Meissner, is drafted into the Wehrmacht as an aspiring 19 year-old scientist. He spends four long years evading death as a soldier and three more confined to the gulag. The letter focuses, however, on the autumn of 1944, when Meissner’s regiment has dissolved and the Germans, in retreat from a rapidly advancing Russian Army, have all but lost the war, their “mental, physical and moral disintegration almost complete.”
Highlighting the moral as well as physical and mental disintegration of the German troops is not a means by which to attenuate guilt, Starritt tells me. His grandfather’s generation knew their consciences would always be burdened by what they had seen and done. Instead, We Germans seeks to provide a layered meditation on what happens to human beings when they have, as Starritt writes, “kicked out the supports under the edifice of civilisation.” Can anyone ever be reconciled to the barbarism of the Eastern Front, where seven out of eight of all Germany’s soldier deaths in World War Two occurred? And how much guilt should a person bear if his country succumbed to an ideology as evil as Nazism, even though he never professed it himself? In order to handle such difficult questions, Starritt faced a challenge: how would he prevent the reader from dismissing the events that occurred as those of another time or a different people? The answer to maintaining the reader’s empathy, Starritt explains, came from his literary hero, Tolstoy. “He’s the master of introducing detail that is non-essential to the plot, but fundamental to giving the fictional world its texture.” In order to maintain that level of detail, Starritt tells me, he read endless diaries and letters,
