Our battalion commander
Our battalion commander ( Russian Наш комбат / Nasch kombat ) is a story by the Russian writer Daniil Granin , which appeared in 1968 in issue 4 of the Petrozavodsk literary magazine Север ( Sever - The North ). In 1970 Volk und Welt published the German translation by Thomas Reschke in Berlin .
The hero story - image of the best of all battalion skommandeure, clever and fearless as Tschapaj - is a reconstruction of the truth wrong. The commander senselessly sent many boys to the grave. So the narrator only has a summary: The attack was poorly prepared. "Our courage turned out to be stupid."
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In winter of the year 1942, that battalion of the Red Army , which is named in the text does not specify the Germans at Pulkovo access to on a front section of four and kilometers with 147 man Leningrad blocked. Decades later, the battalion commander made a site visit with three of his soldiers at the time - including the first-person narrator. All those involved in the war are drawn. Everyone got something. One was hit in the same leg twice and the other survived a headshot. The relatives are sick of the veterans, these outsiders, being sick. In spite of all this, the war experience does not let go of the four “day trippers” to the observatory .
The commander had inspected “his” section of the front several times in previous years. As a father figure, the battalion commander enjoys unreserved respect from the veterans accompanying him. Often times, all the participants in the small expedition had already smoked their heroism in front of the Leningraders on the day of victory in 1941/42. Now their commander at the time opens their eyes. Apparently the victims in the assault on the German positions could have been largely avoided if the detour via a remote ravine to a vulnerable position of the enemy had been chosen. However, the Russians ran head-on "into the targeted MPi fire" of the Germans. The heroic past is over. Because the assumed MG bunkers with reinforced concrete domes did not even exist. The three soldiers do not want to hear the late self-accusation of their highly esteemed commander, who complains "... that was carelessness ... eighteen dead, thirty wounded". And yet, when they are strolling down the Nevsky with their wives again after the short excursion , “alarmingly bullets whistle up in the treetops”. Even a quarter of a century later, the blockade experience cannot be shaken off. At the time, machine-gun locks were kept warm on the body in the freezing frost. "The skin stuck to the frozen lock." And a comrade was shot in the stomach ...
German-language first edition
- Daniil Granin: Our battalion commander. P. 5–85 In: Our battalion commander. The place for the monument . Two novels. People and world. Spectrum series 27. Berlin 1970, 146 pages (used edition)
Web links
The text in Russian
Remarks
- ↑ For example, the commander had given a scout his own food ration (Edition used, p. 44 center).
- ↑ The first-person narrator describes the view of the encircled Russians: “From here, the Germans could overlook our hunger, our lack of people, our meager trench life, our lack of opportunities to retreat. They could quietly wait until we died, according to their calculations we should have surrendered long ago, should have died, lost our minds, lapsed into cannibalism. "(Edition used, p. 53, 10. Zvo)
- ↑ The first-person narrator tells “funny” stories of the glorification of the defenders of Leningrad - for example, a half-starved Russian attacker does not throw the hand grenade into the German shelter , because there he finds a luxuriously set table: What a shame about the good food and drink! (Edition used, p. 35 below and p. 37 below)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Russian Sewer - The North
- ↑ Russian note on the first edition Север , anno 1968, issue 4, pp. 7–68
- ↑ Edition used, p. 4
- ↑ Edition used, p. 73, 5th Zvu
- ↑ Edition used, p. 66, 4th Zvu
- ↑ Edition used, p. 85, 2nd Zvu
- ↑ Edition used, p. 51, 8th Zvu
- ↑ Edition used, p. 47, 10th Zvu