Soldier X

“I dreamed of being one of them. A hero. In my mind, I saw myself leading an attack on an enemy position. Singlehandedly, I would destroy it. But then I would be wounded—most likely in the shoulder. Beautiful nurses would take care of me. Officers would pin medals on me, praise my courage, and thank me for what I had done for my country.”

X’s childish dream of being a hero for Germany is entirely a fantasy, and the rest of the novel systematically contradicts and undermines each piece of it. He does not lead an attack nor destroy the enemy but watches and hides as the enemy destroys them; he is grievously wounded in ways that permanently damage his appearance and health; he betrays his country, and they betray him. The only true piece of his fantasy is the beautiful nurse, and even she is a real person, unlike his idealized, unreal fantasy of nurses as objects.

“Behind us was another group of boys. In a nasal voice, one was declaring that the Jews across the way were an ‘exception,’ that most Jews, as we had been told by the government, had simply been ‘relocated’ to work camps and were well treated.”

This passage explores the fascist propaganda of the Nazi regime. While the death camps and horrific treatment of the Jews were kept secret from the average German citizen, Nazi propaganda—and direct speeches from Hitler—referenced explicitly that Jews were to be “exterminated,” making the boy’s denial even more unrealistic. Still, this passage importantly establishes that people will go to many lengths to deny their country’s evil deeds. The boys are strung between the acknowledgment of horror and patriotism, and even before they have seen war, none of them know how to navigate the demands of both.

“And you are here to defend your country—for it is now we who are on the defensive. You are here to protect your parents, your brothers and sisters, and your grandparents—your people, your Volk. They are depending on you. If the Bolsheviks—the Russian communist pigs—break through, then they will win the war, and horror beyond imagining will befall Germany, your homeland.”

This passage strikes to the heart of how propaganda is the main thing that makes war work. The soldiers must believe that their families will face horrific conditions if they fail, even though these conditions are already befalling their families due to the war itself. The soldiers must be nationalists to be effective, and Dobelmann’s speech is intended to remind them of what is at stake. What he knows, however, and what all the boys are soon to learn, is that horror beyond imagination is already real.

“The tea was weak, without flavor; the bread was ersatz—made of flour mixed with sawdust—and was difficult to swallow; but the soup—of cabbage, carrot tops, and chunks of meat—was thick and good. Ravenous, I downed it all within short order, as did the others, and we were pleased when we were offered more.”

Ersatz is a German word for substitute that became common during the World Wars due to shortages, with some bread “recipes” including up to 20% sawdust—called “tree flour”—to make up for the lack of actual flour in encampments. These inferior goods often led to malnutrition and disease. This passage highlights the lack of supplies present in encampments and shows that even positive experiences during war have dark sides since the enjoyable soup is secretly made of rat meat.

“Dobelmann and other Feldwebels were in charge of us, directing us as we toiled away on the grubby, backbreaking chore. We scooped bucketfuls of brown water from the trenches, restacked sandbags that had fallen, and filled more bags—gunnysacks—with mud. We were soon sopping wet and filthy. Of the Felds, only Dobelmann got his hands dirty, so to speak, and actually helped with the work.”

This passage is vital to the book’s characterization of Dobelmann. While he has been strongly affected by the war, he sees himself as an equal to the boys, an unusual position within the decaying German army. His willingness to help them do menial labor shows his commitment to the cause of the war. This also contributes to the Ethical Ambiguities and the Cost of Survival During War in the book—even though Dobelmann fights for German nationalism and the Nazis, he still maintains certain morals in his treatment of others that many soldiers do not.

“Your most important weapon is your brain—your mind power. Things may get very rough—far more than you think possible. When that happens, and you’re so scared you think you are going to lose your mind—don’t! Do not lose control. If you do—if you permit that to happen—then you will be dead.”

This quote serves as the thesis of X’s survival and, by extension, the thesis of what makes humanity strong. X’s flexibility and ability to see himself occupying multiple identities gives him a strength the other soldiers do not have. Additionally, he takes Dobelmann’s words and expands them beyond their original meaning—while Dobelmann means (at least on the surface) for the soldiers to use their minds to keep fighting, X takes it and transforms it into a mantra of personal survival.

“I suddenly felt sick; my legs began to tremble. I sat down on a fallen sandbag in the trench, and found myself looking at Hals again—at his mud-spattered eyes. His mouth was slightly open, as though he were about to say something. Hanging from a bootlace around his neck was a piece of shrapnel.”

Hals’s death shakes X deeply, and he struggles to view his body as anything but alive—even anthropomorphizing his corpse into waiting to say something in this passage. While many of the deaths affect X, this is the death with the most narrative significance, representing the final loss of hope and connection within the German trenches. If even Hal cannot make it out alive—and X is not there to witness his actual death—then narratively, none of them can.

“The man, the German officer I had left for dead on the other side of the blockhouse, pulled himself into view. His face covered with grime and soot, his legs seemingly useless, he was dragging himself along the ground like some sort of fire-blackened, badly injured alligator. He looked up at me, and at first I didn’t realize what he was seeing was the enemy—and perhaps his executioner.”

The simile X uses—comparing the soldier to an alligator—further explores the dehumanization of soldiers during war. After injury and the brutality of the fight, the soldier no longer resembles a person but an animal. Also, like an injured animal, the soldier lashes out at the first person he perceives as a threat to save his own life. The motif of clothes functions here as a shorthand for allegiance—X, by donning the Russian uniform, has erased allegiance to Germany, whether intentional or not.

“Nikolai apologized for laughing at me—not once, but several times, as though he had committed some great sin.”

This simple sentence helps characterize Nikolai as kind and understanding, expanding the characterizations of the Russian soldiers into far more than just enemies—they are humans, just like X and the Germans, capable of caring deeply about even people they have just met. X, who already does not see himself as human, is confused by this presentation, not because Nikolai is Russian, but because he does not understand why he deserves to be cared for. This passage also presents irony—even though they do not know X is German, the Russians are far kinder to him than the Germans ever were.

“If it hadn’t been for Nikolai, I don’t think I would have made it. Nikolai, who had a wife and two young sons back home, was to me like the father I had never known. He talked to me a lot and always had a smile and an encouraging word for me. Another thing I received from him was a new name. I hated being called Aleksandr or Alex, and told him so. He began calling me X.”

This passage importantly contextualizes X’s name as both an erasure of his past identities and a new beginning. Nikolai’s role as a father figure makes his “renaming” of X even more significant—rather than X choosing to erase his own identity, he is being given a new one, and it has genuine care behind it. X is a name with hope attached to it, not simply a name of despair; it represents Nikolai’s recognition of X’s desire to become a new person.

“I felt a strange bond with this man. He was keeping everything locked up inside. Like me, for his own reasons, he did not want to—or could not—talk about what he was dealing with inside. Explaining what he was thinking and feeling was impossible. And there was no one to whom he could turn for help.”

Throughout the novel, X experiences empathy for a variety of other people, regardless of their nationality or lot in life. This passage highlights his empathy and similarity to other soldiers but more generally conveys the isolation any veteran or soldier feels. While all the soldiers have experienced horror, the effect of each trauma is unique to everyone, and in a general culture of masculinity and repressed emotion (as well as minimal support), it is even more difficult to process disabling and traumatic occurrences.

“Since coming to Alreni, supply trucks and other vehicles brought more wounded to the schoolhouse hospital on a fairly regular basis. They suddenly stopped coming. The reason, we learned, was that the Germans had retaken a large area of Western Russia, and this had cut off all transport into Alreni. Now the hospital was running out of almost everything, and the patients began to suffer.”

This passage illuminates how the effects of war bleed out into everything, even if the front lines are nowhere nearby. Even though the violence has not yet reached Alreni, a different form of violence—deprivation—affects them due to German encroachment. Additionally, X delivers this passage very flatly and factually, showing his neutrality. While once he might have been more in favor of German victory, now, he simply wants the people around him and himself to survive.

“The letters were usually very simple and about the most ordinary sorts of things. The only difficult part about writing them was the need for the soldiers to inform their loved ones that they had been wounded, and trying to be cheerful and reassuring about it. But how does a young man tell his girl that he can no longer father children, an aunt and uncle that he is so crippled he can no longer help out on the farm, or parents he is so disfigured they will probably not recognize him?”

This quote highlights the range of human experiences X witnesses during the war, and the style conveys X’s sympathy and understanding for them. X sees the humanity inherent to the injured soldiers, conveying that their lives have so much more trajectory and value beyond the immediate realities of the war—yet the war has permanently changed those futures due to the physical effect on their bodies.

“Papa got in trouble with the communists again. He wrote a pamphlet about Stalin betraying any of the good in communism. He wrote under a false name, but they caught him anyway.”

Many communists or socialists in Russia were against Stalin, who they believed perpetuated a cult of personality; the implication in Tamara’s description of her father is that he was one of these people. Many pamphlets and leaflets like her father’s were written during Stalin’s rule to condemn Stalin’s regime, which claimed the lives of millions due to famine, execution, gulags, and other causes.

“More shots rang out; Katerina seemed to swoon, to collapse almost gently, ladylike onto her arm. Her eyes closed; blood pooled out from beneath her.”

This passage sharply contrasts with the gruesome, violent deaths of most of the other characters and highlights the way the book portrays gender. The women in the novel are shown to be strong, but in most cases, their beauty supersedes their strength and even their humanity. Katerina dies like a doll, reinforcing her objectification within the narrative; even dying does not affect her greatest value: her beauty.

“My palms were wet with perspiration, my mouth dry. I was scared to death of them. I wore a Russian shirt, had a Russian pack on my back, and carried a Russian Simonova rifle. My own countrymen had become my enemy.”

This quote exemplifies the symbol of clothing in the novel. No matter what X’s actual allegiance is, the clothing he wears determines how people treat him. Even if he is “German,” Russian clothing marks him as Russian, and vice versa. X’s ability to move between lines is partially dependent on external marks of identity, which become even stricter during the confusion of war.

“I looked down at my identity number, stenciled in blue ink on the top of my orderly’s smock. ‘I am,’ I said, ‘Aleksandr Dukhanov, medical orderly—temporary, Fifth Service Regiment, Southwest Sector.’”

Although X eventually tells Tamara the full truth about his identity, his initial response proves how much his false identity has become real to him. While this is, in part, an effort to deflect and hide himself from her, it also shows that he no longer sees Erik as the truth and X/Aleksandr as the lie—instead, both are real parts of himself. X is the synthesis of two different people and two different identities, not simply a new version of Erik.

“Puttering up the roadway came a strange-looking car. The thing was small, humpbacked in shape, the body domed in corrugated metal.”

The description of the car suggests the Volkswagen Beetle, but the Beetle, though invented for the Nazi German population, did not go into production until after the war ended. Many other cars popular in Germanic countries during this time had a rounded, Beetle-like shape, however, often to accommodate small engines—the Steyr 50 and the Adler 2.5 Liter, for example. Regardless of the make and model, Elena Novak’s car is a sign of wealth and relative protection from the war.

“An emaciated stranger looked back at me. I was extremely thin and covered with deep bruises and scratches, and my forehead, belly, and knee were scarred from wounds. My hair was long, and the stubble on my chin and cheeks had filled out and become a sparse, goatee-like beard. It was a face I had never seen before. Especially the eyes; they did not look like mine at all. They had a tiredly alert, hardened look, and seemed as though they belonged to someone much older. They were the eyes of a man, not a boy.”

Other than being blond, this is the first major description of X in the book, and it emphasizes his deterioration due to the war. Childhood has vanished for X both in experience and appearance; now, he resembles something between a man and something wild and unkempt. The division of his scars between his forehead, belly, and knee also provides clear imagery that no part of his body is spared from the brutality of the war.

“She began talking about her son Gunter. He had been so plagued with guilt that, upon learning he was to be shot, he had not only accepted it with equanimity, but had expressed the feeling that he deserved to die.” 

Gunter and X’s guilt reflects survivor’s guilt, which is a common symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). People experiencing survivor’s guilt blame themselves for living when other people did not. Although survivor’s guilt is presented here as a symptom experienced by the Germans, it was ironically first diagnosed among Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. This book presents it as a universal human response to war.

“The war had driven them crazy with rage, bitterness, and confusion. The Germans—especially the veteran soldiers—had been certain they would conquer the world. They had been led to believe—as I had—that nothing else was possible. But the impossible had happened: they were losing, being driven back on all fronts.”

X here describes “victory disease,” a phenomenon where success in battle dooms a military to overconfidence, leading to bad decisions and failure. The German army, while effective, is often considered to have suffered from their success and overconfidence, dooming themselves through their assault on Russia. This also, however, depicts the overconfidence that comes from fascism and the single-minded belief in their superiority.

“From the outside it looked in good shape, but as we pushed our way inside we found that, beyond the front wall, hardly anything remained of the place. What had once been the lobby now consisted of busted chairs and other junk floating in a huge, water-filled crater. Above what was left of the registration desk hung a banister from which broken spindles dangled.”

The persistent imagery of destruction and decay helps build the different settings of wartime Europe, but this image highlights the absolute wreckage near the end of the war. The façade of the hotel parallels the façade of Nazi Germany—while they might have been able to look like a functioning country from the outside, they were wrecked and near-collapse on the inside.

“One of the nurses left; the mirror she returned with was a feminine one, of the kind a lady would have on her dressing table. It was heart-shaped and had a pink handle and frame, and a red backing. For a long while I stared at the plastic red back of the thing.”

The description of the mirror X first sees his destroyed appearance in builds irony. Masculinity and femininity have no real role in war since destruction comes for both, leaving both to survive in strange places. The mirror also symbolizes the relative wealth and success of the American army since a plastic mirror would not have survived anywhere else in the book.