In 2013, while helping her mother, Ingrid, comb through family possessions, Karin Wagner came across a large folio handwritten in German in the back of a dresser drawer. When Karin asked her mother what the document was, Ingrid replied, “Oh, that is your grandfather’s Great War memoir.”Schiller was a seventeen-year-old student in Bromberg, Prussia, when World War I broke out in August 1914. He enlisted in the German army and was assigned to an artillery unit on the Eastern Front. From 1915 to 1917, Schiller saw action in what is now Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. After the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 and Russia’s withdrawal from the war, Schiller was transferred to the Western Front. He arrived in time for Germany’s last great offensive in the west, where the attempt to break the Allied lines included what is believed to be the single greatest artillery bombardment in human history up to that point. After the German retreat and Armistice, Schiller reentered military service in the Freikorps, German mercenary groups fighting in former German territory in Eastern Europe, where the conflict dragged on even after the Treaty of Versailles. Schiller left military service in May 1920.
Hans Schiller’s Kriegserinnerungen (literally, “memories of war”) was written in 1928 and based on diaries, since lost, that Schiller kept during the war. A Tale of Two Fronts, an edition of the memoir with historical context and explanatory notes, provides a vivid first-person account of German army life during World War I. It is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the experiences of common soldiers in World War I.
About the Author :
Frederic Krome is professor of history, University of Cincinnati Clermont College, and the author of The Jewish Hospital and Cincinnati Jews in Medicine and Fighting the Future War: An Anthology of Science Fiction War Stories, 1914–1945
Gregory D. Loving is professor of philosophy, University of Cincinnati Clermont College. His articles have appeared in Philosophical Studies in Education, Academe, Interdisciplinary Humanities, and other publications.
Karin Wagner is CEO, founder, and executive director of the Neigh Savers Foundation, a horse rescue organization in California.
Brian K. Feltman is associate professor of history, Georgia Southern University, a specialist in Germany in the World War I era, and the author of The Stigma of Surrender: German Prisoners, British Captors, and Manhood in the Great War and Beyond.
Review :
"A major discovery, Schiller's engaging and vivid memoir is historically important for three reasons: first, it provides a rare, first-person glimpse of German army life on the Eastern Front during the Great War; second, it offers an insider's account of the 1918 attack on the Chemin des Dames, Germany's last and best hope for victory in the west; and, third, it captures the chaos and brutality of the European 'long war, ' fueled by revolution and ethnic hatred, that extended beyond the armistice of November 11, 1918, and well into the early 1920s. The section on Schiller's service in the Freikorps, which involved little-known operations against Russian Bolsheviks and Poles, is exceptionally valuable."--Steven Trout, author of The Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Angel Fire: War, Remembrance, and an American Tragedy
"An extremely valuable account of World War I written by a German who principally served on the Eastern Front and went on to serve in the postwar chaos in Germany's eastern borderlands. Alongside the horrors of this world war, the plight of civilians are to the fore, notably starvation."--Jeremy Black, author of A Short History of War
"Schiller's First World War memoir reveals a youth growing up amid total war, and with cool candor offers rich details of the less familiar Eastern Front (ceaseless marches and artillery barrages of the early war; landscapes of Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia; a wintertime wolf attack; and starving cities), the more familiar Western Front (the exhausting last battles as Germany neared collapse), and postwar border conflicts in the Baltic region and the new border with Poland. This vivid testimony by turns confirms and challenges commonplaces in the evolving historiography on the experience of the First World War."--Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, author of War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I
"Schiller's memoir takes the reader from the heady days of the outbreak of war, to the last desperate attack on the Chemin des Dames, to the chaotic situation in the east in the aftermath of the war. A veteran of both the Eastern and Western Fronts, Schiller gives us an expansive look at the war as fought by a German artillerist. Although horrified by gruesomeness of modern warfare, he remains committed to the German cause while retaining a sense of humanity. Schiller is something of a cross between Erich Maria Remarque and Ernst Jünger."--Richard DiNardo, author of Imperial Germany and War, 1871-1918
"Schiller's gritty account will interest scholars and lay readers alike."--Choice
