Taoism says that "things will be reversed", Yi Xue says "Whether the extreme will come", Wilhelm's monologue in the beginning of the story "It is said that at the moment of death, everything around will return to peace". It's probably just the opposite. The story revolves around a pair of brothers, Wilhelm, a worthy soldier who has been honed into a young leader on the battlefield. The younger brother Friedhelm is only 20 years old. He is a bookworm in everyone's eyes. He is even considered a scholar who can hold a pen but can't hold a gun. There is no room for the weak in war. Everyone takes a different pose, becoming unable to recognize themselves as death approaches.
If it were me, I might cry a lot in my mother's loving eyes before I left, because I was afraid and didn't know if there was a future. Friedhelm likes the poems of Du Rimbaud and Jung, and anyone who loves to read can see what life is like. He immersed himself in rhythm poetry, enjoying private romantic space, and thinking about life made him look down on life. When the older brother said in high spirits that "war will make a man grow up", the younger brother said "war will also bring out the worst of us". Maybe he really saw what life was like, and Friedhelm chose to die to atone for the mistakes he made in order to survive.
Whether on the battlefield or in the fast-developing life, competition is increasingly cruel, and we can only choose to compete with cruelty. No one can escape the harshness of competition, just like the arrangement of fate.
Fate left Friedhelm alone on the battlefield, from a weak and emotional person who could even cry in the face of death to a Nazi soldier killed with a gun, his transformation is still as beautiful as a poem. Death is like a ghost on the battlefield, everywhere. When Friedhelm felt that death was always accompanied by no escape, he chose reason. Sensibility is the failure factor to imprison life, and poetic life should also be rendered with blood. Someone has to die, and he hopes that his comrades in the trench and himself can meet the sun tomorrow.
Two years after entering the war, before and after the Kursk tank battle, Friedhelm stood in the Greyhound Company as a more ferocious soldier than Captain Wilhelm. He can no longer count how many Soviet people he has killed like his comrades-in-arms, because he can't count them and dare not count them. Soldiers who are immersed in poetry are transformed for the sake of their comrades and their own lives. There is only one creed to survive on the battlefield, and that is killing.
Friedhelm didn't want to live after the war, every moment on the battlefield he had to run out of ammunition like a gun, in order to protect. The only way to protect his comrades was to slaughter Soviet soldiers, he had no choice, and the words "I'm sorry" were hidden in his heart. So his life became a poem, stained with the blood of others, and it also protected the lives of more people. This is completely in line with Schopenhauer's words, and the two extremes of human nature can often coexist. It is a pity that not everyone reads poetry, not everyone sees life clearly, but everyone sees the ferocity of Friedhelm. He had to carry the image of a greyhound on his back and recall the poetry in his heart.
In the spring of the Soviet Union, the space seems to be endless, the scenery that has never been seen before, the fields stretch to the end of the horizon, the sky is blue, and it is like the beauty that God wants to create with his own hands to fascinate us. Poetry and painting should always be resolved, just as spring should always be resolved, just as spring should always usher in a long winter. The Germans can no longer march viciously in the bitter winter, and the rout of the Eastern battlefield in World War II will not allow the fallacy of "the Third Reich to last forever". But no one dared to face failure, and more young people learned from Mein Kampf their arrogant ideas. In other words, death is not close to the throat, and the arrogant young German does not know how terrible death is.
Friedhelm's chance to redeem himself. On the eve of the German defeat, he and a few young soldiers met the Soviet army in the snow-capped mountains of the Soviet Union. He could not persuade his arrogant comrades to surrender, but he wanted the young soldiers to live. Friedhelm heard the world at peace amid the gunfire, and the young German soldier was finally terrified to see his death. They finally lay down their weapons and, as Friedhelm said, the Soviets will send them home. He finally redeemed the mistakes he made in order to survive with a poetic death.
That's when we were young, thinking that the future belongs to us, the whole world is in front of us, we just need to act, we are invincible, and then we gradually understand more. In the war, in the fall of everything, alive, sorry.
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