The German War (80 page)

In December, Stölten found himself suddenly reunited with Dorothee, thanks to an unexpected spell of leave. It was strange to be back in his beloved atelier in the Zehlendorf attic, which his parents had kept just as he had left it. He still wanted to paint, even though ‘the paintbrush has become as foreign to me as a fish-fork to an Eskimo’. And he was painfully conscious too of how little his artistic knowledge and skills had developed in the previous year. It felt to him that ‘my goal does not lie on the path which I have been forced to follow for years’. Seeing Dorothee reaffirmed that life was worth living, but it also threw him into a new crisis, as he contemplated – for the first time – his return to civilian life after the war. How could he ask Dorothee to share the life of a penniless artist in a future that would be ‘dark and poor in hope and full of unheard-of poverty’? For the first time, Stölten seems to have been contemplating Germany’s defeat. ‘After this war will soon come, perhaps in twenty years, another, which is already faintly discernible today,’ he warned Dorothee after his return to the front in his first post-leave letter. ‘In any case, the life of this generation seems to me to be measured by catastrophes.’ Yet imagining the catastrophe to come did not mean that he was ready to capitulate yet.
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Rescuing possessions from a destroyed house in Cologne, 1943.

Hamburg firestorm – the living: in the Reeperbahn bunker, July 1943.

Hamburg firestorm – the dead: concentration camp prisoner gathering up remains, August 1943.

Evacuation: bidding farewell at Hagen railway station, July 1943.

Girls from Hagen on the Baltic coast.

Commemorating the dead of the Hamburg firestorm, 21 November 1943.

Female anti-aircraft personnel repairing a search light.

Flight from East Prussia across the Frische Nehrung, January/February 1945.

Death march to Dachau: dead concentration camp prisoners on a train, April 1945.

Teenage soldiers surrender at Veckerhagen.

Eva and Victor Klemperer outside their home in Dölzschen in Saxony, c.1940.

Red Army Lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand and Berlin girlfriend.