A novel that's hard to read at times but worthwhile for the perspective. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. For fans of WWII fiction.

I could not get into this book. I thought it would be something very different than it actually was. Thank you, however, for the opportunity to find out.

I have listed it as abandoned on Goodreads and will not rate it as I don't think I should since I did not read the book completely.

Well, unfortunately, Net Galley made me put in a rating.

An interesting view of the war after WW II for the view of a young German soldier. Worth the read.

Published in Germany in 2015; published in translation by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on August 29, 2017

On his deathbed, Walter’s mind returns to the war. Walter was a dairy farmer, just turning 18 and working for the Reich Food Estate thanks to his inability to shoot straight during his term in the Hitler Youth Corps. Unfortunately for Walter, the war is nearing an end and Hitler needs bodies to move forward and die, followed by more bodies who move forward and die, so Walter is drafted and sent to Hungary, where the Waffen SS is trying to stop the Russian advance. But because he has a driver’s license, Walter ferries supplies rather than fighting at the front. He fires only one shot during the war, but it is a shot he will never forget.

After Walter has a moment of heroism, he is rewarded with the opportunity to search for his cruel father’s grave. That quest takes him even closer to the Russian front, where the consequences of war are stark. Hopelessness pervades the novel. Civilians lose their homes and towns, deserters flee the front only to face execution. The Germans are fighting “a war for cynics, who don’t believe in anything but might makes right” — the same thinking that starts every war. The war pits enemy against enemy but also friend against friend when Walter is ordered to be “stronger than your own scruples.”

The horrors of war are seen from the perspective of soldiers fighting and dying for the losing side. Some of those horrors are inflicted by the soldiers, following orders from officers, on civilians suspected of being partisan, or just to satisfy their blood lust. And some horrors are inflicted on soldiers by their own officers, as the story illustrates in its most dramatic moment. Walter comes of age with an act that no teenager (or adult) should be forced to undertake, and then swallows that moment, concealing it deep within his being for the rest of his life — a fact that is revealed in the opening pages and again, indirectly, through song lyrics that Walter's son recounts in an epilog.

One of the story’s themes is that life moves on, even as individual lives end. Walter believes there will always be a need for milkers, but learns at the war’s end that he will soon be displaced by machines, his three years of training leading only to personal obsolescence. But change is inevitable and the brief time that Walter serves in the war brings about many changes in his life and country. Some of those changes he will live with until he dies, will make him welcome his own eventual death.

To Die in Spring is written (or translated) in smooth prose with no wasted words. It tells a small story at the end of a big war, developing the central character in depth and providing enough context in the atmosphere of war and supporting characters to make the story both convincing and compelling. To Die in Spring isn’t quite as atmospheric as All Quiet on the Western Front, but it conveys similar truths about war's impact on soldiers with nearly the same power.

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I didn't care for this book. I tried to like it but found myself thumbing through just trying to get to the end

In 1915, an iconic recruitment ad appeared in Britain in which a child asks, “Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?” The ad was meant to shame men who didn’t join up and had nothing to tell. In reality, a lot of kids didn’t hear what their fathers did in either of the world wars because it was too horrifying or sad or made their fathers feel guilty. In To Die in Spring, by Ralf Rothmann (translated by Shaun Whiteside), a son asks his father to write down what he did during the last months of the war, after Walter Urban was forcibly recruited in to the Waffen-SS. Walter never does and his son never knows what his dad did. But we do.

After a short chapter in which Walter’s son describes his father’s post-war life and silence, we are taken back to the last months of World War II. Walter has managed to avoid being conscripted so far because he does essential work on a dairy farm in northwestern Germany. All this changes when, one night at a town party, the commander of a group of Waffen-SS makes it impossible for Walter and the other able-bodied men of the town to sit out the war any longer.

Walter lands a cushy gig after three weeks of basic training. He drives whatever truck they put in front of him so that he delivers injured men to hospitals, new troops to the ever retreating front, or supplies to wherever they’re needed. There’s a stark contrast between Walter, who is barely 17, and the soldiers who have been fighting for years. The soldiers who fought in Russia are brutal; Walter witnesses or hears about them committing more than one atrocity. I don’t think Walter had any illusions about the war, but he was rather isolated on his dairy farm. He still believes—at least at the beginning—in honor and duty. Walter might have been able to talk to his son about those months, if it weren’t for the act that scars him so deeply that he would rather spend most of his life not talking to his family than speak about.

Children who ask their parents or grandparents about their war experiences are never prepared for the rawness of the memories. Even children who’ve read about World War II, the Korean War, or the Vietnam War may not be ready to hear a first person account of killing another human being. And yet, one has to wonder if Walter had written down his experiences, he might have been able to come to terms with what his commanding officers had made him do.

To Die in Spring is one of the better novels I’ve read about World War II. It doesn’t feel as though the author was checking off genre tropes or deliberately trying to write a tearjerker. At times, I was reminded of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front by this novel’s bleak depiction of a defeated army that isn’t allowed to rest yet but desperately wants to stop.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration.