We Germans

Local Description

When a young British man asks his German grandfather what it was like to fight on the wrong side of the war, the question is initially met with irritation and silence. But after the old man's death, a long letter to his grandson is found among his things.

That letter is this book. In it, he relates the experiences of an unlikely few days on the Eastern Front - at a moment when he knows not only that Germany is going to lose the war, but that it deserves to. He writes about his everyday experience amid horror, confusion and great bravery, and he asks himself what responsibility he bears for the circumstances he found himself in. As he tries to find an answer he can live with, we hear from his grandson what kind of man he became in the seventy years after the war.

WE GERMANS is a fundamentally human novel that grapples with the most profound of questions about guilt, shame and responsibility - questions that remain as live today as they have always been.

Review: A remarkable and audacious novel that is harrowingly real and, at the same time, asks the most searching questions about men at war - William Boyd

An impressively realistic novel of German soldiers on the eastern front, raising the fundamental questions of individual and collective guilt - Antony Beevor

This may be only his second novel, but Alexander Starritt is already showing striking signs of ambition ... a visceral examination of guilt, collective and individual, centred on a small group of bedraggled German soldiers on the eastern front . . . individual episodes are vividly done, and the book has a gritty realism. Its arguments about the equivocal nature of guilt on the battlefield can be arresting - The Times

Daringly, in what is only his second novel, Alexander Starritt climbs into the skin of one of the most appalling archetypes of the 20th century: a Nazi soldier as he marauds across eastern Europe during the second world war - Financial Times

A stirring work that reads like a developing photograph, the lines slowly clarifying, the light steadily emerging from the dark - TLS

[A] thoughtful, unsettling chronicle . . . a fascinatingly enigmatic addition to the literature of Germany's coming to terms with the past - Publishers Weekly

Starritt's prose is riveting. It unspools like a roll of film-raw, visceral, and propulsive, rich with sensory detail and unsparing in its depictions of cruelty . . . We Germans feels eerily timely . . . Starritt's daring work challenges us to lay bare our histories, to seek answers from the past, and to be open to perspectives starkly different from our own - New York Times

Author Biography: Alexander Starritt was born half-Scots, half-German in 1985, and grew up in the Scottish north-east. Educated in Edinburgh and at Oxford, he translates fiction, poetry and academia from German, including Stefan Zweig's A Chess Story. He has reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator and the Mail on Sunday, and his short fiction has been shortlisted for the Paris Literary Prize. His first novel, The Beast, was published in 2017.