.
Meanwhile the sun was coming up from the horizon of green, and gradually the hoarse call of birds was becoming shriller and more lively. The sun seemed to beat down hammer-like on the cast-iron plate of the lagoons. A shiver ran along the water with a kind of metallic vibration and spread to the surface of the pools, just as the sound of a violin spreads like a shiver along the arms of a musician. By the roadside, and here and there in the cornfields, were overturned cars, burned trucks, disemboweled armored cars, abandoned guns, all twisted by explosions. But nowhere a man, nothing living, not even a corpse, not even any carrion. For miles and miles there was only dead iron. Dead bodies of machines, hundreds upon hundreds of miserable steel carcasses. The stench of putrifying rose from the fields and the lagoons. The cockpit of a plane was sticking up from the mud in the middle of a pool. The German cross was clearly discernible: it was a Messerschmitt. The smell of rotting iron won over the smell of men and horses -- that smell of old wars; even the smell of grain and the penetrating, sweet scent of sunflowers vanished amid that sour stench of scorched iron, rotting steel, dead machinery. The clouds of dust lifted by the wind from the far ends of the vast plain carried no smell of organic matter with them but a smell of iron filing. And all the time, while I was pushing into the heart of the plain and approached Nemirovskoye, the smell of iron and of petrol grew stronger in the dusty air; even the grass seemed to be permeated with that undefinable, strong and exhilarating smell of gasoline, as if the smell of men and beasts, the smell of trees, of grass and mud was overcome by that odor of gasoline and scorched iron.
*
It had been raining for days and days and the sea of Ukrainian mud slowly spread beyond the horizon. It was the high tide of autumn in the Ukraine. The deep black mud was everywhere swelling like dough when yeast begins to work. The heavy smell of mud was borne by the wind from the end of the vast plain and mingled with the odor of uncut grain left to rot in the furrows, and with the sweetish stale odor of sunflowers. One by one the seeds dropped out of the black pupils of the sunflowers, one by one fell the long yellow eyelashes from around the large, round eyes, blank and void like the eyes of the blind.
The German soldiers returning from the front line, when they reached the village squares, dropped their rifles on the ground in silence. They were coated from head to foot in black mud, their beards were long, their hollow eyes looked like the eyes of the sunflowers, blank and dull. The officers gazed at the soldiers and at the rifles lying on the ground, and kept silent. By then the lightning war, the Blitzkrieg, was over, the Dreizigjährigerblitzkrieg, the thirty year lightning war, had begun. The winning war was over, the losing war had begun. I saw the white stain of fear growing in the dull eyes of German officers and soldiers. I saw it spreading little by little, gnawing at the pupils, singeing the roots of the eyelashes and making the eyelashes drop one by one, like the long yellow eyelashes of the sunflowers. When Germans become afraid, when that mysterious German fear begins to creep into their bones, they always arouse a special horror and pity. Their appearance is miserable, their cruelty sad, their courage silent and hopeless. That is when the Germans become wicked. I repented being a Christian. I felt ashamed of being a Christian.
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Abandoned Soviet KW-1 tank, Ukraine: photographer unknown, 1942 (Deutsche Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive)
*
It had been raining for days and days and the sea of Ukrainian mud slowly spread beyond the horizon. It was the high tide of autumn in the Ukraine. The deep black mud was everywhere swelling like dough when yeast begins to work. The heavy smell of mud was borne by the wind from the end of the vast plain and mingled with the odor of uncut grain left to rot in the furrows, and with the sweetish stale odor of sunflowers. One by one the seeds dropped out of the black pupils of the sunflowers, one by one fell the long yellow eyelashes from around the large, round eyes, blank and void like the eyes of the blind.
The German soldiers returning from the front line, when they reached the village squares, dropped their rifles on the ground in silence. They were coated from head to foot in black mud, their beards were long, their hollow eyes looked like the eyes of the sunflowers, blank and dull. The officers gazed at the soldiers and at the rifles lying on the ground, and kept silent. By then the lightning war, the Blitzkrieg, was over, the Dreizigjährigerblitzkrieg, the thirty year lightning war, had begun. The winning war was over, the losing war had begun. I saw the white stain of fear growing in the dull eyes of German officers and soldiers. I saw it spreading little by little, gnawing at the pupils, singeing the roots of the eyelashes and making the eyelashes drop one by one, like the long yellow eyelashes of the sunflowers. When Germans become afraid, when that mysterious German fear begins to creep into their bones, they always arouse a special horror and pity. Their appearance is miserable, their cruelty sad, their courage silent and hopeless. That is when the Germans become wicked. I repented being a Christian. I felt ashamed of being a Christian.
Curzio Malaparte (born Kurt Erich Sickert, 1898-1957): from Kaputt,1943, translated from the Italian by Cesare Foligno
Abandoned Soviet KW-1 tank, Ukraine: photographer unknown, 1942 (Deutsche Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive)
Destroyed aircraft, Ukraine, Soviet Union, beyond the Dnieper: photographer unknown, 2 September 1941 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv/German Federal Archive)
Burning Soviet T-34 tank, Ukraine: photographer unknown, 1941 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv/German Federal Archive)
Burning houses mark the struggles of the 6th army in the advance toward Stalingrad: photo by Horst Grund, 21 June 1942 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive)
Wreckage of Soviet Polikarpov I-153, during the Russian retreat: photo by Horst Grund, 21 June 1942 (Deutsche Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive)
Abandoned Soviet KW-1 tank on the steppes near Stalingrad: photo by Horst Grund, August 1942 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv /German Federal Archive)
Abandoned Soviet T-34 tanks: photo by Horst Grund, 21 June, 1942 (Deutschse Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive)
![File:Bundesarchiv Bild 169-0016, Sowjetischer Panzer T-34.jpg]()
Abandoned Soviet T-34 tanks, during the Russian retreat: photo by Horst Grund, 21 June, 1942 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv /German Federal Archive)
Abandoned Soviet T-34 tanks, during the Russian retreat: photo by Horst Grund, 21 June, 1942 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv /German Federal Archive)
Junkers JU-52 in flight over Ukraine, August 1942: photo by Horst Grund, 1942 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv /German Federal Archive)
German IV Panzer odvancing in Ukraine, 1941: photo by Horst Grund, 1941 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive)
Fieseler Fi 156 transport plane at air strip under construction on the steppes near Stalingrad, September 1942: photo by Horst Grund, 1942 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive)
View of Stalingrad-South, 23 September 1942: photo by Horst Grund, 1942 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive)
Stalingrad-South, ruins after battle, 23 September 1942: photo by Horst Grund, 1942 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive)
German IV Panzer on the way to the Eastern Front, 21 June 1941: photo by Horst Grund, 1941 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv / German Federal Archive)