Katrin Becomes a Soldier

I was not aware of this book when last year I was reading books by authors born in 1897. This impressive semi-autobiographical novel, published in 1930, takes the form of a diary of an adolescent Jewish girl. It's largely set in Metz, a historic city of Lorraine, one of the frontier regions that had at different points been part to the Holy Roman Empire, France and Germany. The actual diary — “a lovely fat one made of red leather with gilt edges” — is a present to the central character, Cathérine Lentz, for her 14th birthday (27 May 1911). When war breaks out and her male contemporaries, including her beau Lucien, leave for the Western Front, she is determined to serve in solidarity with them and volunteers to serve with the Red Cross, chiefly at the city’s railway station but also in the military hospitals. There’s no happy ending — Cathérine (or Katrin as she is known to the German soldiers she attends to) outlives most of her young male friends, including Lucien, before herself dying in December 1916 of disease contracted in a military hospital due to poor nutrition and voluntary overwork.

The author, Hertha Strauch (born 24 June 1897), grew up in the town of Saint-Avoid and then the nearby city of Metz. She used the nom de plume Adrienne Thomas, Adrienne being her middle name. During the First World War, she served as a voluntary nurse with the Red Cross. Whereas the central character of this novel opts to stay and serve in Metz when her parents leave for Berlin to avoid the air raids, the author moved to Berlin and continued her Red Cross work there. She married there in 1921 and settled in Magdeburg. Her first novel (this one) was published in 1930 and soon appeared in many translations. She went into exile in 1933 with the beginning of the Third Reich and her book was banned and burned in Nazi demonstrations. She was living in Switzerland when her second novel was published in 1934. She wrote a further ten books for publication, most being semi-autobiographical, as well as several unfinished works. In 1947 she moved to Austria with her second husband, the prominent Austrian socialist, Julius Deutsch. Although highly regarded in the German-speaking countries for many years, she has only recently been honoured in her home town due to a reluctance to acknowledge any aspect of the German occupation of Lorraine. There is now an Adrienne Thomas prize for young historians in her native Saint-Avoid.

The central character’s narration of the war is consistently pacifist. At the start of the war, when her boyfriend asks “Wouldn't you join up if you were a boy?”, she doesn't answer but records in her diary:
“I knew that I should go. This frightful war is more bearable for a man, for he knows that others will be killed today and he himself will die tomorrow.”
By February 1916, she condemns the inhumanity of the fighting going on near Metz:
“I should like to sleep but I can't go to sleep. I wish they would stop that noise out there! I can't stand it. They are attacking each other like wild animals. There! — now I hear it again. But the men out there can't be civilised human beings!”