Log3

 

This week, I read the first few chapters of Tigers in the mud. In this part, Otto mainly described all the background when he was about to enlist. Nothing too dramatic, the motivation of Otto was just like anyone else: encouraged by peers, parents and country, and young men responded to their Fatherland’s calling( An interesting cultural difference: German tends to call it Fatherland instead of Motherland. Similarly, they use the male pronouns to call the ships in navy, when other countries usually use female pronouns in tradition). Otto mentioned a lot of details about what he and his peers felt about joining the army. Although he didn’t deliberately emphasize his positive feelings too much, I can still tell it by some descriptions, such as he felt a little bit cocky when he was able to join the Panzer(tank) Battalion because of his mechanical profession, wearing the iconic black tank crew uniforms. Also, when Otto was assigned to be a loader on a 38(t) light tank( t means Czechoslovakian instead of tons), he felt they were invincible and unstoppable with such a deadly killing machine. The way that Otto described how they are incited by nationalism and patriotism makes me recall a movie I quite enjoyed before: All Quiet on the Western Front in 2022. In both Otto's memory and this movie, young men believed that they were guardians of their homeland and the battlefield was the place that they could make a name for themself. Even if they ended up with an unfulfilled result, they can still die with honor. Such overconfidence, fanaticism and ambition ,would usually become a pathetic and ironic contrast with the pain, terror on the battlefield later. This kind of description often touched and impressed me a lot, because those people were just normal citizens before the war began. Then the war broke out, everyone just got drawn into the madness all sudden. These strong , uncontrolled emotions really scares me and reveals how war turns people into animals.