The Hidden Narratives of Germany’s Afghanistan War Veterans

What was it like to serve as a soldier in the German armed forces during the war in Afghanistan? An American combat veteran‘s search for deceptive answers.

In Iraq, I experienced the horrors of war firsthand as an infantryman. Yet as an expatriate living in Germany, I knew little about the German armed forces (Bundeswehr) and even less about what it was doing in the Hindu Kush.

To seek out the individual stories of these German servicemen and women, I first looked to literature and the media. It turned out to be a frustrating search, the answers to which were not necessarily to be found in the pages of a book, but in an unexpected place.

German war literature

Undoubtedly, in the past, German veterans wrote some of the greatest books about fighting in war: Erich Maria Remarque, Ernst Jünger, Heinrich B?ll, Günter Grass, the list of these first-class German writers of international importance can easily be continued. Unfortunately, in contrast to previous generations, the spectrum of contemporary literature written by German veterans is still limited.

Most of the current books written by German veterans can be more or less classified into two categories. Many are a kind of anthology of short individual accounts by various servicemen and women in the style of a historical or factual report. Others are politically charged in their meaning and express blunt criticism of the Bundeswehr or the indifference of German society towards the servicemen and women it sent to fight in Afghanistan.

Regrettably, most of these lack a significant depth of reflection that is necessary to draw a reader into the personal triumphs and crushing tragedies of a combat experience. Arguably though, and to the credit of these authors, their intent is informative and explanatory - not necessarily narrative. As always there are exceptions and in this case two books stand apart from the others.

The first is the novel Sandseele (Sand Soul) written by a former officer under the pseudonym Wolf Gregis and published in 2021. The novel is a story full of irresolvable conflicts in which a German veteran who has long since returned to civilian life is suddenly hurled back into the war from his own living room.

The other is the memoir Vier Tage im November (Four Days in November), written in 2012 by the former Fallschirmj?ger - paratrooper Johannes Clair. In his book, Clair vividly conveys not only how he and his fellow soldiers reacted under the extreme situations in Afghanistan, but also how they thought about fighting in the war. It is no wonder that Clair's book spent weeks on the Spiegel bestseller list.

Both books refuse to impose a political message, instead they bluntly immerse the reader into the extraordinary world of a combat veteran and show us that for many veterans, in Germany and otherwise, the war really never ends even after they return home.

Despite the talent of these two authors, the field of war literature by contemporary German veterans is still remarkably open after twenty years of war.

Turning to the media

Admittedly, books written by war journalist of the caliber of Sebastian Junger are a rarity. Junger and British photojournalist Tim Hetherington, who was killed in 2011 while reporting on the war in Libya, spent a year accompanying an American platoon of paratroopers at a tiny outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. The goal of their mission was to find out what was really happening on the ground.

The resulting intense and unsparing book War and the documentary film Restrepo, both translated into German, are a harrowing account of the reality of war as seen through the eyes of combat soldiers. A book like this is rare by any standard, but in Germany no comparable work even comes close.

Interestingly around the same time that Sebastian Junger portrayed the dirty, scared, and exhausted American infantryman in combat in the Korengal, the German media showed a startlingly different story of German soldiers in northern Afghanistan. Media images from 2008-09 showed Bundeswehr soldiers in new and clean uniforms, almost always without helmets and in unarmored vehicles.

The Good Friday firefight in April of 2010, in which several German soldiers were killed, changed the understanding of the dangers faced by German servicemen and women in some respects. Apart from Johannes Clair's book though, it seemed - in the media or in literature - that the disturbing personal realities of life for Bundeswehr soldiers in Afghanistan were never realistically portrayed.

Taking strange risks

Setting up an Instagram profile is something that most people would hardly consider dangerous. However, war changes a person in strange ways and for years I stayed away from social media - in the same way that most war veterans avoid large crowds. Yet the thought that I might find stories of German combat veterans on Instagram finally drove me to create a profile. What I found exceeded all my expectations.

What strikes you first when you scroll through the posts of these veterans is the dirty and exhausted expression on their faces. They are no different from the faces of soldiers from any other nation in any other war. Their sandbagged bunkers, damaged vehicles, and meager living conditions mirror my own combat experience in Iraq, and I knew immediately that I had finally found the true and harrowing reality of German soldiers in Afghanistan.

It is much more than simple images that most of our society has not seen, it is the stories of the men and women who show us what it was really like to have served in northern Afghanistan. It is also the disturbing journey into what their lives have become since their return: broken relationships and divorces, nightmares and trauma, and coming to terms with the numerous suicides of former comrades.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of these profiles, which act like a digital regulars’ table, which also functions as a kind of support network. Some of the profiles are quite professional with a wide reach, like the well-known active duty lieutenant colonel @marcelbohnert, who led a company in Afghanistan in 2011.

Likewise, the author @wolf_gregis is a popular figure, who regularly reports on the achievements and sacrifices of veterans through his profile. Wolf also runs an extremely popular veteran podcast called “It's up to us”, which is unfortunately only broadcasted in German.

Most of them, however, are everyday people you might meet on the street such as @timfocken, a paratrooper and Paralympics participant who was severely wounded in combat. The rapper @mazibora_kreigimkopf and the infantryman @mkempter85 show us not only what they experienced in Afghanistan, but also the hard-earned success and pain of living in the shadow of a war experience. A simple search for #einsatzveteranen or #veteranenverband will bring up many such profiles.

Untold realities

Of course, as a society we should be cautious about looking for easy aesthetic ways to understand experiences that are both harrowing and deeply traumatic - like those of combatants in war. Literature is ultimately about what it means to be human, and literature by veterans, more than any other medium, helps us think about the moral complexities of war. It is a means for us to sort out the messy specifics of so many traumatic experiences.

Having said that, war changes and so does the way we understand the experience of war. Movies, television shows, music, or current media, such as podcasts or Instagram, all help to provide insight and probe into the dark experience of fighting in war.

Posting pictures and stories on Instagram can never be a serious substitute for contemporary literature, but it can be useful to some degree in helping us better understand the experience of a combat veteran. Until German soldiers, who actually served in Afghanistan process their real-life war experiences into deeply reflective literary novels or memoirs, we have little other way to witness firsthand the utterly destructive force the war exerted on their lives.