The Novels of Sven Hassel

I came across the novels of Sven Hassel while I was in High School in the late 70s.
These are novels about war, written by a German soldier in the second world war. Sven Hassel's novels are more or less dramatical biographies depicting the lives of a penal soldiers fighting on various battle fronts.

I was growing up in the era of the first Arab/Israeli wars and in the time of the Vietnam war. So I was being more or less made to believe the hero stories of war and who the good guys were in every war.

The period of my youth was almost like a war culture, we played war games all the time, we watched "John Wayne" movies and "The Legend of Tom Dooley", "Kelly's Heroes"...

I'm not going to describe the film culture in which I grew up in Rabaul. But I'd like to provide a background to the veneration of war culture in which my generation grew up. 

Our house boy in the village was full of comic books, "Tarzan", "Korak" (son of Tarzan), "Believe it or not", "The Phantom", "The Marvel Comics" and "DC Comics - Superman". But my most favourite comic series of all was the "Comando Comics". The Comando comics has a shorter format than all the other comics, and the drawings were the best we had come across on all war stories, the war machines were accurately reproduced, and the heroic deeds of war was so well polished that we truly believed that war was a place for heroes.

So when I picked up Sven Hassel's books, my classmates said: "What, you are reading about German soldiers? They lost the war."

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But I read those books, starting with the "The Legion of the Damned", and boy did I discover the true horrors of war..!

Sven Hassels, books are a brutal account of war. War without principle, war without honour, war without meaning. The soldiers in Sven Hassel's squad fight as a unit to survive and that seems their only principle. They are going through the motions of war as trained men. As machines.

I can't tell anymore which stories belong into which of the novels I've read, but it's a series of novels that describe the war, although not always historically consistent. 

But what you get, is the vivid account of a soldier, telling the story of his squad of soldiers serving in a penal regiment, just before the fall of Germany during the second world war.

Penal regiments are military formations from convicted men who are sent to the front as punishment, sometimes in lieu of death penalties. These regiments in the German army used to be given "suicidal" tasks where the risk of death was very high.

It is through the experiences of these condemned soldiers that I first realised as a young teen-ager, the realities of war. The soldiers are crawling in the mud, they are cold, hungry or extremely thirsty that they could murder for a drink. They are forced to pee in their clothes while under fire. Their feet are rotting in their cold boots. Their socks are worn through, and you can feel the rock in a soldiers boot, as he is marching with a regiment, unable to stop to remove the stone that's making a hole in the sole of his foot. When at last the regiment, stops and the soldier is removing his feet from his boots, parts of the soles of his feet remain at the bottom of his boots.

In one paragraph, that I have never forgotten to this day, Sven Hassel describes how to enjoy frozen sardines out of a can in the Russian winter.

An American film was made from one or two of Sven Hassel's novels. Played in English by American actors, the film: "Wheels of fire" totally destroys the spirit of Sven Hassel's writing and does not at all bring the novels to the screen.

Biography Sven Hassel

The Author Sven Hassel was born in 1917 in Fredensborg, a small village of Denmark. He was raised in the traditional scenario of a Danish working-class family. At the age of 14 Sven embarked in the merchant navy as a shipboy. In 1936 he did his military service, and the following year, due to the great unemplyment in Denmark, he joined the German army as a volunteer. Initially he served in the 2nd Cavalry Regiment and furthermore in the 11th and 27th "Panzerregiment". He fought in all the frontlines except in the North of Africa. Consequentialy Sven was wounded eight times. From 1945 to 1949 he was POW and was subject to Russian, American, French and Danish prisoner camps.

In that period Sven wrote his first book, THE LEGION OF THE DAMNED, which was published in Denmark in 1953 and it is the only novel in Denmark, which has been in sale continuously since then. In 1957 the author unexpectedly developed the rare disease of Caucasian fever, a sickness caught in the war, causing total paralysis. He was not cured until 1958. Since 1964 Sven Hassel lives in Barcelona, Spain. He is married (1951) to Dorthe Jensen and has a son, Michael (1952).

Sven Hassel has written 14 novels: The Legion of the Damned, Wheels of Terror (filmed), Comrades of War, Marchbattalion, Assignment Gestapo, Monte Cassino, Liquidate Paris, SS General, Reign of Hell, Blitzfreeze, The Bloody Road to Death, Court Martial, O.G.P.U. Prison, and The Commissar.

These novels have been translated into 17 languages and published in more than 50 countries. In Great Britain 15 million copies have been sold and worldwide more than 52.000.000.

Sven Hassel´s style is emphasized by the use of same characters throughout the series. They are altogether Porta, Tiny, the Legionnaire, the Old Man, Heide, Gregor Martin, Barcelona-Blom and Sven himself. Of these true persons, only Tiny, the Legionnaire, Heide, Gregor Martin and Sven survived the war.

Sven Hassel´s novels are antimilitarist. He writes about the small soldier, showing us the backside of the medals. Sven tells us about the men who do not provoke wars, but who have to fight them. All Hassel´s books are based on his own experience in WWII. He warns younger generations against war. Hassel stresses that war is the last solution of bad politicians.

Novels List:

Legion of the Damned

Wheels Of Terror

Comrades of War

March Battalion

Assignment Gestapo

Monte Cassino (The Beast Regiment)

Liquidate Paris

SS-General

Reign of Hell ISBN 

Blitzfreeze

The Bloody Road to Death

Court Martial

O.G.P.U. Prison

The Commissar

The Aubrey Maturin Series

The Aubrey Maturin Series, a Novel Series by Patrick O'Brian

Reviewed by Martin Maden

The "Aubrey Maturin" Series by Patrick O'Brian

(20 Titles - although there is a 21st novel on the list)

For lovers of historical fiction: I'm a big fan of the late Patrick O'Brian who passed away in 2000. But I so admired his 20 novel, "Aubrey and Maturin" series of which I only have two. The second and the 6th.

I stopped buying his books randomly because I had decided to buy his whole series, and to read them from beginning to the 20th. But as there was no reliable PNG bookshop... this plan has not eventuated as yet.

I think that no novelist has ever described life on a sailing ship, especially a "ship of the line" as well as Patrick O'Brian could. He took historical events and placed his fiction characters in there and even as they fought these historical battles, from a fictitious ship, you still feel part of the history, you still feel the ordinary sailors life, you still meet Lord Nelson.

Captain Aubrey is an embodiment of Lord Nelson. He definitely carries Lord Nelson's injuries and behaves like Lord Nelson would have as he commanded the ships of the British Navy. In his long and eventful naval career Nelson had lost an arm and an eye in naval battles. 

Admiral Lord Nelson was appointed Commander in Chief of the British Fleet during the Napoleonic Wars where he died in action during the famous naval battle of Trafalgar.  In that battle, which decided the British naval superiority and prevented Napoleon from invading Great Britain, Lord Nelson was captain of the H.M.S. Victory. He defeated the combined navies of France and Spain who were based in Cadiz, near Gibraltar. This navy had orders from Napoleon to sail into the English Channel to suport Napoleon's planned invasion of Great Britain. He died in action knowing that he had defeated a naval force greater than his own. The French and spanish had 33 battleships (ships of the line) against the 25 ships under his command.

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Maybe not something for everyone but:

Yesterday October 19th, was actually the 206th Anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar so I'll tell a little of the history.

Background Definition: "Ships of the line" - a battleship big enough to carry a battery of cannons, to stand in the traditional line of naval battles and to exchange barrages of artillery with enemy ships. Usually in the British Navy, these were ships having three decks lined on both sides with heavy cannons. Some of the Spanish ships were much larger than the British warships. Two battle lines of ships would face each other to manoeuvre engagements from this starting formation.

In the battle of Trafalgar, Lord Nelson changed this approach so that he could concentrate his force and break up the superior numbers of his enemies into disarray. Using the direction of wind, which was blowing towards Africa, he entered the enemy "line" from the West, in two ship columns after two thirds of the enemy ships had passed his own force. Nelson led the column (squadron) advancing towards the enemy ships on the windward side (North) while Admiral Collingwood Captain of the "Royal Sovereign", led the Squadron on the Leeward (the southern or right squadron).

The "Royal Sovereign" was the first ship in the British line to be fired upon by the French but she held her fire until she was well within the enemy formation before her cannons started firing on the Spanish ship "Santa Anna" which eventually sank in that battle. By the time "Royal Sovereign" started fighting with the "St. Anna", other ships from the British second squadron had arrived to engage with the French ships, especially the French ship "Fougueux", who had been firing on her as she entered the enemy line. The rest was hell and chaos as the mobile British ships arrived on the line to engage and fire on the enemy.

At the end the British lost 1587 men while the French and Spanish lost 16000 lives. All the enemy ships in the part of the line that the British entered were captured or detroyed. 11 were captured or burnt and 8 fled towards Africa (the Leeward side). Nelson's Navy did not lose a single ship in that battle.  

I won't describe the battle from aboard the H.M.S Victory, but if you're ever in England, I've always wanted to visit the HMS Victory, Nelson’s Flagship, which lies in Portsmouth Harbour preserved as it was at the time of the battle of Trafalgar. I did not have time the last two times I was in London to make the trip. There you should be able to revisit the battle of Trafalgar.

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Back to the "Aubrey and Maturin" series:

As we read through this incredible series of novels the reader can actually experience history through the British naval heritage.

The two books from the series I have read are: "The Fortune of War" and "H.M.S. Surprise".  "H.M.S. Surprise" my biggest favourite so far, describes a naval battle fought between a British ship and an American battleship during the American War of Independence.

Below is a list of books from that series. Hope you can still find them. Good hunting..!

Click Here

Sunset Park - Book Review

Sunset Park, a Novel by Paul Auster

Reviewed by Martin Maden

I live in Germany so I do not come across many novels in their original English print. Usually, I buy my novels at train stations although when I was living in Heidelberg there was a great book shop off the Hauptstrasse where you could buy and also order English books.

I came across "Sunset Park" at the train station here in Bielefeld where I live and as the blurb on the back cover referred to the real estate debt and foreclosures in New York during the ongoing banking crisis, I wanted to see how the novelist would treat the situation in a fictional setting.

"Intense and engrossing." - cried the Times Literary Supplement

"A wonderfully unpredictable story of fatal manipulations...fascinatingly enjoyable." - Literary Review

"This is Auster, so nothing turns out as you expect...Compelling." - Sunday Telegraph

Okay, I thought, as I walked out with this book from "The International Best Selling Author of 'Invisible'.."

So I got on the train and fell asleep many times during the connections to the Netherlands. Not because of the book, in fact I hadn't even opened it, but I had been working late on a film the night before so I woke up only when I had to change trains, three times, before reaching Delft.

On the way back I decided to read the novel which started out very well but you could tell earlier on that this novelist was a craftsman and was soon beginning to show off his writing skills. So I thought, okay, let him ply his craft.

The first chapter is normal. It prepares you for some almost "post apocalyptic" kind of showdown maybe... In that chapter, through the work and photographic hobby of the main character, you get a description, using the photographed images, of a deteriorating economy, manifested through the decay and the rotting of abandoned homes where people once lived before the crash. 

We meet people, three colleagues, in what appears to be the new life of our main character by their names, habits and even by their nicknames. But such is the assumed skill of the author that he does not feel any need to mention our hero of the story by name in the actual text of the whole of the first chapter.

'Miles Heller' is mentioned as a stand alone title, but as you read the first chapter, you forget that. There is very little else to endear this name to you in that first part of the novel. The author delves into other characters and starts to set the stage to build his plot but he forgets a very basic principle, he forgets that the reader first needs to really get to know Miles, the hero of the story.

This early, in the book you already feel the author sniping at his own novel to assert his own observations and sense of prose. It is almost as though, the author is already clashing with his own creation for the forum space.

This seems to be a style consideration, but it is these kinds of choices throughout, that eventually become detrimental to the overall structure and integrity of the novel.

It is not until the end of the second chapter that we meet Miles by name and you have to be very careful there because you could just have missed the moment when his name is finally mentioned. You are used to knowing him as he, that Miles, his actual name, finds it difficult to enter your reading consciousness.

This is after you've met his father by name, his stepmother and stepbrother, after you've met his underaged lover Pilar, a 17 year old Puerto Rican girl, after they have made love many times, after you have met her entire family of sisters and their children, you finally get to meet Miles, the main character, by name. 

You actually feel the initial reaction to the name. It's as if the reader has already adopted a character and in lieu of a name provided by the novelist, has given him another name by then and so when the author comes back to reclaim the right to name the character, there is a slight loss of the reader's adoption of the character. Never a good thing.

Okay you let it go because the storytelling is still good at that point. And don't get me wrong the storytelling is good all the way, in fact it is so good that the author, so trusting in his own craft, believes he can put anything on paper and just by the use of his massive array of literary devices, that he can please any reader.

We now know Miles by his actual name, and we get to know that he was in a fight with his stepbrother Bobby, which led to a tragic accident, where Bobby got run over by a car and killed. So Miles is on the run from his own past and you start to follow the story trying to understand the degree of his innocence and anticipating a confrontation with a guilty conscience. You're are with Miles, trying to understand how he is dealing with that past, but all you are getting from the author is  a litany of the boy's virtues. It's like the author knows that the boy is innocent so he does not bother to describe Miles' pain in a way that the audience could feel it and share that understanding. Okay that's the author's right to keep a reader outside the loop maybe for dramatic purpose.

But as you go on reading, you are suddenly made to think, hang on, this is going on for a while now. This is the story of a 28 year old boy and it is starting to feel that it is being told from the pen of a 60 years old writer. Somewhere this soon becomes apparent as it dawns on the reader that you are not going to get a gut felt description of the main character.

Throughout the novel, one keeps expecting Paul Auster to eventually get down to really describing Miles, not only with a character profile but as a person of that age, gifted not only with challenges and pain, but with the actual drive and vision of a person trying to deal with and to reconcile with a brother's death. 

Unbelievably, and getting ahead of myself, the reader will not get that at all. It does not happen. Paul Auster never gets to the crux of that matter.

The author throws everything including the kitchen sink at the story until at the end we are totally assured that Paul Auster is a very intelligent man. And that he would be even more intelligent if only he could actually tell us a good story.

Instead, Miles gets into various troubles, over his relationship with Pilar and has to leave Florida in a hurry in order to escape to "Sunset Park" which is a communal flat in New York, where he arrives, heralded like a Messiah, preceded by stories of people who admire and adore him. In fact Miles is so fabulous that one of the girls of the communal flat even masturbates in anticipation of his arrival. Imagine that..!

Waiting for Miles in New York is a host of new characters and Paul Auster proceeds to introduce them to us, without any fear of losing the plot. Well we are in the hands of Paul Auster. We can't get lost. Right?

Anyway, we are in a banking crash in New York but the book's characters are trying to save Liu Xiaobo the Nobel peace prize winner from imprisonment in China. This Liu Xiaobo is being used as a connecting device for five of the characters whose lives threaten to come together, but at the end doesn't quite happen.

In spite of that distraction, in fact we don't lose the plot. But we end up losing Miles for a considerable amount of the novel. We lose Miles because the author has decided to build part of the boy's character profile through the eyes, questions and expectations of other people. People who are saving businesses, struggling to pay the rent, dealing with their own sexuality, saving a human rights activist...

That is all very well, but a novelist must never forget the personal character that belongs only to the reader and not to the other characters in the book.

In that maze of character descriptions the author then leads us through parts of New York, where we finally get to meet Miles' biological mother, and to be led through the artistic world of the New York theatrical scene, by the woman who deserted Miles when he was still a baby, to reunite the boy with his mother, and eventually we end up with a new character, Mile's father Morris, who runs a small book publishing agency. 

Morris is such the epitome of the all around principled American entrepreneur for the author, that he makes the reader stay with him for a long time. The description of Morris is quite elaborate so that you start to feel: "Okay Paul Auster, you should have made this man your principle character, since you understand him better than you understand Miles, and since you choose to explain the deterioration of the economy from his perspective, from the plans he had for a possible future for his son...

As soon as we get to New York, the novel begins to fill up with these memories of America from the 1940s to the present. 

Miles is 28 years old. 28 years ago was 1983. Why is Miles thinking from under the hat of a post World War II American man? That is history. But how is that history manifested in the life and heritage of our main character? Through baseball and collections of baseball memorabilia...

Why is he facing his difficulties which coincide with the financial melt down through the memories of his father and grandfather? Good question.

Last chance for you Mr. Paul Auster. There is one way you can still save this novel. Give us a victory at Sunset Park, or at least a way for the audience to proceed beyond Sunset Park and to make some sense of the financial meltdown. Give your audience a victory or a defined closure. 

To be fair, I will not give you the ending of the story. But as Miles steadies himself to face the consequences of clashing with the law, his family is at his side once more as he rides the final paragraphs of Sunset Park looking for the final full stop. There is none.

This novel cost me €8.95. To me the whole work felt like a first draft. If could be made into a film but it needs a lot, a lot of work, to focus the characters and get the core issues that challenge the main characters defined.

This novel has no narrative purpose except to reminisce romantically about a lost economical era. The writer does not prove that he is well versed with the old economical era to be able to compare it with the one that is crashing. Maybe he does understand his subject, but he has spent valuable space playing around with his writing tools and skills. Too much showing off of a writers virtuosity to be able to concentrate on simple story telling. If he wanted to use the banking crisis as a backdrop of his story, at the end he did not manage to tell a story. Stringing together a bunch of characters whose lives embody the nature of the hopelessness does not warrant the declared promise of a novel.

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Novel published in 2010 by Faber and Faber Ltd.

ISBN 978-0-571-25881-9