Every day, more wounded arrived: they came from Kursk, from Rostov, from Kharkov, recaptured one after the other by the Soviets, from Kasserine too; and a few words with the newcomers said much more about the current situation than the military communiqués. These communiqués, which were delivered to us in the common rooms over little loudspeakers, were introduced by the overture to Bach’s cantata Ein Feste Burg ist unser Gott; but the Wehrmacht used the arrangement by Wilhelm Friedmann Bach, Johann Sebastian’s dissolute son, who had added three trumpets and a kettledrum to his father’s austere orchestration, an ample enough pretext, by my lights, to flee the room each time, thus avoiding being drugged by the flood of lulling euphemisms, which sometimes lasted a good twenty minutes. I wasn’t the only one to show a certain aversion to these communiqués; a nurse whom I often found at those times ostensibly busy out on a terrace explained to me one day that most Germans had first heard of the encirclement of the Sixth Army at the same time as its destruction, and that this had done little to temper the shock on morale. It had had an effect on the life of the Volksgemeinschaft; people were openly talking and criticizing; a semblance of a student rebellion had even broken out in Munich. That, of course, I had not learned from the radio or from the nurses or from the patients, but from Thomas, who was now well placed to be informed about this sort of event. Subversive pamphlets had been distributed, defeatist slogans painted on the walls; the Gestapo had to intervene vigorously, and they had already condemned and executed the ringleaders, most of them idealistic youth gone astray. Among the minor consequences of this catastrophe would have to be counted, alas, the sensational return to the forefront of the political scene of Dr. Goebbels: his renewed declaration of total war, in the Sportpalast, had been broadcast to us on the radio, no possibility of escaping it; in a rest house belonging to the SS, they unfortunately took this sort of thing very seriously.
