Siege : A Novel of the Eastern Front, 1942

Rating:
Summary: Floating above the carnage
Review: This is an unexpectedly fine book. Though closely based on history, it's far from the usual rehash. At first Schneider's style seems clumsy, wordy, repetitious, but as it grows on us we discover that it's ideally suited to explore the strange psychological, even spiritual, states experienced by his characters -- starving, freezing, exhausted soldiers dragooned into serving mad dictators and plunged into hellish battles. If you read "Siege," you'll feel haunted by it long afterward.

Rating:
Summary: Forgotten War, Forgotten Soldiers, a Discovered Masterpiece
Review: "That war should be so terrible..." is an apt a description as one reader left above, as any in the description of "Siege: A Novel of the Eastern Front, 1942". Russ Schneider has created a masterpiece that will continue to haunt the reader well after the book is finally put down. As only a reader I can only say that I am unsure about whether I could ever endure another reading of it, such is the subtle terrible power contained in its narrative. This book evokes palpable feelings of dread, misery, frustration, biting cold, and its slow unending grind towards the ultimate destruction that was the total war on the much forgotten Ostfront. There is little or no let up, and the end is inevitable even during the brief passages concerning the soldiers on their furlough back from their first ordeal at Cholm.

Schneider has created such a story that is as involved and captivating as any bestseller. That this book was written almost without fanfare altogether, and sits absent from most East Front collections, or even any anti-war collections, is a travesty. This book deserves a place besides Heinrich's "Cross of Iron", Sajer's "The Forgotten Soldier", and Muller's "Juggernaut" (another forgotten, yet superb novel -just ignore the laughable 70's USA "anti-commie" pulp themed paperback cover). Schneider's ability to weave his story has almost a dreamlike quality to it as he carries, drags, or even scrapes his characters bodily over the unrelenting carnage and wholesale slaughter. Furthermore, Schneider's knowledge of the German situation on the Eastern Front is impressive to say the least, and the details and historical background to the conflict contained are meticulous.

Finishing this book is akin to being dragged headfirst through a charnel house. It's powerful, shocking, cruel, and miserable, leaving its fatalistic story burned white hot into the reader's mind. A discovered masterpiece, just brace yourself before undertaking it's uncompromising and demanding journey into the forgotten ice and death of the Eastern Front.

Rating:
Summary: Forgotten War, Forgotten Soldiers, a Discovered Masterpiece
Review: "That war should be so terrible..." is an apt a description as one reader left above, as any in the description of "Siege: A Novel of the Eastern Front, 1942". Russ Schneider has created a masterpiece that will continue to haunt the reader well after the book is finally put down. As only a reader I can only say that I am unsure about whether I could ever endure another reading of it, such is the subtle terrible power contained in its narrative. This book evokes palpable feelings of dread, misery, frustration, biting cold, and its slow unending grind towards the ultimate destruction that was the total war on the much forgotten Ostfront. There is little or no let up, and the end is inevitable even during the brief passages concerning the soldiers on their furlough back from their first ordeal at Cholm.

Schneider has created such a story that is as involved and captivating as any bestseller. That this book was written almost without fanfare altogether, and sits absent from most East Front collections, or even any anti-war collections, is a travesty. This book deserves a place besides Heinrich's "Cross of Iron", Sajer's "The Forgotten Soldier", and Muller's "Juggernaut" (another forgotten, yet superb novel -just ignore the laughable 70's USA "anti-commie" pulp themed paperback cover). Schneider's ability to weave his story has almost a dreamlike quality to it as he carries, drags, or even scrapes his characters bodily over the unrelenting carnage and wholesale slaughter. Furthermore, Schneider's knowledge of the German situation on the Eastern Front is impressive to say the least, and the details and historical background to the conflict contained are meticulous.

Finishing this book is akin to being dragged headfirst through a charnel house. It's powerful, shocking, cruel, and miserable, leaving its fatalistic story burned white hot into the reader's mind. A discovered masterpiece, just brace yourself before undertaking it's uncompromising and demanding journey into the forgotten ice and death of the Eastern Front.

Rating:
Summary: Prose and scale to rival Cormack McCarthy, William Faulkner
Review: An amazing book! A great book. Siege is not simply a war story. Schneider is a philosopher. He writes on the grand scale of history, suffering, courage, and the struggle between man and God. Siege ranks with All Quiet on the Western Front and with Cross of Iron by Willi Heinrich. This book should satisfy both war enthusiasts and anyone who appreciates great literature. It is a story of a handful of soldiers caught in a power struggle between thoughtless, inhumane regimes and struggling to stay alive and sane in a vast, wartorn landscape. Russ Schneider's descriptions of the endless Russian landscape compare with Cormack McCarthy's Blood Meridian. I've never read better descriptions of landscape and its effects on the psyche. Chapter IV begins "The small sun bulged like an aneurysm in the thin line of red stretched across the horizon.....The earth-the stomped ruins of Cholm and all the rest of the earth-was nudged tight against the vacuum of space, the normal gradations of the atmosphere sucked away, gone." The sardonicism of the character Kordts matches the bleakness of the landscape. You will care about these characters and hate to finish this book. It's not to be read just once. Out of the material of war, how many writers can elevate the spirit, rend the heart, and create something beautiful.

Rating:
Summary: Human endurance amidst the horrors of war
Review: Before he died in 2000 at the age of 43, Russ Schneider wrote four books set in the Russo-German front during World War II. In addition to "Siege" (released posthumously by the Military Book Club and finally available in paperback), he published two collections of short stories and the nonfiction "Gotterdammerung 1945: German's Last Stand in the East."

"Siege" is a bracing exception to the formulaic ardor that often plagues the genre of "military fiction": its captivating story erases the reader's knowledge of the historical outcome; the reluctant yet resolute soldiers are hardly superhuman; the writing manages to be both evocative and lyrical; and the author empathizes with the misery endured by the troops--without ever sympathizing with the German effort itself.

Even the prologue hints at the uniqueness of this work. Emaciated and wretched Russian prisoners are released from the Siberian Gulag, corralled into cattle cars, and shipped to the front, where they are chained to the inside walls of bunkers, handed guns, and forced to face the German onslaught. After this brief representation of the despair and terror of Stalin's human fodder, the perspective shifts to the German side for the remainder of the novel. Yet the vileness of the opening scene is so searing that most readers won't forget that, for the men forced to fight on the Eastern front, the brutality and senselessness of both sides are indistinguishable.

The majority of "Siege" is based on real events. In January 1942, Russian forces surrounded, trapped, and outnumbered troops under the command of Generalmajor Theodor Scherer--over 5,000 men--in the town of Cholm, where they held out for 105 days during one of the harshest winters on record. Six months later, Scherer found himself frustrated by another siege, in nearby Velikiye Luki, but this time he was on the outside, separated from the remainder of his forces.

While Schneider depicts Scherer as a benign if overburdened leader, the novel's nucleus comprises three fictional characters. The insolent Kordts and the garrulous teenager Freitag are the only men ensnared in both sieges. Freitag is the type of youngster who is liked, and protected, by everyone; the pair's odd friendship provides a shield for Kordts, whose coolness is viewed with suspicion by his superiors and fellow soldiers alike. During the second siege, the two men encounter Sergeant Schrader, who is drawn toward their magnetism, and Schrader's partiality for Freitag increases when his own companion is wounded and when Freitag himself is separated from Kordts. "Siege" is, above all, a tale about the resilience of friendship amidst great peril.

In the minds of all three men, both sieges take place, appropriately, in a geographical, political, and historical vacuum. For the most part, the troops in the trenches rarely knew what was happening in the world at large, and most German and Russian soldiers had little sense of the events that pushed them to slaughter each other. True--Hitler makes a cameo appearance, and the Holocaust is mentioned obliquely when Kordts encounters a group of SS officers sent to the front, but these token scenes seem obligatory rather than intrinsic to the story.

Because Schneider didn't live to see his work published, the prose occasionally has an unpolished taint--but it's never enough to overcome the brilliance of the work as a whole. Furthermore, a map and a short glossary would have been thoughtful additions, since the Russo-German front is alien territory even for those with a background in World War II history. Nevertheless, because the setting is so claustrophobic--taking place almost entirely within the confines of two small towns--readers who don't usually peruse military fiction should be able to follow the action without recourse to a reference shelf.

With historical accuracy, compassionate characterization, and (above all) a page-turning finale, "Siege" portrays the unthinkable limits of human endurance amidst the horrors of war.

Rating:
Summary: High Praise for Seige: A Novel of the Eastern Front
Review: The late Russ Schneider's scholarship and passion for this forgotten theater of WWII permeate his masterpiece. Through his all-seeing lens, we are drawn reluctantly into the blood-soaked maul of the Eastern Front.

The major events are historically accurate, and it matters little that Schneider's characters - officers and foot soldiers, Germans and Russians alike - are fictionalized. As they ready themselves for battle and almost certain death, they draw the breath of life. We experience their inconsolable fears, their unimaginable hardships amid the shelled landscape and existentialist horror of burned, eviscerated comrades.

It would be premature, a disservice to Russ Schneider's legacy, to compare his tale with the established literary canon of wartime courage and futility. Surely, with the passage of years, as more and more readers discover this fine book for themselves, "Seige" will be identified as an incomparable classic.

Rating:
Summary: "If War was not so terrible"
Review: The Western perspective often glosses over the "Great Patriotic War" fought on the Eastern Front by our Allies turned enemies, the Russians. This great and horrifying book goes some way to remedy this, although still told from a western, albeit German viewpoint. Russ Schneider depicts a microcosm of the great struggle waged between two megalomaniac dictators, through the eyes of the common soldiers involved.
Joseph Stalin probably wins the prize for "World's Worst Dictator" and some measure of this comes out in the first chapter of the book. Other than this the Russians are just the enemy, to be hated, despised and mown down by machine gun fire.
I do not regard this as a book about courage: It is more of a struggle for endurance and mere existence against the twin forces of an implacable and relentless enemy and a barren and brutal landscape. The author does not have to deliberately espouse his personal philosophy in this book. It is all too clear. The sheer meaningless barbarism and suffering tell it all. There is no higher cause to be found here. There is existence and there is death, nothing else.
Those who think that war can be a solution for any of our problems should be made to read this book. Better still, they should serve in the front lines at Velikhiye Luki.

Rating:
Summary: "If War was not so terrible"
Review: The Western perspective often glosses over the "Great Patriotic War" fought on the Eastern Front by our Allies turned enemies, the Russians. This great and horrifying book goes some way to remedy this, although still told from a western, albeit German viewpoint. Russ Schneider depicts a microcosm of the great struggle waged between two megalomaniac dictators, through the eyes of the common soldiers involved.
Joseph Stalin probably wins the prize for "World's Worst Dictator" and some measure of this comes out in the first chapter of the book. Other than this the Russians are just the enemy, to be hated, despised and mown down by machine gun fire.
I do not regard this as a book about courage: It is more of a struggle for endurance and mere existence against the twin forces of an implacable and relentless enemy and a barren and brutal landscape. The author does not have to deliberately espouse his personal philosophy in this book. It is all too clear. The sheer meaningless barbarism and suffering tell it all. There is no higher cause to be found here. There is existence and there is death, nothing else.
Those who think that war can be a solution for any of our problems should be made to read this book. Better still, they should serve in the front lines at Velikhiye Luki.