Will Bashor's Reviews> Feldpost: The War Letters of Friedrich Reiner Niemann

This is not only a fascinating epistolary account of a German soldier’s front-line service in World War II, but also a collection of letters articulately written and interlaced with a son’s love for his family…” to help hide the loneliness.”
Reiner wrote of the drudgery, digging trenches, death and pain, but his letters were also touching. And I was surprised at times just how poetic they were. He wrote about contrasts of “half-shot-up-trees” alongside the "new green shoots.” War was indeed to “blame for the confusion of seasons.”
No matter what was going around him, Reiner kept his loved ones in his mind in the present and in the future. Knowing that there would one day be an end to the war, he recognized that they had lived among “brutish men” and only mutual love could help make life once again bearable.
During war, he wrote, “everything is always more beautiful in the blossom of memory.” Such insight kept my interest from cover to cover.