The Human Cost of War

Red Sorghum

Mo Yan

In the rural landscape of northeastern China, family legend, love, violence and memory become inseparable from the Japanese invasion. Mo Yan follows several generations through a world of sorghum fields, bandits, guerrillas and villagers in which resistance can be courageous, savage and morally complicated.

Beginning here means encountering imperial Japan first from the outside: through the lives of people whose homes have become a battlefield.

Twenty-Four Eyes

Sakae Tsuboi

In 1928, a young schoolteacher arrives at a small village school on an island in Japan's Inland Sea and takes charge of twelve pupils. Over the following years she watches them grow while poverty, nationalism and eventually war gradually narrow the possibilities of their lives.

After Red Sorghum, the change of perspective is striking. The country that appeared as an invading power is now seen from within, through children, parents and a teacher who themselves possess little control over the forces consuming their society.

Alone in Berlin

Hans Fallada

After their son is killed in the war, Otto and Anna Quangel begin leaving anonymous postcards attacking Hitler's regime around Berlin. Their small act of resistance places them against an enormous apparatus of surveillance, fear and denunciation.

Around them is not simply Nazi Germany, but apartment buildings, workplaces, marriages, petty criminals, frightened neighbors and people making daily calculations about compromise, courage and survival.

History (La Storia)

Elsa Morante

Ida Ramundo is a widowed schoolteacher trying to protect her children as Fascism, occupation, bombing, hunger and displacement transform Rome around them. Great historical events continually intrude upon lives that possess almost no power to affect them.

Morante tells history from beneath: through mothers and children, refugees and the poor, and people whose suffering rarely determines how wars are subsequently remembered.

Life and Fate

Vasily Grossman

Against the enormous backdrop of the Battle of Stalingrad, Grossman follows a network of families, soldiers, scientists, prisoners and officials scattered across the Soviet Union and the territories consumed by war.

The novel moves between kitchens and laboratories, trenches and prison cells, concentration camps and bureaucratic offices. The war against Nazi Germany becomes inseparable from Stalinism, antisemitism, ideological conformity and the compromises people make in order to remain alive.

The Painted Bird

Jerzy Kosiński

A young boy wanders alone through an unnamed Eastern European countryside during the war, passing from village to village and from one precarious refuge to another.

Here the institutions that normally protect a child have almost vanished. War exists less as armies and battles than as a condition in which fear, superstition, prejudice and cruelty have been released from ordinary restraints.

The Kindly Ones

Jonathan Littell

Maximilien Aue is an educated German and SS officer who moves through some of the central killing zones and institutions of Nazi Europe. Through him, the reader encounters mass shootings in the occupied Soviet territories, the bureaucracies of extermination, Stalingrad and finally the collapse of the Reich.

After six books concerned largely with people caught inside war, the perspective crosses a final boundary. We are now inside the machinery itself, among officers, administrators and functionaries whose decisions transform policy into individual deaths.

The disturbing element is not simply that these people are monsters. Many remain recognizably human: ambitious, frightened, vain, intelligent, obedient, self-deceiving, pragmatic. Atrocity does not always require someone who experiences himself as evil.