“To Live, to Talk, to Have”
How a German soldier from World War I helped me to mourn my grandfather’s death 100 years later
For the past half a year, I’ve been transcribing and translating the correspondence of World War I-era German soldiers. I’ve learned to read Kurrentschrift and Sütterlin, the archaic German scripts in use at the time, and gotten a glimpse into the lives of men who are otherwise unknown to history. Deciphering these soldiers’ postcards gives me much the same pleasure, I think, as others derive from solving sudoku or a particularly tricky crossword puzzle.
Mick, the private collector who provides me with most of the original sources, recently acquired 21 postcards written by various members of the Körner family. Several of them were sent by Diedrich Körner between March and September 1916. His life is a mystery to us. We don’t know when or where he was born; what he did before the war; or even how many siblings he had; but we do know that he was a Musketier of the Reserve Infantry Regiment №65 and that he occasionally wrote home to his parents and extended family in Bremervörde, near Hannover.
The idiosyncratic script of his early postcards turned even the most unremarkable correspondence into a thing of beauty. Though he likely fought at the Aisne and the Somme, his messages never hinted at the conflict. Instead he assured the recipients that he was “still healthy and cheerful” and thanked them for care packages that they sent him; “only one egg was broken.”
Sometimes he wrote with more haste and less formality. His script changed then: a more conventional Kurrentschrift superseded the ornamental flourishes of his Roman hand. The final postcard of the set was addressed to his sister Meta and postmarked 14 September 1916. By that time, Reserve Infantry Regiment №65 had been sent from France to Ukraine: “So far I like it better here than on the Western Front.”
Within a month he was dead. Killed in action, possibly at Brzezany or Halicz. Of all the soldiers whose correspondence I’ve translated, he was the first who did not survive the war. What a blow it was to find his name in the Verlustlisten next to that fateful word: gefallen.
Death turned Diedrich Körner into a statistic. Five words — a single line — in a book with more than thirty thousand pages. One of the two million German war dead. I found this transformation more tragic than I probably should have. After all, I never knew him. Maybe he kicked puppies and gave his cousins wedgies when he was alive. I don’t know. But I do know that he was very happy to receive a foundation stone from his father, a mason, in the spring of 1916, and that he enjoyed the sardines in oil that his sister sent him several months later. Still, that’s not much to build rapport on; hence my surprise, upon seeing his name in the Verlustlisten, to feel much of the same grief as when I once looked up my grandfather Yeh-Yeh on Ancestry.
Almost one hundred years separated their deaths, yet Yeh-Yeh too was reduced to a few lines of official text. The documents on Ancestry inform all and sundry of his social security number, his last known address, and his birthday according to the Gregorian calendar — but they won’t tell you that we usually celebrated his birthday according to the lunar calendar, or about his experiences as a fighter pilot during World War II, or his childhood in the new Chinese Republic. They will give you no indication that when I heard news of his death half a world away, I felt like a boat drifting out to sea. I took the Chinese chop that he had had made for me when I graduated from high school and stamped an entire page with my Chinese name, re-inking the chop again and again until no more space remained.
Afterwards, my parents were tasked with cleaning out his apartment. My mother asked me if I wanted her to save anything. “Something with his handwriting,” I told her. Because he didn’t speak English very well, I expected something in Chinese, but in fact my mom found some scraps of English that he’d written as practice.
I was really upset. Verb infinitives weren’t the way that I wanted to remember Yeh-Yeh. The phrases that he had copied seemed so mundane, unoriginal, and even banal — all characterisations that could uncharitably apply to Diedrich Körner’s correspondence too. Yet I had transcribed and translated Diedrich’s words so that he might be more than merely a name in the Verlustlisten, and I had celebrated the quotidian aspects of his prose as evidence of his humanity.
Surely I could do the same for Yeh-Yeh.
So yesterday, for the first time in more than five years, I took out those bits of paper upon which my grandfather had carefully copied out English words. He had also noted their Chinese equivalents; I hadn’t remembered that, and although I couldn’t read them, they came as a comfort.
The lines that I had once dismissed now formed a poem of sorts.
To live.
To talk.
To have.
We get there.
When all the words were finished, I sat there for a long time, studying the ragged edges of the paper where they’d been torn out of a notebook; the surprising confidence of my grandfather’s Roman letters; and the easy elegance of his Chinese, always remarked upon and admired by my Hong Kong friends whenever I asked them for translations.
And I thought: Yeh-Yeh, you were right—it took me many years to understand, but in the end, I got there.
Thus it was that a German soldier who liked cognac and sardines allowed me to realise the value of my grandfather’s vocabulary lists. I see now that they don’t need to meet any artistic standard, they don’t need to win prizes for eloquence or span multiple pages, they just need to be and I just need to read them. And when I speak aloud the words that were written in pencil and ink so many years ago, my grandfather and Diedrich Körner — and Stefan Beising and Paul Meineke and Julius Herrmann and Walther Uhlig and so many others— are alive again, if only for a moment, in the clear sky and sunshine of Oslo in the spring of 2021.
