Ashes and Iron Blood

This is not a heroic epic, but a history of individual life swallowed up by war. The novel is from the perspective of German officer Sternheim, spanning from 1939 to 1945, and reconstructs the process of World War II in spring, summer, autumn and winter. From the "False Spring" in Poland to the "Summer of Iron" in France, from the "Mud Scam" in Moscow to the "Last Spring" in Berlin - six years of war were compressed into one man's flesh and blood. Sternheim was not a Nazi believer, just a soldier selected for the war. In the severe cold of -42 degrees below zero, while retreating through the birch forest where soldiers were carving, and when witnessing high-ranking officers' drunken revelry in the ruins of Berlin, the war machine began to ask: What are we defending? Like the intertwined destinies of the five young people in "Our Fathers", "Iron and Four Seasons" rejects the cheap dichotomy between good and evil. Is the Soviet Red Army's revenge justifiable, but the German soldiers' persistence is guilty? Both are simultaneously true and absurd. With a cold and poetic writing style, the author tears off the textbook label of history and exposes the chaotic nature of war to the sun: everyone is right, everyone is dying, and right and wrong lose their meaning in the mountain of corpses and sea of ​​blood. Sternheim lived until the war, and his ashes were eventually scattered in the wind of the Lüneburg heathland - the wind contained the morning light of Poland in 1939 and the smoke of Berlin in 1945. When the dandelion blooms bright yellow flowers on the ruins of the battlefield, it does not remember the war, it does not need to know. The end of war is not good and evil, but meaning. And the opening of a flower is closer to the truth than all war literature.