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The Boy Who Went to War (2011) - WMASG - 12-15-2025
A young student artist, with a powerful visual memory, he found himself gazing on a canvas that would remain with him for ever. His comrades lay wounded and bleeding, their bodies punctured by bullets, their limbs torn to shreds by shards of metal. The horses, still harnessed to the big field guns, let out strange screams of pain from the shrapnel that had buried itself deep in their flesh. The narrow country lane, a scene of sunny calm just a few seconds earlier, had been transformed into a picture of carnage.
It was 17 June 1944, and eleven eventful days had passed since invasionstag or D-Day, when the Allies had first landed in Normandy. Wolfram and his men had experienced a world of dangers as the American forces fought their way inland from their landing zone on Utah Beach. However, the German soldiers had not realised, until it was far too late, that they had pushed dangerously close to the American front line. Nor did they know that the little village of Le Vretot, their goal on that sunny afternoon, had already fallen into Allied hands. Wolfram, along with all the other men of the 77th Infantry Division, had inadvertently become trapped inside the American beachhead.
Now, they were sitting ducks.
There is a photograph of Wolfram Aïchele from about 1934, shortly before his life was to be turned upside down by the megalomaniac ambitions of the Führer. With his freckles and toothy grin, he looks like a typical happy-go-lucky ten-year-old, yet his contemporaries remember the young Wolfram as something of an oddball, albeit an endearing one. He was a dreamer who was perpetually lost in his own imaginary world.
He still has his zeitglöcklein or ‘birthday book’ from this time: a daily calendar in which to note the birthdays of aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters. This particular book is filled instead with the birthdays of his childhood heroes – and they are not the ones you might expect from a young boy. No footballers, no heavyweight boxers. Instead, he lists, among others, Johannes Gutenberg, Albrecht Dürer and Tilman Riemenschnieder, master-craftsman of the late German gothic.
Wolfram was quite unlike other boys of his age. Each weekend, he would clamber on to his trusty boneshaker and set off into the rolling countryside, cycling enthusiastically from church to church in order to marvel at the glittering diptychs and triptychs of medieval Swabia. Overlooked by most adults – and certainly by children, these fantastical painted landscapes fired the imagination of young Wolfram. Their gilded twilights and luminous trees transported him into another world and he would dash home to make faithful copies of everything he had seen while out on his bicycle.
He had inherited his eccentricities from his parents, who encouraged him in his medieval fantasies. They also encouraged him always to think for himself – a pedagogy that would sit very uncomfortably with the Nazi ideology of the 1930s. His primary-school teacher, Frau Philip, was exasperated by his lack of interest in the team spirit, although others, close friends of the family, saw his precocious nonconformity as a cause for celebration.
‘My sons are interested only in following the crowd,’ bemoaned the family’s physician, Dr Vögtle, just a few months before the Nazis came to power. ‘I just wish they could be like Wolfram.’