Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: To Die in Spring

Subtitle: A Novel

Author: Ralf Rothmann, Shaun Whiteside

Narrator: Tim Bruce

Format: Unabridged

Length: 6 hrs and 25 mins

Language: English

Release date: 08-29-17

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Distant, silent, often drunk, Walter Urban is a difficult man to have as a father. But his son - the narrator of this slim, harrowing novel - is curious about Walter's experiences during World War II, and so makes him a present of a blank notebook in which to write down his memories. Walter dies, however, leaving nothing but the barest skeleton of a story on those pages, leading his son to fill in the gaps himself, rightly or wrongly, with what he can piece together of his father's early life.

This, then, is the story of Walter and his dangerously outspoken friend Friedrich Caroli, 17-year-old trainee milkers on a dairy farm in northern Germany who are tricked into volunteering for the army during the spring of 1945: the last, and, in many ways, the worst, months of the war. The men are driven to the point of madness by what they experience, and when Friedrich finally deserts his post, Walter is forced to do the unthinkable.

Critic Reviews:

"Directly confronting issues of responsibility, accountability, and legacy, this is an undeniably powerful work." (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

Members Reviews:

Coming of age in war

On his deathbed, Walterâs mind returns to the war. Walter was a dairy farmer, just turning 18 and working for the Reich Food Estate thanks to his inability to shoot straight during his term in the Hitler Youth Corps. Unfortunately for Walter, the war is nearing an end and Hitler needs bodies to move forward and die, followed by more bodies who move forward and die, so Walter is drafted and sent to Hungary, where the Waffen SS is trying to stop the Russian advance. But because he has a driverâs license, Walter ferries supplies rather than fighting at the front. He fires only one shot during the war, but it is a shot he will never forget.

After Walter has a moment of heroism, he is rewarded with the opportunity to search for his cruel fatherâs grave. That quest takes him even closer to the Russian front, where the consequences of war are stark. Hopelessness pervades the novel. Civilians lose their homes and towns, deserters flee the front only to face execution. The Germans are fighting âa war for cynics, who donât believe in anything but might makes rightâ â the same thinking that starts every war. The war pits enemy against enemy but also friend against friend when Walter is ordered to be âstronger than your own scruples.â

The horrors of war are seen from the perspective of soldiers fighting and dying for the losing side. Some of those horrors are inflicted by the soldiers, following orders from officers, on civilians suspected of being partisan, or just to satisfy their blood lust. And some horrors are inflicted on soldiers by their own officers, as the story illustrates in its most dramatic moment. Walter comes of age with an act that no teenager (or adult) should be forced to undertake, and then swallows that moment, concealing it deep within his being for the rest of his life â a fact that is revealed in the opening pages and again, indirectly, through song lyrics that Walter's son recounts in an epilog.

One of the storyâs themes is that life moves on, even as individual lives end. Walter believes there will always be a need for milkers, but learns at the warâs end that he will soon be displaced by machines, his three years of training leading only to personal obsolescence.