Mail Correspondence with Soldiers at War (“Feldpostbriefe”): Letter from German soldier Herbert Duckstein to his unborn son, January 1942 (Published on 02/06/2026)
I. Herbert Duckstein and Propaganda Company 690
Herbert Duckstein, born on 23/02/1909 in Magdeburg, was a member of Propaganda Company 690. The Propaganda Companies constituted a separate branch of the German military, assigned to the combat units. In addition to providing war coverage through text, images, and film, their tasks included influencing the enemy through “combat propaganda” and, conversely, countering enemy propaganda. In principle, every German army had a Propaganda Company.
Propaganda Company 690 was formed in early 1940 for the 12th German Army and took part in the Wehrmacht’s Balkans campaign in 1941.
II. Letter to his unborn son
In early January 1942, Herbert Duckstein wrote the following letter to his unborn son, who saqw the light of day shortly thereafter (source: Dollinger „Kain, wo ist Dein Bruder? Was der Mensch im Zweiten Weltkrieg erleiden musste – dokumentiert in Tagebüchern und Briefen“ (1983), p. 118 ff. [translated from German language]):
“The journey has not yet begun – neither yours nor mine. We still stand on the threshold of the great adventure: you facing yours, which we call life (without saying all that much by that), and I facing mine, into which war and the circumstances of the times are leading me. This letter to you is therefore, first and foremost, a letter to your mother, who, as the great mediator, stands between yours and mine with her own life…
I love you as long as your quiet heartbeat marks the path you are destined to walk. But I don’t seem to love you enough, and that is a father’s way of casting all cowardice aside and summoning all the courage that would be necessary at this moment to be with your mother and you, just as you are embarking on the adventure of life. Over the millennia, men have crafted a concept of duty that has distanced them further and further from humanity.
This letter to you is, therefore, in truth an act of cowardice that deserves contempt. Where would we be, how blessed would the human race be, if a sense of duty and humanity could be set in place of one another! If both had the same roots. Perhaps that is a goal of human endeavor, but at the moment we are further from it than ever… It would be unbecoming for a father who accuses himself of cowardice to impart lessons and advice to his child before the child is even ready to hear them. I neither want nor can do that, just as people who have created a gulf between advice and action are utterly repugnant to me. At best, advice can spring from action; action can set an example, but advice alone is an unstamped and therefore worthless coin.
So I don’t mean to give you advice, but just to tell you how I handled it and what I believe has been a viable solution.
I have always been wary of any kind of theoretical instruction. In my view (and everything I set forth here bears the unmistakable stamp of the individual), nothing is repeatable, least of all a human life. Every human life has its own, unique blend of vital forces and spirits at its root, and every person lives through their own time, and every place has its own conditions at every hour, its own unrepeatable, spiritual climate. The circumstances of time and place help shape a person, and they toughen themselves by asserting themselves against them. Spiritual endowment is always different, and the soul’s disposition is nourished by forces of the blood that rise from dark, unknown depths, and of which no one knows where they take root…
I have always been wary of people who are quick to use words, both spoken and written. Only those who carry responsibility as a law within themselves also bear responsibility toward the word – this most beautiful, noble, and dangerous tool that an endless line of generations has bequeathed to us as humanity’s most precious treasure. Responsibility toward language is the highest responsibility toward the human community. That is why it is better to remain silent for a long time and speak little, reserving language for times of need, when one has no choice but to take refuge under its protective roof.
People who are quick with words and know how to wield the spoken word in such a way that their listeners are dazzled by it ultimately appeal only to the imperfect and the inferior. They are the brilliant rhetoricians who can »unravel« everything – even the most enigmatic things that remained a mystery to philosophers and thinkers until their deaths – with a single sentence, who claim to possess the key to every secret door. They are superficial people lacking the abysmal depth of a genuine inner life, or they are those quacks and dilettantes of life for whom Goethe found the words: »That is the true nature of dilettantes, that they do not know the difficulties inherent in a matter, and that they always want to undertake something for which they lack the strength.« They themselves are often unaware of their own condition, either because they do not realize that they know nothing, or because life has apparently not yet presented them with any serious difficulties, and because, with the help of their sleight of hand, the trick has always worked out at the last moment.
Oswald Spengler had the courage to utter these bold words: »Optimism is cowardice.« I have never envied optimists, because I do not envy them their disappointments. They are the legitimate brothers of the dilettantes in the sense that Goethe meant. They still believe they see the sky in a rosy light, even when heavy storm clouds have already darkened it. They do not see the stormy weather because they do not want to see it. Even when the clouds have already opened up, they still close their eyes to it, just to be proven right as optimists – or because it is very difficult to turn back. No, we want to keep our eyes wide open; we do not want to see things as we wish them to be, but rather as our sensitive senses and alert minds perceive them.
This has very little to do with comfort. I embrace adventure because it keeps the mind and soul flexible. Those with a flexible mind do not need the comfortable and noncommittal attitude of the optimist, whom popular wisdom likes to call »incorrigible« (just as a villain might be). The mentally flexible person, unhindered by dogma, is even able to adapt to a harsher environment without submitting to it. Submission means exposure, and exposure means death.
But above all, we must not underestimate the importance of humility. Engaging with something greater than our minds can comprehend, and our unceasing pursuit of it, demands humility. The incomprehensible does not become comprehensible by negating it. This attitude would be fitting for optimists, whom we do not wish to be and must not be, because the optimist either closes his eyes to difficulties or has a ready-made solution at hand, rather than savoring the suffering and thereby undergoing a purification. Even in their natural domain – namely, medicine – solutions have only a limited justification. The very nature of a solution presupposes that every person of normal disposition reacts to a specific stimulus in the same way, which I consider false in this conceptually necessary generalization. Humility and tolerance are the hallmarks of the spiritual person. The spirit cannot be constrained. Anyone who presumes to keep the spirit productive by forcing it into a straitjacket has not felt a single breath of the spirit. Arrogance and intolerance are the hallmarks of the unspiritual person, who regards his own attitude – which is alien to the spirit – as the only valid one and therefore as the law. He is so unspiritual that he is optimistic enough to believe in the permanence and triumph of his attitude. It is a false triumph that he may savor for a long time, with all the joys that accompany triumph, only to see its bearer cast all the more deeply into the dust one day.
We want to embrace life as an adventure, to navigate its ups and downs (for we can only understand them by experiencing them), to savor it as long as it does not come at the expense of others, and to remain humble when fate or providence – that sum of a hundred thousand uncertainties that God has in store for us – prevents us from returning home from this adventure.
Greetings with all the love he is capable of – though it seems not quite enough to witness your first step into your great adventure – are sent to your mother, your greatest treasure on earth, and you
By your father, whom you have not yet met”
III. Death in June 1944
Herbert Duckstein was later demoted for making defeatist remarks and transferred as a disciplinary measure to a mission against partisans in Greece, the so-called andartisses. He was killed on 02/06/1944, during a partisan ambush near Ioannina; today, his grave is located at the German military cemetery in Dionyssos-Rapendoza near Athens.
(Head picture: German military cemetery Sandweiler/Luxembourg,
September 2024)
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