At seventeen, Helmut Fleischer fights as a soldier for Hitler on the Eastern Front, and shortly after the war ends, he finds himself in Soviet captivity just shy of eighteen. He will spend two years in the Gulag. This is not an ordinary but nonetheless a significant life path in the 20th century. For the author, it becomes an intellectual life mission: What kind of story have I been drawn into, and what interpretative frameworks have I sought to apply to it? The steps of his intellectual reflection are documented in this book.