Jenny Kollenberg only learned about the correspondence shortly before her mother Selma's death in 2005, and gradually read and processed the more than a thousand letters that her parents wrote to each other during World War II. They recount experiences from the front and from home—everyday stories from wartime, truly not tales of heroism or glorifications of war—in fact, quite the opposite. Her mother, Selma Höhfeld, writes in her letters about the work and worries of a small farmer with a young child (Jenny) in the Bergisches Land (Marienheide). Her husband Alex experiences military training in West Prussia as a soldier, the occupation in France, and later in East Prussia and Russia. Alongside the horrors of war, the deprivations, the hard work, the suffering, and despair that can be read in the letters, there is always also...