Pascal Couchepin's reading: «Barbarossa».»

Le Regard Libre N° 61 - Pascal Couchepin

Each month, we feature a column by one of the personalities who take turns writing for us. Current affairs, history, politics and philosophy: former Federal Councillor Pascal Couchepin's readings.

The book is almost a thousand pages long. I hesitated to buy it. I succumbed and have not regretted it. Both authors, Lopez and Otkhmezuri, are specialists in the Second World War. The latter is Georgian and a digger of Soviet archives. Two experts, then, but gifted with a fine ability to make a history book, austere by nature, as exciting as an adventure novel. And what an adventure it was, this German-Soviet conflict, which brought the war to a climax of violence and cruelty on both sides, but also of human suffering.