If the volunteers' memoirs inscribe specific spatial and temporal positions, they also expose the ideological frameworks from which their authors are writing. Both Clemons and Gray, in their reviews of Le Soldat oublié, underscore that Sajer's standpoint constitutes one of the chief interests of the book. Clemons opens his review by stating that “simply as a record of an unfamiliar aspect of World War II – the Russian campaign from a German viewpoint – The Forgotten Soldier is fascinating” (37). Taking a more specifically comparative stance, Gray affirms that “though we have several Russian accounts of the war in the East,” Sajer's is “the first in English translation from the German point of view” (4). To be sure, Gray's claim is not quite accurate; an English version of Guderian's memoir had been available since 1952, of von Manstein's since 1958, and of letters written from Stalingrad by German soldiers since 1955. But Gray is certainly correct when he insists later in his review that Sajer's perspective is not just German, but also “an outsider's” (4). Indeed, as must be emphasized once again, Sajer was not drafted into the Wehrmacht, as many Alsatians were during the war; he volunteered, and so did the French, Belgian, and Swiss memoirists whose testimonies comprise my corpus. In this respect, those testimonies differ from the personal texts that Fritz examines in Frontsoldaten and Kühne in Kameradschaft, which were written by native Germans who were not asked whether they wanted to go to the front or not.