The cherries of freedom

"Alfred Andersch, whose many admirers included Thomas Mann and Max Frisch, was one of the foremost novelists of post-war Germany. He spent most of the war plotting his desertion from the Wehrmacht. "At a certain moment I chose to act in a way that gave meaning to my life, and from that time on that action became the axle around which the wheel of my existence revolved ... "" "When the opportunity arose at last, in the idyllic Italian countryside on the day of the Normandy landings in 1944 and until he was safely taken POW by the advancing American army, Andersch found himself in a wilderness, a place of freedom. The cherries he plucked from a tree were the cherries of freedom, and the taste of them was one Andersch had not known for all of the years of the Third Reich: the taste of freedom."--Jacket.