Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

Four-fifths of the soldiers and half of the officers who went into captivity subsequently died as a result of the trauma they had suffered. Of the twenty-two generals, one succumbed to stomach cancer.

In the spring of 1943, Field Marshal Freiherr von Weichs, C-in-C of the disbanded Army Group ‘B’ (of which the Sixth Army had been part up to November 1942) and his chief of staff, General von Sodenstern, were paying a visit to the Führer’s headquarters. The first letters from the troops captured at Stalingrad had just begun to filter through to Germany. Over lunch, the two officers voiced their opinion that these letters – evidence that many of the men who had fought at Stalingrad were still alive – must have come as a great relief and comfort to their relatives.

Hitler looked up with a glowering expression on his face that dumfounded the two men. Then he said: ‘The duty of those who fought at Stalingrad is to be dead!’

Endpapers Endpapers

Afterword Afterword This book is a work of fiction. Any attempt to identify real historical personages in certain of the protagonists (unless, of course, they are well-known figures like Field Marshal Paulus or General von Seydlitz) would be unjust and could potentially do a great disservice both to the dead and to people who are still alive. Yet at the same time, nothing in this book is ‘fabricated’. All the incidents recounted in the action of the novel actually took place sometime and somewhere, either on the snowbound fields outside Stalingrad or in the ruins of the city itself. The author has exercised poetic licence only where certain details of place, time and dramatis personae are concerned. He has taken the subject matter of his book both from the experiences he himself underwent in and around Stalingrad and from accounts given to him by survivors of the battle – soldiers, officers and generals – during the three years he spent in captivity. It is incumbent upon him to thank here all his former comrades for their invaluable assistance and cooperation.

Appendix by Carsten Gansel

About Heinrich Gerlach

About the Introducer

About the Translator

An Invitation from the Publisher

This book is a work of fiction. Any attempt to identify real historical personages in certain of the protagonists (unless, of course, they are well-known figures like Field Marshal Paulus or General von Seydlitz) would be unjust and could potentially do a great disservice both to the dead and to people who are still alive. Yet at the same time, nothing in this book is ‘fabricated’. All the incidents recounted in the action of the novel actually took place sometime and somewhere, either on the snowbound fields outside Stalingrad or in the ruins of the city itself. The author has exercised poetic licence only where certain details of place, time and dramatis personae are concerned. He has taken the subject matter of his book both from the experiences he himself underwent in and around Stalingrad and from accounts given to him by survivors of the battle – soldiers, officers and generals – during the three years he spent in captivity. It is incumbent upon him to thank here all his former comrades for their invaluable assistance and cooperation.

My quest to find the original manuscript of Heinrich Gerlach’s 1957 bestseller about the siege of Stalingrad ( Die verratene Armee, translated into English by Richard Graves in 1958 as The Forsaken Army ) has a personal preamble that goes back to German reunification in 1989–90 and to the archives in East Berlin that were opened up for the first time during that period. The Aufbau-Verlag, the foremost literary publisher in the German Democratic Republic, had commissioned me to edit a forthcoming work on Johannes R. Becher. In that momentous autumn of change in 1989, Becher – who had been one of the co-founders of Aufbau in August 1945 and was appointed as the GDR’s first minister of culture in January 1954 – was emblematic like no other writer of the ‘rise and fall’ of East Germany and of a part of its literature. What becomes of a state’s ‘poet laureate’ when that state no longer exists? And what remains of his literary output? These were questions that were not just being asked at Aufbau, which held the rights to Becher’s estate and had published an eighteen-volume edition of his works. They were now planning one further volume containing previously unpublished poems and letters of his, together with other documents. I was particularly drawn to this project because researching in the archives would give me an opportunity to fill in certain ‘blind spots’ in my knowledge of the writer. Becher was something of an unknown quantity, and not just to the younger generation, largely because of the way he had been enshrined uncritically in the collective cultural memory of the GDR. His pathos from the pioneering years immediately after the war, his simple stanza forms and rhyme schemes and his outmoded lyricism were clearly at odds with the apprehensive ‘waiting-room feeling’ (Heiner Müller) experienced by people in the GDR in the 1980s and with the increasingly critical questioning that was going on, not just in literary texts. Hans Mayer, one of the most eminent German scholars of the postwar period, who knew Becher personally and thought highly of him, believed that he had been a ‘godsend’ to the GDR as minister of culture, but also pointed out that ‘the contradictions in his life and work … are too many to enumerate’. And it was precisely the contradictions in Becher’s life and work that would be highlighted in the work I was about to edit, since, prior to 1989, all the details that didn’t fit with the image of an exemplary (communist) writer had been hushed up.

So it was that in the spring of 1990 I found myself in a large room in the Central Party Archives of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), poring over the hitherto secret files on Johannes R. Becher. Behind me, I recognized Walter Janka, one of the most popular figures in the GDR during reunification. In the autumn of 1989, his essay ‘Difficulties with the Truth’ had been published by Rowohlt in Hamburg; when Aufbau reprinted it in January 1990, it reached a wide audience in the East and was read out in public, including at universities. Janka, sitting there now hunched up with his wife on a school bench and reading the SED’s secret files on him, which elicited a groan from him now and then, had been head of the Aufbau publishing house in 1956, when he and a number of others – Wolfgang Harich, Gustav Just, Heinz Zöger and Erich Loest – had been sentenced to long prison terms in show trials. ‘Participating in a counter-revolutionary group’ read the charge sheet at the time, an accusation that went unchallenged by such authors as Anna Seghers and Johannes R. Becher – both of whom attended the trial – despite the fact that they knew it was a lie. Walter Janka gave a detailed account of this in his essay, remarking on Becher: ‘If we ever get a chance to examine the state and party archives, scholars of literature will find it hard giving an assessment of so prominent a literary figure.’