Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

Then he caught sight of something that made him screw up his eyes and lean further forward. By the side of the road, the leg of a horse was sticking out of the snow. And another, and another. On the left a pyramid of bones had been erected, and a little further on a horse’s skull had been stuck on top of a pole. Further on he saw a man with his head and shoulders buried and his legs sticking through the snow like a pair of candles. A light coating of snow covered the yellow soles of his bare feet. The driver had noticed Eichert fidgeting and said, ‘The Bone Road. We had to mark it somehow, because it’s always disappearing under the snow. If we put up wooden signposts, they grab them for firewood. They even collect the bones of the horses.’ Captain Eichert had been in the army for thirteen years and had become extremely tough, but the Bone Road gave him the creeps.

Our conversation about Heinrich Gerlach’s novel – which, with a view to the novels written about the Second World War in the East and West and Stalingrad, fitted precisely into the history commission’s discussions – remained a private one. Subsequently, Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel and I took different positions on how to set about relating East and West German biographies, destinies, codes and experiences to one another. After the Twelfth Congress of the German Writers’ Association in 1994, he resigned from the history commission, put himself up for election and entered the German parliament in October 1994 on the Democratic Socialist Party ticket as a member for Saxony, a role he performed until 1998.

Though I’d lost touch with Count von Einsiedel, after the 1994 Congress in Aachen I developed a close relationship with another author who had also made his debut with a war novel, namely Erich Loest, whom I’d known since 1990. His novel Jungen, die übrig blieben was first published in 1950, when the author was only twenty-three years old. As with Gerlach, it was a recollection of the war, of the fear experienced by the ordinary soldier and of the hopeless predicament of those who found themselves condemned to kill or be killed. It recounted in great detail the passage to manhood of a group of schoolboys during the final years of the war: the inhuman square-bashing and constant humiliation during training, followed by the horror of combat, disillusion and despair. Loest’s novel, which came out at Christmas 1950, was savaged in the Tägliche Rundschau ( Daily Review ), the newspaper of the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD):

Loest’s attitude may have been typical of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. If he really did think at the time that such a pathetic stance was the only one open to him, that might to some extent be excused by his youth. But five years have passed since then, and today it’s no longer appropriate to write in such an ‘objective’ and disengaged way about the war. Nowadays, every German must know how wrong and disastrous his spineless attitude was back then towards the Nazi military machine.

Similar arguments – which I will touch on later – were also used in the Soviet Union to substantiate the supposed danger posed by Gerlach’s Stalingrad novel. Following this criticism of his novel, Erich Loest lost his job at the newspaper where he worked (the Leipziger Zeitung ) and embarked on a freelance career. ‘All water under the bridge now,’ Loest told me when I met him. I grew even closer to him after he was elected as chairman of the German Writers’ Association. Naturally, we also swapped notes on both his own debut novel and Gerlach’s Die verratene Armee , which Loest knew. He shared Von Einsiedel’s high opinion of it, while adding the mild caveat that Gerlach had, after all, been thirty-three years old and a qualified teacher at the start of the war, whereas he was still a secondary school pupil at the time. But it was really important, he stressed, that we should now revisit these war novels from the East and the West. A short time later, in 1995, after I’d been invited to take up a professorship in Gießen, Loest and I (Loest on behalf of the German Writers’ Association and myself for my university) signed an agreement to collaborate on a joint project that would examine the literary history of the two Germanys between 1945 and 1989, including comparing the war novels written in both countries during the Fifties and Sixties. We arranged special access facilities to the archive of the (East) German Writers’ Association (DSV), which the history commission had voted should now be housed at the Academy of the Arts. I had already been working in the archive since the early 1990s. I now found myself wading through a pile of hitherto unseen documents relating to the history of the two Germanys. In the process, I also chanced upon an audio recording of a meeting of the executive board of the DSV, which took place in the East German government’s official guesthouse on 11–12 June 1959. The topic under discussion was: ‘Reality is harsh – but what are we to make of the hard-bitten writing style?’ These disputes about the ‘hard-bitten’ style of writing in the GDR concerned the war novels of young authors who, from the mid-1950s on, began writing about the Second World War and about life and death at the front, taking their cue from American role models like Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway. Official criticism of these writers was scathing, with the novels of Harry Thürk, Egon Günther and Hans Pfeiffer that I’d talked about earlier with Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel being shunned as ‘decadent’ and ‘objectifying’. The discussion on the tape also turned to the question of how to distance war fiction in the GDR from that of West Germany, which was regarded as revanchist. Heinrich Gerlach’s Stalingrad novel supposedly belonged in this category! For the project examining German literature post-1945 and the role played by the Writers’ Association, I had such a mass of material to work through that I decided to restrict myself to the years immediately after 1945 and the hopes of authors at that time for a ‘parliament of the intellect’ (a slogan coined by the writer Günther Weisenborn to describe the first postwar congress of German writers, held in Berlin in October 1947). For the time being, my work on the ‘hard-bitten’ war novels and also on Heinrich Gerlach’s Stalingrad novel took a back seat.

After repeatedly touching upon questions of the depiction of war in connection with my work on the literary canon and censorship, on the formation of literary groups and on the publications of the proceedings of the second and third writers’ congresses held in the GDR in 1950 and 1952, it was only in the spring of 2007, while working on the topic of ‘literature and memory’ with my fellow researcher, Norman Ächtler, that I encountered Heinrich Gerlach’s Stalingrad novel once more. When we studied the book more closely, we quickly recognized that the story of Gerlach’s novel is unique in German literature. Our investigation led us inevitably to a sensational report published in the magazine Quick on 26 August 1951. The banner headline ran: ‘It’s All Come Back To Me…’ The subtitle then went on to reveal the sensational secret: ‘Returnee from Russia regains his memory through hypnosis.’ The report began with a summary of Gerlach’s capture at Stalingrad, his odyssey through POW camps and the amnesia brought on by these traumatic events:

Finally, eight years after being taken prisoner at Stalingrad, and with many long, demoralizing years in Soviet POW camps behind him, he returns to his home town on the River Weser. The years of captivity are like a grey veil to him, with the images blurring and growing ever more indistinct. All the events and years and landscapes begin to merge into one. And then dissolve. What was it really like? He doesn’t know any more. Then, out of the blue, he gets a letter from an old army mate telling him about a manuscript that Gerlach had handed to him when he, the friend, was released. In the event, he continued, he hadn’t been able to hand it over to Gerlach’s wife. At the border, the novel – a package containing several hundred handwritten pages – had been confiscated. Now it all starts coming back to Gerlach. That’s right – a manuscript about his time in Stalingrad, which he’d got off his chest during his time as a POW. But what on earth had he written?