Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

At the beginning of the experiments I was deeply sceptical. During hypnosis, my doubts manifested themselves in the form of snippets of thought that flickered like coloured flashes on the margins of my state of unconsciousness, and on one occasion even took the shape of a giggling goblin, who called out from the back of my head: ‘Serves you right, this is all a load of nonsense!’ When I’m under hypnosis, I’m in a state of split consciousness. I know that I’m sitting in Dr Schmitz’s practice and that he’s talking to me, but at the same time I’m reliving the past in any given situation that has been evoked by the hypnosis. The intensity of these two perceptions changes according to how deeply I am asleep. Mostly I relive the same mental images that came into my head at the time when I was writing the book. In scenes that rely heavily on personal experiences, these experiences also come vividly to life once more, and sometimes make me very emotional. These experiences continue immediately after I’ve been woken from hypnosis, and can even gain in clarity as I’m recounting them. My description of the images I see after waking is very halting and awkward, and I generally have no recollection of my original stylistic formulation of them. Everything just unwinds out of me like a very slow film.

However, this description by Gerlach has certain gaps; notably he says nothing here about the lost manuscript. In the documents I discovered in a Munich archive – of which more later – I also found a copy of Gerlach’s observations:

One time, during a very deep sleep, I got the feeling that I’d become detached from myself and was floating in the air about 50 centimetres above my sleeping body. At the same time I had the impression that it would only take a little push to send me down into total darkness. The experience was pleasant and gentle. […] Sometimes, I’m leafing through the manuscript and can see the exact colour and weave of the paper and read entire lines off the page and see on precisely which pages a particular scene is described.

Gerlach’s notes paint a picture of how his memory was stimulated by being placed in a hypnotic state, causing parts of the manuscript to resurface. Admittedly, the triggers provided by Dr Schmitz during hypnosis and Heinrich Gerlach’s own notes prompt even more far-reaching suppositions about the psychic processes that occur when writing. The writer Uwe Johnson, whose debut novel Speculations about Jakob was published in 1959, exactly two years after Gerlach’s Stalingrad novel, saw novel writing as an attempt to create a ‘social model’. ‘Yet this model consists of people,’ Johnson maintained. ‘These people are invented, assembled from many of my own personal impressions. In this sense, the act of inventing is actually a process of remembering.’ Here, Uwe Johnson is highlighting the role of experience that lies at the root of all storytelling. And this was exactly what came into play during Heinrich Gerlach’s attempts to reconstruct his work, since ultimately his thoughts were consciously recalled in a slow process that involved evoking sensory experiences or events. In addition, the much-quoted ‘madeleine’ episode from Marcel Proust’s epochal novel In Search of Lost Time – which one cannot help but call to mind here – showed the kind of things that can act as the key to the past.

For Proust’s narrator, Marcel, it is the taste of a kind of cake called a ‘petite madeleine’ dunked in lime-blossom tea that suddenly opens the floodgates to his childhood. Barely has the cake melted on his tongue when a feeling of ‘exquisite pleasure’ washes over him. And a moment later the narrator notes: ‘And suddenly the memory returns.’ It is not the sight of the madeleines that sets the process of remembering in motion here but that single second when ‘the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate’. For Heinrich Gerlach, the recollections of the act of writing in the POW camp, prompted by the trigger of hypnosis, mingle with his actual experiences in Stalingrad.

The experiment in reconstructing parts of a novel through hypnosis became an important basis over the following years for Dr Schmitz to draw conclusions about the function of memory and recollection in general. He speculated, for instance, that ‘everything that we have learned consists of “sensory impressions of situations”’, such as ‘read, heard or felt experiences… the vast majority of which have long since faded from our conscious mind’. ‘However,’ Schmitz went on, ‘in secret all these unconscious impressions continue to operate and to govern all our attitudes, thoughts and deeds.’ These insights of Schmitz’s should be regarded as serious and significant, given the general state of psychology in the 1950s. Hans Markowitsch, a distinguished physiological psychologist who has specialized in the field of memory and recollection and was head of the memory clinic at Bielefeld University Hospital, maintains that hypnosis remains a difficult topic even today, even though a great deal of research has been done in this area over the past few years. In the context of what is known as retrograde amnesia, in which people are unable to recall particular events after a given point in time, Markowitsch points to experiments that succeeded in reactivating a patient’s memory by means of hypnosis. Researchers nowadays work from the premise that hypnosis employs ‘the powerful effects of attention and suggestion… to generate, alter and corroborate a broad spectrum of experiences and behaviours that are subjectively evaluated as compulsive’. Today, hypnosis has undergone an upswing in interest as part of the research programme of the cognitive neurosciences. Recent studies have demonstrated that the ‘manipulation of the subjective consciousness through hypnosis under laboratory conditions can provide insights into those mechanisms of the brain that are involved in attention, in motor skills, in the perception of pain, in beliefs and in volition (willpower)’.

In this regard, Dr Schmitz’s efforts to reactivate Heinrich Gerlach’s memories through hypnosis also represent a thoroughly innovative experiment even from a modern perspective. When Schmitz later remarks that Gerlach was an easy subject to hypnotize, this is a sign of a possible connection between personality traits and memory. Although, to date, no psychological correlates have yet been found for a so-called ‘divergent suggestibility’ among people, despite numerous attempts to establish one over the past few decades, the latest research seems to confirm that ‘connections between suggestibility and mental preoccupation’ on the one hand and ‘a mental constitution inclined to fantasy, creativity and empathy’ on the other do nevertheless exist. This is certainly true in spades of Heinrich Gerlach. Furthermore, we may assume that the attempt to reconstruct the novel was only successful because what Gerlach had previously gone through had imprinted itself forcibly on his stored memory and was in each case linked to concrete experiences in Stalingrad.

The attempt to reconstruct the lost novel came to an end on 30 July 1951. In twenty-three extended sessions, Schmitz and Gerlach had gathered together an extensive body of material. Schmitz estimated that they now had to hand ‘the contents of two major sections of the former manuscript’. As the original manuscript comprised three parts, this meant that ‘two-thirds of the work had been rescued from oblivion’. He assumed that the methods they had employed had ‘given a powerful impetus to recollection and that the remainder of the work would duly emerge in the course of processing the material, as generally happens in the case of memories’.

The Quick story, the first part of which gave a graphic impression of how the sessions had gone in the accompanying photos, was rounded off with a report by Dr Schmitz giving a suspenseful account of certain selected episodes from the experiment. He followed this with a summary of the overall result for the readers of Quick :