Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

The lost manuscript began to emerge once more from a thousand individual details, and its forgotten structure likewise became clear once more. So, the strenuous work of this treatment was not in vain. The darkness was illuminated better than we could have hoped. One report on the whole process confirms that the faculty of memory has automatically been strengthened by it. As a result, we are confident that everything will re-emerge, perhaps even in a better and clearer form than it had been before.

It was with this prospect in mind also that Heinrich Gerlach returned to Brake on the Weser and began piecing together his novel on Stalingrad. Even so, his hopes of now being able to get on rapidly with preparing the text for publication were not realized. This was one reason why, six months later, on 11 January 1952, Gerlach wrote once more to Dr Schmitz seeking his help. He told the psychiatrist that he would send him large parts of the reconstructed manuscript in order to satisfy the doctor’s ‘strong personal interest in the outcome’. At the same time, he also asked Schmitz to show this completed section of the novel to Quick . In fact, Gerlach himself had already sent the first chapter to the magazine in October, while admitting that he did so ‘only very reluctantly, as people won’t be able to make head or tail of it as it stands’. Unfortunately, he told Schmitz, he hadn’t yet received a reply. He presumed that Schmitz’s good offices would make more headway:

It’s always better to pester people in person, and because you have a direct intellectual and material interest in the book, I am trusting that you won’t find my request unreasonable.

This letter, which came to light during the subsequent dispute between the two former partners, allows us to draw conclusions about Gerlach’s situation at the time and his plan on how to proceed with work on the manuscript. It is also interesting that Gerlach clearly thought about soliciting Quick ’s interest for a second time in supporting the undertaking. His letter to Schmitz continues very much in this vein:

I hope to complete the second section in the period from March to June. This will have the added advantage of furnishing Quick with enough material to decide whether they’d be willing to finance another trip by me to Munich. Provided your schedule allows, we could then work together in July on the third – and by far the most important – section (where many things are still very unclear to me), and by August or September or at the latest October, everything would then be cut and dried. Anyhow, those are my hopes and plans; let’s hope fate conspires to make it so!

In addition, Gerlach asked Schmitz to send him the transcript of the sessions, claiming that it would ‘help me greatly in my work by prompting my rejuvenated memory’. Sadly, only a portion of the records would ever come to light, breaking off after page seventeen. He also asked about the date of manufacture, delivery address and price of the ‘small typewriter’ he’d seen at Schmitz’s practice and which he’d been very taken with. Gerlach’s letter ends with a commitment to their continuing collaboration and the positively autosuggestive confession that the novel had to be published at all costs:

My dear Herr Schmitz, I should like to assure you that since working together I feel very close to you on a personal level. I promise you that I will do everything in my power to ensure that we bring our collaboration to a successful conclusion. Money matters are the very least of my concerns here, given that I’ve got a steady job and income and no pressing needs. But I am obsessed with the thought that this book must see the light of day, all the more so in this current age, which seems hell-bent on preparing for another war and forgetting the horrors of the one just past.

In the event, this further collaboration would never come about. Similarly, Gerlach’s plan to finish reconstruction of the novel manuscript by the end of 1952 also came to nothing. By the end of April 1952, he had only written ninety pages; the complete reconstruction of his book would ultimately take him another four years. In a long conversation with me and an extensive letter of July 2012, his daughter, Dorothee Wagner, recalled her father’s working methods in the years following his hypnosis: ‘From the outset,’ she told me, ‘my father would involve other people in his writing. He asked them to recount things to them, quizzed them, and gave public readings of his work. He was happy to receive suggestions and criticism. […] He got our family engaged in the new edition of the novel and maintained close contact with friends and former fellow camp inmates. Many of them came to stay with us, and the talk then was invariably of Stalingrad and life as a POW. My father eagerly followed everything that was published on the subject and studied historical sources on the war, in so far as that was possible back then.’

The delay in work on the new novel was also due to the fact that after eleven years of military service and as a prisoner, Gerlach had to work his way back into the business of being a schoolteacher. Following his return from captivity, he first found employment at a secondary school in Berlin. From 1951, he occupied a senior master’s post at a grammar school in Brake on the Weser. He taught German and Latin to pupils in the upper school – both subjects that called for a great deal of preparation and correcting of scripts. Over and above this, he also had to deal with the sort of problems that faced all late returnees from the war. ‘My father first had to find his way back into family life,’ recalled his daughter. ‘That hardly left any time for writing, so he used the school holidays for that.’

Finally, in the autumn of 1956 Heinrich Gerlach was in a position to send the completed manuscript to the Nymphenburg publishing house in Munich, which replaced the original title Durchbruch bei Stalingrad ( Breakout at Stalingrad ) with Die verratene Armee ( The Forsaken Army ), feeling it was more in keeping with the spirit of the 1950s. The new title not only sounded better, but also chimed in with the myth of ‘lambs to the slaughter’ that had worked its way into the public consciousness since the start of the new decade. The publisher put the Stalingrad novel on its forthcoming list for autumn 1957. And so a radical experiment that was unique in the annals of German literature came to its successful conclusion. Nymphenburg did not expend a lot of effort on promoting The Forsaken Army ; the sensational story of its genesis generated enough publicity of its own. The large print run of ten thousand for the first edition of the book sold out within weeks in November 1957. Curt Vinz, who had founded the publishing house with Berthold Spangenberg and Gerhard Weiss in 1946, was ecstatic about the book’s impact:

We’ve also got firm contracts with publishers in New York, London, Milan, Stockholm and Holland, plus options for French, Spanish, Norwegian, Finnish and Danish co-editions. We’ve even received an enquiry from Poland – a first for us – and the radio station in the Soviet zone of Germany has requested an excerpt for broadcast. We’ve never experienced anything like this!

Indeed, the ‘Novel of Stalingrad’ (as the subtitle dubbed it) really did capture the mood of the age, giving a voice to those who had survived Stalingrad and Soviet captivity. Although Hans Schwab-Felisch, one of the most renowned literary critics associated with the Gruppe 47 (‘Group 47’) circle of writers, placed a caveat on Gerlach’s literary achievement by pointing to the novel’s documentary character, he was still full of praise: ‘Even so, one must give credit to the author, who gives evidence in this work of a remarkable ability to impose a tight and consistent order on an immense mass of material, but most of all for his consummate skill in squaring and blending the chance events of his personal experience with the general run of events, and his objective recounting of military matters with the demands of a novel.’ Ultimately, the critic maintained, in its portrayal of the ‘common soldier’ as well as various ‘washed-up types’ among the ranks of the officers, the novel came across as far more ‘immediate and true to life’ than Theodor Plievier’s Stalingrad . Above all, Schwab-Felisch continued, Gerlach offered an authentic account of what those who had been soldiers in the Third Reich had gone through, from gnawing hunger to being ordered to defend their positions ‘to the last man’, which amounted to a death sentence. The reviewer of the Stuttgarter Zeitung also heaped praise on the author’s achievement. Heinrich Gerlach, who unlike Theodor Plievier had ‘been through hell’ and who ‘had been trapped in the Cauldron at Stalingrad from the first to the last day’, had ‘not been able to attain the kind of distance that a novel about the “forsaken army”, about that historical event, requires’. The fact that the enterprise succeeded nevertheless and that the book ‘had such a shocking emotional impact’ on the reader ‘must be attributed above all to his careful planning and his unflinching honesty’. With regard to the lost manuscript, Gerlach’s use of hypnotism and the recreation of the novel, the reviewer stressed: