Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

The sessions did not last for three weeks, but two. On only one occasion was his secretary present. Before each session I sketched out the particular scene to Schmitz that I hoped we might be able to reconstruct while I was hypnotized. After Schmitz had put me in a state of half-sleep, he sat beside me and whispered certain words to me that I’d given him in advance, whereupon I would recount the scene to him in full while under hypnosis.

In retrospect, Heinrich Gerlach took a less euphoric view of the sessions than he had done in the letters he had written to Schmitz at the time. During the treatment, he claimed, they hadn’t managed to reconstruct two-thirds of the plot of the novel, but only about a quarter. His summary was correspondingly downbeat:

We’re talking about some 150 pages of the 614 pages of the original manuscript. Schmitz sent the transcript to me at Brake. There, using the 150 pages that Schmitz had coaxed out of me, I wrote the first and second parts of my novel. The missing 450 pages or so of my old manuscript I conceived afresh over the next four years, via a combination of memory research, conversations with friends and studying historical sources.

Heinrich Gerlach’s account here accords with the statements that his daughter, Dorothee Wagner, made more than fifty years later, without any knowledge of the documents concerning the legal dispute. Gerlach’s indication that hypnosis had yielded only 150 pages and that it had taken another five years to write the remaining 450 pages still rings true today.

Finally, the Hamburg edition of the popular tabloid newspaper Bild-Zeitung also picked up on the court battle. On 31 January 1958, the Bild ’s chief reporters, Dr Hermann Harster and Max Pierre Schaefer, ran a full-page story with the headline: ‘The Horror of Stalingrad – Relived in the Psychiatrist’s Chair’. Here, too, the story of the recreation of the novel was recounted. However, Bild put more emphasis on the legal side of the contract and asked: ‘Is a doctor entitled to demand a financial stake in the intellectual property of his patient instead of his customary fee? That is the key question at the centre of an odd legal dispute that has no precedent in the history of jurisprudence and medicine in Germany.’ Once again, both sides were interviewed for the article. The war, Gerlach’s time in captivity, the loss of the manuscript and the attempts to piece it together again were all graphically described. Bild also printed a facsimile of the agreement, which did indeed carry Gerlach’s signature. The text of the document, which was dated 30.7.1951 and certified with the signatures of both Heinrich Gerlach and Dr Schmitz, ran as follows:

The first signatory, Herr H. Gerlach of Hunterstrasse 6 in Brake, and Dr K. Schmitz of Jahnstrasse 20 in Munich have on this day come to the following agreement. In the event that Herr Gerlach should, as a result of hypnosis by Dr Schmitz, manage to reconstruct his manuscript ‘Breakout at Stalingrad’, which he has forgotten, Herr Gerlach hereby undertakes to pay Dr Schmitz by way of a contingent fee 20 (twenty) per cent of the anticipated gross receipts accruing from publication of the manuscript, or of parts thereof. Dr Schmitz hereby signals his willingness to take the course of treatment through to a successful conclusion.

Alongside the facsimile of the contract, Hermann Harster and Max Pierre Schaefer placed a feature panel in which two legal experts laid out the provisions of current contract law. They explained that, according to paragraph 138 of the German Civil Code, any contract that was morally objectionable should be deemed invalid. In line with this, all gross violations of professional duty were to be regarded ‘as unethical and as rendering null and void any legal transaction (German High Court ruling 153/260)’. However, it was incumbent upon the professional code for German doctors to pronounce on whether an agreement involving a contingent fee constituted a violation of a physician’s professional duty of care. Their conclusion was that, in the present case, particular note should be taken of the statement (in paragraph 1 of the code) that ‘services to health’ was not a business. Furthermore, the fee charged by a doctor must be commensurate with the treatment; the official schedule of fees should serve as a guide here (Paragraph 10). In other words, the legal evaluation of the case in hand was contentious. Doctors whose opinions on the dispute were solicited by Bild were quoted as taking the following stance:

An obstetrician might just as well demand a share of the royalties earned by a child he’d helped bring into the world and who later became a writer.

It was evident that the sympathies of the doctors questioned tended to lie with Heinrich Gerlach. Two months after the first reports of the clash between the writer and Dr Schmitz, the Frankfurter Illustrierte also took up the topic, headlining its story ‘Did He Write “Stalingrad” Under Hypnosis?’ The extensive report included testimony from someone who, in the magazine’s view, had not yet had sufficient opportunity to state his case: Heinrich Gerlach. Alongside an outline of the history and the genesis of the novel, the piece also included an interview, in which the author answered a series of questions. Among the areas covered were the ‘mysterious and incomprehensible’ circumstances of the contract with Dr Schmitz. On this point, Heinrich Gerlach noted in conclusion:

The ‘contract’ was dated 30.7.1951. By that stage I had been hypnotized 23 times by Dr Schmitz and was in such an unstable frame of mind that I’d have sold him my grandmother. Why hadn’t Dr Schmitz presented me with such an agreement at the start of the treatment programme? Isn’t this at the very least a case of medical malpractice?

The article, which also carried a photograph of Heinrich Gerlach in the offices of the Frankfurter Illustrierte , concluded with an excerpt from the novel, which it then went on to print in full, in instalments.

For all the extensive reporting in the press of the legal dispute at the beginning of January 1958, there was no information at that juncture about the outcome. Had the Munich Medical Association issued an arbitration ruling or did the matter come to trial? I resolved to examine Dr Schmitz’s papers to find the answer. Sixty years was a long time, to be sure, but considering the uniqueness of either of these outcomes, it seemed fair to assume that there would probably be a paper trail somewhere in the form of archived material. After numerous attempts, however, I was forced to abandon this hope. My last chance at finding information was scotched by the Munich district court, where I’d enquired after Dr Schmitz’s death date. I was informed that the doctor had died on 15 March 1967. In the public records, his wife was given as the sole heiress, along with a note that she, too, must have passed on in the interim. The court records office could tell me nothing about the doctor’s son, who had been resident in Munich in 1967. However, a series of enquiries led me to the Munich Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians, which also had a small archive. Several requests on my part finally yielded the information that they did indeed hold microfilm archive material of the Schmitz–Gerlach case. I was really keen to see what transpired from this source, but my hope of being able to use this material to piece together a complete picture of the dispute was immediately frustrated when I sat down at the microfiche reader in the Association’s library. The documents that had been preserved on film were incredibly difficult to decipher, and in parts completely illegible. Nevertheless, I was able to reconstruct the route Dr Schmitz had taken to try to corroborate his claim. Among the documents, alongside Heinrich Gerlach’s ‘Observations During Hypnosis’ I also found the agreement that he and the doctor had signed.