Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

This archive material confirmed that no definitive ruling had been forthcoming, and that as a result the matter had gone to court. In this forum, the dispute excited media interest nationwide. For instance, a brief note appeared in Der Spiegel on 12 March 1958, referring back to the magazine’s earlier report on 29 January of that year and announcing:

The documentary filmmaker Wilfried H. Achterfeld from Essen has asserted copyright of the title ‘Dictated Under Hypnosis’ by entering it on the list of film titles in the German movie industry’s voluntary registration scheme. The subject of the planned film ‘will be closely based on the current legal dispute between the psychotherapist Dr Schmitz and the bestselling author Dr Gerlach’.

The fact that the idea for the film never came to fruition almost certainly had to do with the length of the trial, which dragged out over several years and only ended on 29 January 1961 with a settlement between the parties. A newspaper report on the long-running case reported the outcome thus:

The question of the validity of the signature on the contract played a decisive role in the case. For instance, was it obtained during hypnosis or under the after-effects of the procedure, as Gerlach implied? The matter was finally resolved by a handwriting expert’s report prepared by the Niedersachsen Criminal Police Bureau. According to this, there could be no doubt that Gerlach signed the agreement of 30.7.1951 while in a fully conscious state. The matter thus became subject to settlement. Schmitz accepted the sum of 9,500 Marks, and the author indicated that he was willing to pay that sum.

According to the Oldenburg district court, in compliance with the ordinance governing such matters, the records of this civil action were subsequently destroyed. The same went for the graphologist’s report, which was prepared in the context of the trial and which formed the basis for the settlement between the two disputants. I hoped I might still find a copy of the report in the state police bureau in Hanover, but was disappointed. In any event, the resident graphologist there told me that the kind of report that had been drafted back then would no longer be admissible, since in the interim it had been shown that even signatures written in trance-like states do not necessarily display the slightest deviation from the norm!

And with that, I considered my involvement with Heinrich Gerlach to be at an end. Notwithstanding the book’s genesis, unique in the history of German literature – which, astonishingly, even literary scholars of the older generation did not know about or had forgotten – the fact remained that the original draft of the novel was lost and the only extant version was the successful new one. In his foreword to The Forsaken Army , Gerlach had explained the very special circumstances of the novel’s emergence in captivity, the seizure of the manuscript and his eventual recreation of the novel:

In 1944–45, when everything that had happened was still fresh in my mind, I wrote this book while I was a prisoner of the Russians. My fellow prisoners, from all ranks and walks of life, helped me with their recollections and constructive criticism. In December 1949, the manuscript that I’d carefully guarded for so long was confiscated by the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). The brave attempt by a friend of mine to smuggle a miniature transcript written on twenty sheets of paper to Germany also failed… In the period from 1951 to 1955 I rewrote the manuscript after my return to Germany. I saw it as my duty towards my dead and living comrades.

In the Cold War period of confrontation between East and West, it seemed a hopeless endeavour to try to track down the manuscript seized by the MVD. But on rereading Gerlach’s preface, I couldn’t help but speculate on how the two versions might compare. Given that many commentators saw the key achievement of Gerlach’s reconstruction of his Stalingrad novel as being its authenticity, what must the original have been like, written as it was in the immediate aftermath of the military catastrophe at Stalingrad? I wondered whether the manuscript had been destroyed after being confiscated, or was languishing in some secret Russian archive. But I could see no possible way of finding out.

As it happened, just such an opportunity did arise in October 2011, albeit completely fortuitously. I was swapping notes with Manfred Görtemaker, a leading scholar of modern history who taught at the University of Potsdam and the author of such titles as History of the Federal Republic of Germany (1999) and Thomas Mann and Politics (2005). During our conversation about the projects we were currently working on, Görtemaker mentioned some recent research that had taken him to Moscow. In response to my question whether it was now possible to work in Russian archives again, he replied that, although not exactly straightforward, it wasn’t out of the question either. I kept thinking about our discussion after I got home, so I sent him an email telling him about the material in the Russian archives that particularly interested me. It didn’t just concern Heinrich Gerlach, but more generally cultural activity among German prisoners of war and attempts to harness this for the purposes of Soviet re-education in writers’ workshops. I cited exiled German writers like Erich Weinert or Johannes R. Becher. Görtemaker responded straight away and put me in contact with Moscow. The documentation I got back raised my hopes, with the result that on 14 February 2012, we – namely I and my colleague Norman Ächtler – found ourselves standing outside the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA) in Moscow, a plain, functional two-storey building on Admiral Makarov Street. In the rear section of the building, not visible from the street, there is a silo-like tower containing a series of Russian archives. I was aware that the Russian State Military Archive had had several names throughout its history, and was founded in 1918 as the ‘Archive of the Red Army’. It had been given its present name in 1992 following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The enormous body of documentation relating to all the different branches of the Soviet armed forces, including special forces, from the time of the Civil War to the Second World War is held here, including all relevant files on individuals. I also knew that, since 1999, the military archive also included a so-called ‘special archive’ containing the bulk of records in German.

Access to the special archive, which was established in August 1945 by the Soviet secret service to house all the papers seized from the Germans, was at first the sole preserve of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), which after 1954 changed its name to the Committee for State Security, or KGB. The records kept there also served post-1945 as evidence in war crimes trials and to assist the KGB’s activities, both internally and abroad. Up to the 1970s the holdings of this archive had been catalogued on a card-index system, though this work had not followed a consistent logic. As a result, even today not all the documents have been registered or made accessible. This can mean that you find none of the documents you’re looking for, but also that you sometimes unearth wonderful chance discoveries. We not only knew exactly what we were looking for in the archive but had also thought long and hard about where best to commence our search. We were fully aware that, although the documents housed in the military archive were in principle accessible to foreign academics as well, in practice the restrictions on making copies meant that it was virtually impossible to cast one’s net very wide.