Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

The twenty-one articles that Heinrich Gerlach wrote while working on the editorial staff of Free Germany analyse the catastrophe at Stalingrad and the current military situation; he also reported on meetings of the National Committee and tried to put across a more objective image of the Soviet Union to counter the clichéd view of Bolshevism that was peddled in Germany. He also gave authentic accounts of life in the Cauldron, culled from the novel he was working on. His article of 26 March 1944, recalling the German capitulation at Stalingrad a little more than a year after the actual event, begins thus:

Fourteen months ago, the Sixth Army was wiped out at Stalingrad. Hundreds of thousands died, not for their homeland – since that could hardly be defended there on the Volga – nor for oil, metal ores or wheat – they couldn’t be obtained by seizing others’ territory – nor even to save the endangered Eastern Front – the mass killing at Stalingrad couldn’t achieve that; no, the sole reason for their cold and brutal sacrifice was Adolf Hitler’s dogmatism and self-regard. And because the men knew that they had to die for nothing, they didn’t go to their deaths with a victorious smile on their faces, with flashing eyes and singing the national anthem, but instead, dressed in rags, emaciated by hunger, filled with all the pain of tormented animals, they died a miserable death in frost and snow, and with a curse on their lips against the man whom they’d once trusted. That was Stalingrad .

The rest of the piece is an unsparing reckoning with Hitler and with German propaganda, which made ‘out of the senseless, criminal sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of men a new heroic epic to rival the Nibelungenlied ’. Gerlach’s acute and bitter account climaxed in a call that he believed would presently grow ever more insistent on the home front too: ‘Hitler must be toppled if Germany is to survive!’

In July 1944 – with the front moving inexorably closer to Germany – he invoked a nightmarish vision of the death and destruction that was about to be visited upon the country. Harking back to his last home leave at the end of April 1942, he conjured up a picture of Lyck in East Prussia, which was situated around 150 kilometres from Gerlach’s birthplace of Königsberg and was still untouched by the war – ‘My home town – what a charming little place!’ He described the island on the lake, the marketplace, the church, the water tower and the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt School, for many years his residence and place of work. ‘What’s about to happen?’ Gerlach asked, before delivering a sobering and positively chilling answer: ‘It’s not about to happen, it’s happening right now! Today, Hitler ordered the alarm bells rung throughout Lyck! Evacuation! Assemble on the market square, women, children and pensioners with hand luggage, handcarts are permitted.’ Gerlach foresaw destruction: total destruction. ‘Hitler is setting out his killing zone in Germany! Blowing up buildings! Setting light to houses! No stone is to be left standing!’ And he saw what would be left after a fight to the death: ‘All that remains is a heap of stones, a pile of smoking, smouldering rubble. A smell of burning wafts far and wide across the countryside. That was Lyck!’ Confronting any illusions people might have, he noted: ‘It’s impossible to imagine – but this is how it will turn out, this is the only possible outcome if we let Hitler continue with his war. For wherever Hitler wages war, he recognizes no mothers, no children, no home towns and no schools. All he sees is “defensive terrain” that is to be left as scorched earth when German forces withdraw.’ In the desperate hope that such a dreadful scene might still be averted, Gerlach positively implores his countrymen not to submit to this fate but to rise up against the dictator:

This must not be allowed to happen! My East Prussian countrymen, my fellow Germans all, whom Hitler has consigned to the same fate: now, finally, you must refuse to obey this lunatic, you must now stay the hand of the executioner of Germany.

Heinrich Gerlach’s terrifying vision would become reality, and even his own family was forced to leave Lyck, but not because of the advance of the Red Army; instead, like other families of BDO members, they were rounded up and taken into custody in July 1944. Six months after Gerlach’s article, in late January 1945, Elbing was besieged by the Red Army and doggedly defended by the German garrison. Five thousand German troops died in this pointless action. By the time the siege was over, 60 per cent of the town lay in ruins, with only six houses left standing in the old town. In sum, it is fair to say that all of Heinrich Gerlach’s journalistic contributions show him to be a perceptive analyst of current affairs and a firm opponent of Hitler.

Heinrich Gerlach’s involvement with the BDO and the newspaper Free Germany could do nothing to dispel his repeated flashbacks of the traumatic experiences he had gone through during the catastrophe at Stalingrad. Yet he saw an opportunity to rid himself of them through the act of writing. He began with a series of diary entries, but did not get very far, because the events began to coalesce in his mind and to become ever more monstrous with the passage of time, while the urgent necessity of processing his experiences constantly increased. At the end of 1943 he decided to switch from diary entries to an epic form of narrative. For that, he needed characters, plus locations and a time frame within which the action could unfold.

Gerlach had all that at his fingertips, given that Stalingrad and the annihilation of the Sixth Army provided him with a ready-made storyline, so to speak. In the spirit of Uwe Johnson, Gerlach could therefore hold fast to the maxim that ‘the narrative begins once the story is complete’. He spent a long time agonizing over how to begin the text and formulate his opening sentence, which would, after all, set the tone for everything that came after. With his thorough grounding in German literature, Gerlach knew full well how crucial the start of a narrative had been to a novelist he greatly admired, Theodor Fontane, who wrote to his friend Gustav Karpeles in 1880: ‘The first chapter is always the most important thing, and within that first chapter the first page, in fact pretty much the first sentence, is key. If you’ve structured your novel properly, then the first page should contain the germ of the whole narrative. That’s why I’m forever fussing and tinkering. What comes after is plain sailing by comparison.’

In order to finally put pen to paper, Gerlach began by giving his first chapter the title ‘Home On Leave?’ The question mark was quite deliberate; the German forces dug in outside Stalingrad kept hoping that they would be relieved by fresh troops and might still make it home for Christmas. After several reworkings, Gerlach settled on the following opening sentences:

Winter had sent out its reconnaissance parties into the brown steppe between the Volga and the Don. The unseasonal warmth of the first days of November had, by the sixth, given way to a snowless frost that froze the mud on the endless tracks as hard as asphalt. Along this pleasingly smooth, firm new surface sped a small grey car, lively as a colt that had bolted from its stable.

These lines, which at first glance depict an almost idyllic winter landscape, lead the reader into the actual story. The very next sentence steers us towards the heart of the action: ‘It was coming from the great depression to the south, where the general staffs and the supply trains for the German units fighting to take Stalingrad had dug in, and heading for the railway station at Kotluban.’ Only after this descriptive passage does Gerlach introduce the first of his characters, namely the car driver ‘so heavily muffled in winter clothing that all that one could see of him were a pair of crafty eyes gazing out at the world and a red snub nose’. In the version that the author pieced together from memory and rewrote fifteen years later, Gerlach opted for a different, more direct lead-in. For the start of the narrative, he chose some unspecified point in medias res and began with a snippet of dialogue, with an unnamed character exclaiming: ‘Hell, it’s cold!’ The second sentence then goes on to identify the speaker as Lieutenant Breuer, the alter ego of the author.