Heinrich Gerlach: Breakout at Stalingrad

And now an eerie transformation comes over these faces. In their crazed desperation, they must surely have still nurtured some belief and hope in spite of everything – even in spite of the funeral oration they’d been treated to yesterday. But now they realize: it’s over, really and truly over. And their faces turn to stone, and their feeble hands form fists. And suddenly one of them shouts:

‘We give thanks to our Führer! Heiiiil Hitler!’

Others take up the chant. The cellar resounds to the drone of their voices: ‘Heiiiil Hitler! … Heiiiiiiiil Hitler!’ This cry, once uttered over and over again by millions in hysterical rapture, has never sounded like it does here now. It’s not mockery, it’s not ridicule; it’s a cold, clear, terrible reckoning. It’s like an executioner’s axe falling.

Breuer can feel his eyes growing moist.

‘Did it have to end this way?’ he thinks. ‘Yes, there was no alternative!’

‘So this is the end,’ the captain continues. ‘We didn’t want this to happen. But we followed in blind obedience all the same.’

Admittedly, it appears to be more than just a translation problem that led the Russian assessor to lift the soldiers’ chorus of ‘We give thanks to our Führer! Heil Hitler!’ out of the context of this episode and to completely ignore the subsequent comments by the narrator, which culminate in a moment of realization by the central character. For the ‘Heil Hitler!’ is, as the narrator says, ‘not mockery, it’s not ridicule; it’s a cold, clear, terrible reckoning’.

This report comprehensively sealed the fate of Heinrich’s Gerlach’s ‘Breakout at Stalingrad’. It promptly vanished into the secret archives of the Ministry of the Interior.

In the book of reminiscences that he compiled for his own children, Heinrich Gerlach’s younger son, Heinrich Jr, notes how his father, from 1951 onwards, alongside his work as a grammar-school teacher, found himself faced with another, far greater challenge: the reconstruction of his lost Stalingrad novel. According to his daughter, Dorothee Wagner, Gerlach had something akin to a feeling of guilt. Time and again he asked himself why he had survived. The lesson he drew from this for himself was an obligation to bear witness to the catastrophe at Stalingrad. According to Heinrich Gerlach Jr, once the family’s circumstances had slowly begun to return to an even keel, his father decided to ‘rewrite the novel about the Battle of Stalingrad’. Disappointed by the results of the hypnotism experiments with the magazine Quick , the only way forward he could see was ‘to rewrite the work from the beginning, relying on some fragments he’d pieced together and his recollection of the novel’. And so, over the following years, and with the family’s help, the novel re-emerged, chapter by chapter. ‘The sole topic of conversation in the house was Stalingrad,’ Gerlach’s daughter recalled.

Gerlach involved the whole family in the business of recreating the novel; whenever he completed a chapter, he would ‘always read it out in front of us and invite us to criticize it’. Every reading was followed by a lively discussion, in which Heinrich Jr’s older siblings stated their opinions very forthrightly, finding as they did ‘a lot of the material too “corny” or “long-winded”’. Looking back, Dorothee Wagner has identified two things that resulted from Gerlach’s constant work on restoring his novel. On the one hand, as his daughter she felt that she was being taken seriously for the first time, all the more so since Gerlach took the criticisms levelled by his family audience on board and made changes to the manuscript as a result. On the other hand, the whole affair was rather stressful. ‘It brought back memories of the war, and in truth that was very taxing for us as children,’ she recollected. Even so, after sixty years she still saw that time in a positive light: ‘In retrospect, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’

Even the Gerlachs’ younger son, whom his sister assumed might not be able to handle hearing about the events at Stalingrad, regards the reconstruction of his father’s novel as a really exciting moment in his own childhood. By his own account, he had ‘secretly admired his father for his ability to write such things, and listened with rapt attention to his readings’. Even as a boy, he said, it was clear to him how much effort it must have cost. ‘The book didn’t write itself,’ he acknowledged. As observers during the process of its genesis, the Gerlach children had experienced how ‘the writer really had to grapple with the individual sentences, and for days on end the head of the Garlich household [the fictional name Heinrich Jr uses for the family in his memoirs] would go around with a vertical furrow of worry creasing his brow, and nobody dared to talk to him’. In much the same vein as his older sister, Heinrich Gerlach Jr summarized the situation during the process of recreating the novel, which lasted until 1956, thus: ‘Stalingrad moved into our back room in Brake and dominated the life of the Gerlach household for years, albeit at one remove.’

These reminiscences by the Gerlach children, as well as the complex genesis of the novel, corroborate the argument that Heinrich Gerlach put forward in his legal dispute with the hypnotist Dr Schmitz. He laid out the facts of the case as he saw it most convincingly in an interview with the Frankfurter Illustrierte magazine in March 1958:

I know exactly […] what I have to thank Schmitz for. He gave me a strong initial impetus and provided me with the building blocks that enabled me to reconstruct around 150 pages of my confiscated manuscript relatively quickly. But that’s as far as it went. Claims that I could never have got my story down on paper again without Schmitz’s help are nonsense. Granted, it might have taken a bit longer.

Because the original manuscript had either been lost without trace or disappeared into a Russian archive, Heinrich Gerlach had no idea whether his attempt to reconstruct the work was close to the original or if, in the course of the various reworkings he had undertaken up to 1957, he had inadvertently introduced some major changes. Only a side-by-side comparison of the two versions almost sixty years later made it possible to solve another mystery in this curious tale. The question remains as to how such a comparison turned out.

The first thing to say is that the conditions for a reconstruction of the Stalingrad novel – notwithstanding the time it took and the psychological stress – were favourable. This was due to a number of reasons: Heinrich Gerlach had worked out the chronological course of the Stalingrad catastrophe, and so was able to recall from the outset the stages of the battle for the city that tied in with his personal experiences. The key thing, therefore, was to connect all the events, incidents and occurrences and the people and places involved and to incorporate them into the flow of the narrative. Moreover, because Gerlach had, during his time in prison, continued to revise his novel even after completion, changing and correcting certain passages, several of the details must have imprinted themselves firmly on his memory. Add to this the fact that, in preparing his miniature transcription of the novel in early 1949, he must of necessity had to vividly recall not only the 614 pages of the original manuscript but also the actual events in Stalingrad. The task that he was now faced with thus resembled what would nowadays be called a mental journey back through time to the past. What was required was for him to retrieve his Stalingrad experiences piece by piece from his autobiographical memory. In the process, he needed to weld together a mass of individual episodes, which in turn were connected with one another in a variety of different ways, into a single great storyline. We should therefore not be surprised that, in recreating The Forsaken Army , Heinrich Gerlach appeared on the face of things to have succeeded in vividly reconstructing in all its fundamental stages the tragedy that unfolded at Stalingrad. In a nutshell, key elements of the plot are identical in both versions. Likewise, 70 per cent of the chapter headings, written in capital letters, are identical to those in the original manuscript.