Heinrich Gerlach: Breakout at Stalingrad

Yet common wisdom maintains that the same story can be told in a number of different ways. And that’s precisely what emerges from a comparison of the two versions of the Stalingrad novel, which tally with one another only at first glance. On closer inspection, a whole series of differences become apparent, which it would be no exaggeration to call highly significant. Basically, the following points emerge: Heinrich Gerlach’s new version/reworking accords with the new attitude to Stalingrad hinted at in the title. The Forsaken Army , with its clear connotations of treachery and abandonment, places the emphasis on what the catastrophe at Stalingrad represented – the deliberate act of betrayal by Hitler and the Nazi leadership, who abandoned 300,000 men to their fate by ordering them to hold the Stalingrad Cauldron at all costs. The original was quite different in this regard. There, Gerlach used the idea of the ‘breakout’ in the title to make greater play of the military situation and the life-or-death predicament of the German troops caught in the Cauldron at Stalingrad.

The different beginning to the text of each version then goes on to make clear how Gerlach structured his new version. Whereas the original text leads the reader into the story and, by mentioning the precise location of Kotluban, immediately sets the scene for the winter battle for Stalingrad, the new version begins in medias res with direct speech and the introduction of the central character of First Lieutenant Breuer. This may seem unimportant, but it actually broaches a fundamental principle that distinguishes the two texts from one another: the original version, with its treatment of military operations between October 1942 and the end of hostilities in Stalingrad at the beginning of 1943, is consistently more precise. Like in a report, exact place names that were of significance to the battle of encirclement around Stalingrad are mentioned repeatedly. The reference to the station at Kotluban right at the start of the text, for example, hints at the actual military state of affairs at the time, for it was around there that the Red Army launched a second offensive in September 1942, which would turn out to be decisive for the fate of the German army at Stalingrad over the ensuing months.

In the original version, Gerlach captures more successfully the increasing hopelessness of the military plight of the Sixth Army, and builds up an atmospherically denser picture of the desperate situation facing the enlisted men and officers. This greater precision, which becomes apparent the further one reads, is evident even in the minutest linguistic details, which seem inconsequential at first. While the original version talks about a ‘rapid march’ (across the Kalmyk Steppe), in the new version this term was replaced by the synonym ‘quick march’, more accessible to a 1950s readership. But this alteration sacrifices a rich seam of allusion, since ‘rapid march’ ( Geschwindmarsch ) was not only a current military term at the time when the action takes place in the autumn of 1942, and formed part of the common vocabulary of the German Landser (general infantryman), but was also the term for a Prussian marching style, based on motifs from the composer Johann Strauss the Elder’s quadrilles. In general, the protagonists’ speech in Breakout adheres more closely than the new version to the soldiers’ argot with which Gerlach was so familiar – language that often comes across as terse and banal, but which conveys the prevailing tense situation all the more accurately.

It is clear that both versions of the Stalingrad novel are ultimately based on Heinrich Gerlach’s own episodic and autobiographical reminiscences. Yet when Gerlach wrote the original version, the disastrous defeat was still fresh in his mind, for he began jotting down his first notes as early as the autumn of 1943, just a few months after the surrender of the Sixth Army. In view of the trauma that Stalingrad represented to Gerlach and his fellow soldiers, this was a very short time span, which inevitably was not without implications for the process of recollection and of necessity impacted on the way the story was told. In consequence, Gerlach tellingly did not choose a mode of narration that created any kind of distance to the events being described, but on the contrary opted for a style that one might term ‘dramatic’, and he largely narrates the tale with no distancing whatever. Precisely at those points where the horrors of war overtake the desperate soldiers, the narrator’s presence recedes into the background, giving the events being portrayed a raw immediacy. For example, when he describes the situation of the exhausted Romanian divisions that are supposed to be providing support for the German troops, catastrophe irrupts in the form of a Russian assault:

There! Suddenly the air fills with a sinister and eerie hissing and whizzing sound. Cries of fear and shouts of alarm ring out. And then, in an instant, the storm is upon them. All of a sudden, a forest of flames erupts from the rumbling ground, and a hailstorm of shrapnel comes whistling towards them, as clouds of sulphurous smoke billow across the plain. So sudden is this attack, and so unexpected in the sluggish stillness of the morning, that even the front-line troops’ keen antennae for trouble are of no use. Only a handful of the men, standing around with no inkling of what’s about to happen, heed the threatening hum and dive for cover in time. The rest are scythed down even before they realize what’s happening.

The bombardment grows in intensity, with the countless Stalin organs being joined by weapons of every calibre. Fountains of earth burst upwards, forming a wall that then comes crashing down on the minefield in front of their position, setting off the charges, shredding the barbed-wire entanglements, burying trenches and machine-gun nests, and whipping up a maelstrom of pieces of wood, weapons and human body parts, before rolling on to the rearward artillery positions. All to the accompaniment of a terrible seething, roaring, howling and cracking sound… The very ground on which they are standing, torn and lacerated, flinches under the hellish onslaught of material. What a piece of work is man…!

The description of the same scene in The Forsaken Army is very different; there, chaos does not suddenly erupt out of the blue, but instead a narrator guides the reader to the event from his sovereign perspective (‘Suddenly the air was full of an odd, sinister humming…’). The chosen tempo of narration, recounted in the past tense, loses the immediacy of the original version and ultimately creates a distance to the events being narrated. Even leaving that aside, however, the account of the Russian attack in the new version is noticeably shorter. A similar situation arises in the description of another military action preceding the encirclement of the Sixth Army, which once more recounts an attack by the Red Army. This assault causes panic among the German men and officers and causes the divisional staff to retreat in the aftermath. In the middle of the night, a stranger bursts into the house where the staff officers have billeted themselves and collapses in a state of near-exhaustion. He is a young sergeant, ‘not wearing a coat or helmet, dishevelled and covered in filth. His lank hair is plastered to his forehead, and he is bleeding from a gaping head wound.’ All he can say at first is ‘The Russians, First Lieutenant, sir, the Russians!’ His following description of the events he witnessed then gives readers an authentic impression of what unfolded, drawing them directly into the life-and-death situation, so to speak:

‘We’re lying in bed, totally unsuspecting… Suddenly, there’s a massive bang, and the whole roof comes crashing down on our heads… and the place is on fire… first thing I do is run to the window and climb out into the open! There, all hell has broken loose. Half the village in flames. Explosions all around, everyone running about like crazy. In the midst of all this, Russian tanks… they were firing into the houses… Our horses from the veterinary hospital were racing past in blind terror… some of them hadn’t made it out of the blazing stables. They were screaming… literally screaming… It was terrible.’