Heinrich Gerlach: Breakout at Stalingrad

Then the man shrinks back into his shell once more.

The immediacy of this description derives not least from the sentence fragments, which look like they have been cut off, and whose elliptical form dispenses with finite verbs – a really apposite way of conveying the flustered state of the young soldier. Here, too, the new version treats the incident differently, depicting the situation in a more measured tone in the form of the protagonist’s speech and weakening the overall effect through the use of such narrative formulations as ‘must have been’ (‘Well, in any event we must have been pretty fast asleep […] It was as bright as day, half the village must have been on fire.’).

Noting these patent differences between the two versions prompts the question as to whether, and if so in what way, the author’s particular situation at the time of writing influenced his portrayal. Was it the case that the ‘total institution’ of the camp caused Gerlach willingly or even subconsciously to adopt the ideological premises of Soviet propaganda? Jochen Hellbeck certainly takes this view, assuming that Gerlach must have been an almost perfect pupil of the Soviet re-education programme in the POW camps. I take the opposite position. While it is beyond question that Heinrich Gerlach, after his experiences at Stalingrad, would have found himself in agreement with certain arguments put forward by the National Committee for a Free Germany, this was in no way the result of didactic influence, but rather the consequence of what Gerlach had gone through in the Cauldron. In addition – as the concluding assessments of his character by the Soviet secret service show – Gerlach had constantly kept his distance from the ideological opinions of the German communists and from Soviet policies.

Another factor also came into play here: by his own admission, Heinrich Gerlach considered the act of writing his Stalingrad novel as an attempt to ‘heal his own psyche, in order that he might “finally rid himself of the nightmare visions of what had happened at Stalingrad”’ (Paul Kühne). Hence, modulation and self-censorship played no role in the writing of his account. Rather, Gerlach was far more concerned to get as close as possible to the actual experiences. Only by doing so could he ensure that his writing became a ‘screen memory’ that would perform the role of ‘healing him psychologically’. The way in which Heinrich Gerlach then went about configuring his Stalingrad experiences confirms this thesis. Thus, the original text is dominated by a mixture of epic narration and dialogue, with little room left for critical reflection. There are good reasons for that: in terms of cognitive psychology, the original version of the novel acts out so-called ‘field memories’. Such recollections are characterized by their tendency to reconstruct past events ‘from the original perspective of the subject as they experienced it at the time’. This is quite a different process from that which occurs in ‘observer memories’. These are memories in which we primarily behave like ‘detached observers’ and in this way produce ‘modified versions of the original event’ which we ‘first perceived from a field perspective’. The fact that field memories predominate in Breakout at Stalingrad , whereas The Forsaken Army is overwhelmingly characterized by observer memories, is also evidenced by the greater emphasis on personal narration in the original version, which places front and centre the experiences of the individual as these events unfold around him on the field of action.

The degree to which the discourse of the 1950s obtrudes upon the newly created text of The Forsaken Army and overlays the field memories is also apparent from a chapter that was remarkably sensitive for the period, given that it treated the question of whether and to what extent the Wehrmacht was involved in war crimes. I disagree with German historian Hannes Heer’s otherwise very nuanced book Vom Verschwinden der Täter (‘On the Disappearance of the Perpetrators’) about the war of extermination in the East in one key regard: namely his conclusion that works of fiction never portray the soldiers of the German army as having anything to do with such crimes. According to Heer, ‘no novel has ever recounted the crimes that were committed in the occupied territories in the East or the Southeast… and there is no literary character who ever admits to these acts or who condemns himself out of his own mouth’. Norman Ächtler has proved that this is not the case, and that the crimes of the Wehrmacht most definitely were treated in literature. Yet in cases where novels did indeed touch on crimes committed by the Wehrmacht, this fact did not gain much prominence in the public’s perception, with the result that these episodes were marginalized and pushed to the fringes of the collective consciousness. Heinrich Gerlach therefore belongs – alongside Theodor Plievier, Heinrich Böll, Gerd Gaiser, Hans Werner Richter, Franz Wohlgemuth, Fritz Wöss, Willi Heinrich or Rudolf Krämer-Badoni – to that group of authors who unequivocally do thematize the crimes of the Wehrmacht. Thus, just before he decides to desert, Lakosch, the driver of Gerlach’s central character, First Lieutenant Breuer, recalls the crimes of the German army that he was involved in. In the original version of the novel that Gerlach wrote in Soviet prison camps, Lakosch calls to mind ‘an incident from the summer of ’41’. In the ‘Ukrainian village of Talnoye, at the northeastern corner of the Uman Pocket’, Lakosch comes across a ‘jeering crowd of soldiers, who were herding a bunch of small figures dressed in strange black garb ahead of them down the street. “What’s going on here then?” he asked. – “They were firing at us from a basement!” – “What, this lot here?” – “No idea! Someone was, at any rate!” – “So what now?” – “What now? We’re gonna do ’em in, that’s what! It’s all their fault, the swine!” Lakosch joined the procession.’ Later, we are told very briefly from Lakosch’s viewpoint how a group of fifty Jewish men of middle age, who had already been grievously maltreated, was about to be put to death by boys on fatigue duty, anti-aircraft gunners and soldiers from ‘every conceivable unit’. An NCO from the flak battery, whose voice was ‘hoarse from shouting’ and ‘now produced only an animal-like bellow’ and who was beside himself with rage, had appointed himself leader of the lynch mob. The escalating situation was finally nipped in the bud by an officer:

‘What’s the meaning of this?’

The troops flinched, instantly brought to their senses. The NCO approached, swearing and gesticulating wildly.

‘Get a grip on yourself, man!’ the officer barked at him. ‘Who gave you orders to do this?’

Suddenly waking from his frenzy, the NCO stood there silently gaping before slumping down, a broken man. Taking a furious swing, the officer batted the pistol out of his hand.

‘Get out of my sight, you animal!’ The NCO slunk off there and then, without a word. ‘And the rest of you, disperse this instant!’

Muttering among themselves, the soldiers retreated, but stayed loitering around the scene.

This shocking scene ends with the Jewish men trying to express their gratitude, which the officer curtly rebuffs, telling them: ‘Just piss off […] and don’t show your faces here again!’ The direct speech then switches to a passage of internal focalization, giving us Lakosch’s reflections on the incident:

Lakosch also found himself seized with rage at the time, because the officer’s intervention had deprived him of a ghoulish spectacle. Even so, he could never rid himself of the memory of this incident. And this recollection changed his outlook. Now, whenever he thought of the faces of the seventeen-year-old boys on fatigue duty, predatory children’s faces distorted with bloodlust – all he felt was disgust and shame.