Heinrich Gerlach: Breakout at Stalingrad

‘That isn’t war any more,’ he would recall with a shudder, ‘it’s…’

But he couldn’t even find the words to express what was troubling him.

In Breakout at Stalingrad , this episode is conveyed in an extremely condensed form through the rapid shift between dialogue and terse narration. Here, too, The Forsaken Army does things very differently, interposing comments by the narrator into both elements. Thus, the flak NCO is described in the following terms: ‘He had a face of the sort you come across all over the place behind counters and perched on office stools. But the devil seemed to have taken possession of this bland countenance.’ While there are no indications in the original version as to why the Jewish men are going to be executed, so expressing the casual matter-of-factness of this act of murder, the new version provides a reason for the soldiers’ lack of inhibition. Lakosch, who asks why they are intending to put the men to death, receives the reply they are ‘to blame for everything’, whereupon the narrator intervenes to comment:

Lakosch felt ashamed at his question; after all, he’d been given any amount of information about the Jews from pamphlets and lectures. He lifted his carbine off his shoulder and pushed to the front of the crowd. He was filled with a grim satisfaction at finally being able to settle personal scores with those who were really responsible for this war.

This intervention by the narrator refers explicitly to the role of Nazi propaganda, which was largely responsible for corrupting the young men. Following on from this, the conflict situation, in comparison with the original version, is staged in a far more dramatic way and evolves into a full-blown standoff between a bestial common soldier and a humane officer. The officer is clearly put centre stage as the antagonist of the out-of-control infantryman and the significance of his courageous intervention is emphasized by the thrust and counter-thrust of his exchanges with the soldier. In order to prevent the situation from getting totally out of hand, he is even forced to brandish his pistol. In line with this, his reaction to the gratitude shown by the Jewish men is also more friendly than in the manuscript of Breakout , as he tells them: ‘Quickly, quickly! Get out of here!’ Surreptitiously, through the pointed dialogue the episode turns into an exceptional situation and a clash between a Wehrmacht officer following proper procedure on the one hand and bloodthirsty troops on the other. The subsequent reflection on the part of Lakosch underscores the uniqueness of the incident and the clear effort to direct our sympathies.

The episode outlined above is just one example of how the prevailing discourse of the 1950s was written into The Forsaken Army . The existential isolation of the individual is presented much more powerfully in the new version. The situations in which the individual is called upon to make crucial decisions are charged with an atmosphere of existentialism. In tune with the kind of ‘big history’ that was predominant in the 1950s, the generation who fought at the front are portrayed as the victims of tyranny and war. The Forsaken Army thus follows the basic template of a whole generation of works, including essays and especially novels and short stories, that made the German foot soldier into the victim of a dictatorial system.

In summary, we may draw following conclusions: the original manuscript, which was written when Gerlach was still in a POW camp, differs markedly from the reconstructed version, which was created during the period after Gerlach’s return to Germany (1950–56) and in which the tenor of the narrative is unmistakably a vehicle for the postwar discourses of the 1950s. This novel, published in 1957, has acquired the status of an authentic piece of documentation that compares and evaluates in such a way as to make the language appear more weighty, polished and smooth. Furthermore, the device of the narrator acts as a vehicle for putting across the characteristic 1950s’ narrative of the soldier as victim.

The author of the original manuscript does not expound problems, and comments on the action to a far lesser extent. Through the ‘hard-bitten writing style’ of his portrayal, he is therefore able more authentically to form a kaleidoscopic impression not only of the German soldier during a campaign but also of the ‘individual’ caught in the Stalingrad Cauldron between illusion, hope and inhuman suffering without paying any attention to concerns beyond the story he is narrating. His unvarnished but nevertheless sympathetic gaze adopts the cause of humanity. The depiction gets underneath the grubby uniform of the soldier and reveals his miserable craving for tinned meat rations, cigarettes, firewood and imitation Christmas trees, as well as his loneliness, vulnerability, despair and destitution in the icy bunkers of the battlefield. For all its moral and narrative detachment from any background political or ideological concerns, this uncompromising account nonetheless most definitely succeeds in generating a certain sympathy, not for the German soldier as a fighter, but certainly for the human being in all his weaknesses and strengths. As a consequence of this, the phenomenon called ‘comradeship’ plays an immeasurably more central role in Gerlach’s original manuscript than is the case in the reconstructed and rewritten new version. This obvious compassion for the ‘soldier as human being’ is the result of the immediate impressions and traumatic experiences of the former officer and eyewitness to the Battle of Stalingrad, Heinrich Gerlach, who, during his long incarceration as a prisoner of war, sought to break the bonds of his captivity through the act of writing.

HEINRICH GERLACH served as a lieutenant in the 14th Panzer Division at Stalingrad. Wounded and then captured by the Soviets, he wrote Breakout at Stalingrad while being held in captivity in the USSR. He died in 1991.

CARSTEN GANSEL (b. 1955), who discovered the manuscript of Breakout at Stalingrad in a Moscow archive in 2012, is a professor of contemporary German Literature at Giessen University. He is a member of the German PEN Centre and president of the jury for the Uwe Johnson Advancement Award. He is the author of numerous books on literature from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, including the work of Hans Fallada, Christa Wolf and Johannes R. Becher.

PETER LEWIS (b. 1958) is a writer, editor and translator of both fiction and non-fiction. He studied German at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg, graduating with first-class honours in 1981. His translation of Jonas Lüscher’s Barbarian Spring (2014) was described as ‘brilliant’ by The New York Times.

Apollo is an imprint of Head of Zeus.

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