As reported in Quick, Gerlach’s ‘treatment’ commenced in mid-July 1951 at Dr Schmitz’s practice. Gerlach, who had only recently moved from Berlin to take up a position as a German and Latin teacher in a grammar school at Brake on the Lower Weser and had just completed his first semester there, was on his summer holidays, giving him the leisure to travel to Munich. Straight away, Schmitz explained to Gerlach that it wouldn’t be possible for him to simply ‘hallucinate’ the novel, as it were, and then write it down in one hit. Nonetheless, they embarked on the experiment on 15 July 1951. To start the ball rolling, in the first hypnosis session Schmitz induced Heinrich Gerlach to cast his mind back to the first chapter of the novel and instructed him to write it down. At this first attempt it immediately became apparent how slim the pickings were, as Gerlach only got a single sentence down on paper – and, what’s more, in a woeful hand that was virtually illegible. Confronted with the result when he was woken from his hypnotized state, he remembered that the sentence he’d scrawled was the first draft of the beginning of the novel, which he’d written in the summer of 1943 before reworking it several times. The sentence read as follows: ‘Winter had sent out a reconnaissance party into the area between the Volga and the Don. The roads were covered with a snowless frost…’ But this outcome also demonstrated that it would be impossible to recreate a manuscript of more than six hundred pages using this method. Schmitz therefore tried putting his test subject Gerlach into a state of hypnosis and getting him to recall one specific event, to which he would then return in the next session. In this way, the plan was to call the course of events around Stalingrad and their fictional depiction to life once more. In the process, Gerlach was woken from hypnosis every ten minutes. In most cases, he was then able fluently to reproduce what he had remembered up to the point where the recollection broke off again. Thereafter, he was put back under hypnosis. The sessions, each of which lasted for around two and a half hours, thus generated a succession of sequels that were also taken down in shorthand by Dr Schmitz’s secretary. A photo of one session, in which Heinrich Gerlach – in the company of Dr Schmitz and his secretary – is seen recalling episodes from his memory was printed in the Quick report, alongside examples of Gerlach’s handwriting.
Heinrich Gerlach himself summarized his observations while under hypnosis two days before the end of the experiment, on 28 July 1951. The preservation of these notes is on the one hand down to the fact that this spectacular experiment was ideally suited for Schmitz to underline the importance of hypnosis. At the same time, the doctor was intent upon drawing conclusions from it regarding the function of memory. However, we are by no means solely reliant upon Schmitz’s account of proceedings, since some years later the working relationship between Gerlach and Schmitz became the subject of an extremely high-profile legal battle that once more caught the public eye. While this was going on, Heinrich Gerlach’s own observations again came under discussion. He had jotted down the following impressions in 1951:
At the beginning of the experiments I was deeply sceptical. During hypnosis, my doubts manifested themselves in the form of snippets of thought that flickered like coloured flashes on the margins of my state of unconsciousness, and on one occasion even took the shape of a giggling goblin, who called out from the back of my head: ‘Serves you right, this is all a load of nonsense!’ When I’m under hypnosis, I’m in a state of split consciousness. I know that I’m sitting in Dr Schmitz’s practice and that he’s talking to me, but at the same time I’m reliving the past in any given situation that has been evoked by the hypnosis. The intensity of these two perceptions changes according to how deeply I am asleep. Mostly I relive the same mental images that came into my head at the time when I was writing the book. In scenes that rely heavily on personal experiences, these experiences also come vividly to life once more, and sometimes make me very emotional. These experiences continue immediately after I’ve been woken from hypnosis, and can even gain in clarity as I’m recounting them. My description of the images I see after waking is very halting and awkward, and I generally have no recollection of my original stylistic formulation of them. Everything just unwinds out of me like a very slow film.
However, this description by Gerlach has certain gaps; notably he says nothing here about the lost manuscript. In the documents I discovered in a Munich archive – of which more later – I also found a copy of Gerlach’s observations:
One time, during a very deep sleep, I got the feeling that I’d become detached from myself and was floating in the air about 50 centimetres above my sleeping body. At the same time I had the impression that it would only take a little push to send me down into total darkness. The experience was pleasant and gentle. […] Sometimes, I’m leafing through the manuscript and can see the exact colour and weave of the paper and read entire lines off the page and see on precisely which pages a particular scene is described.
Gerlach’s notes paint a picture of how his memory was stimulated by being placed in a hypnotic state, causing parts of the manuscript to resurface. Admittedly, the triggers provided by Dr Schmitz during hypnosis and Heinrich Gerlach’s own notes prompt even more far-reaching suppositions about the psychic processes that occur when writing. The writer Uwe Johnson, whose debut novel Speculations about Jakob was published in 1959, exactly two years after Gerlach’s Stalingrad novel, saw novel writing as an attempt to create a ‘social model’. ‘Yet this model consists of people,’ Johnson maintained. ‘These people are invented, assembled from many of my own personal impressions. In this sense, the act of inventing is actually a process of remembering.’ Here, Uwe Johnson is highlighting the role of experience that lies at the root of all storytelling. And this was exactly what came into play during Heinrich Gerlach’s attempts to reconstruct his work, since ultimately his thoughts were consciously recalled in a slow process that involved evoking sensory experiences or events. In addition, the much-quoted ‘madeleine’ episode from Marcel Proust’s epochal novel In Search of Lost Time – which one cannot help but call to mind here – showed the kind of things that can act as the key to the past.
For Proust’s narrator, Marcel, it is the taste of a kind of cake called a ‘petite madeleine’ dunked in lime-blossom tea that suddenly opens the floodgates to his childhood. Barely has the cake melted on his tongue when a feeling of ‘exquisite pleasure’ washes over him. And a moment later the narrator notes: ‘And suddenly the memory returns.’ It is not the sight of the madeleines that sets the process of remembering in motion here but that single second when ‘the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate’. For Heinrich Gerlach, the recollections of the act of writing in the POW camp, prompted by the trigger of hypnosis, mingle with his actual experiences in Stalingrad.
The experiment in reconstructing parts of a novel through hypnosis became an important basis over the following years for Dr Schmitz to draw conclusions about the function of memory and recollection in general. He speculated, for instance, that ‘everything that we have learned consists of “sensory impressions of situations”’, such as ‘read, heard or felt experiences… the vast majority of which have long since faded from our conscious mind’. ‘However,’ Schmitz went on, ‘in secret all these unconscious impressions continue to operate and to govern all our attitudes, thoughts and deeds.’ These insights of Schmitz’s should be regarded as serious and significant, given the general state of psychology in the 1950s. Hans Markowitsch, a distinguished physiological psychologist who has specialized in the field of memory and recollection and was head of the memory clinic at Bielefeld University Hospital, maintains that hypnosis remains a difficult topic even today, even though a great deal of research has been done in this area over the past few years. In the context of what is known as retrograde amnesia, in which people are unable to recall particular events after a given point in time, Markowitsch points to experiments that succeeded in reactivating a patient’s memory by means of hypnosis. Researchers nowadays work from the premise that hypnosis employs ‘the powerful effects of attention and suggestion… to generate, alter and corroborate a broad spectrum of experiences and behaviours that are subjectively evaluated as compulsive’. Today, hypnosis has undergone an upswing in interest as part of the research programme of the cognitive neurosciences. Recent studies have demonstrated that the ‘manipulation of the subjective consciousness through hypnosis under laboratory conditions can provide insights into those mechanisms of the brain that are involved in attention, in motor skills, in the perception of pain, in beliefs and in volition (willpower)’.