In this regard, Dr Schmitz’s efforts to reactivate Heinrich Gerlach’s memories through hypnosis also represent a thoroughly innovative experiment even from a modern perspective. When Schmitz later remarks that Gerlach was an easy subject to hypnotize, this is a sign of a possible connection between personality traits and memory. Although, to date, no psychological correlates have yet been found for a so-called ‘divergent suggestibility’ among people, despite numerous attempts to establish one over the past few decades, the latest research seems to confirm that ‘connections between suggestibility and mental preoccupation’ on the one hand and ‘a mental constitution inclined to fantasy, creativity and empathy’ on the other do nevertheless exist. This is certainly true in spades of Heinrich Gerlach. Furthermore, we may assume that the attempt to reconstruct the novel was only successful because what Gerlach had previously gone through had imprinted itself forcibly on his stored memory and was in each case linked to concrete experiences in Stalingrad.
The attempt to reconstruct the lost novel came to an end on 30 July 1951. In twenty-three extended sessions, Schmitz and Gerlach had gathered together an extensive body of material. Schmitz estimated that they now had to hand ‘the contents of two major sections of the former manuscript’. As the original manuscript comprised three parts, this meant that ‘two-thirds of the work had been rescued from oblivion’. He assumed that the methods they had employed had ‘given a powerful impetus to recollection and that the remainder of the work would duly emerge in the course of processing the material, as generally happens in the case of memories’.
The Quick story, the first part of which gave a graphic impression of how the sessions had gone in the accompanying photos, was rounded off with a report by Dr Schmitz giving a suspenseful account of certain selected episodes from the experiment. He followed this with a summary of the overall result for the readers of Quick:
The lost manuscript began to emerge once more from a thousand individual details, and its forgotten structure likewise became clear once more. So, the strenuous work of this treatment was not in vain. The darkness was illuminated better than we could have hoped. One report on the whole process confirms that the faculty of memory has automatically been strengthened by it. As a result, we are confident that everything will re-emerge, perhaps even in a better and clearer form than it had been before.
It was with this prospect in mind also that Heinrich Gerlach returned to Brake on the Weser and began piecing together his novel on Stalingrad. Even so, his hopes of now being able to get on rapidly with preparing the text for publication were not realized. This was one reason why, six months later, on 11 January 1952, Gerlach wrote once more to Dr Schmitz seeking his help. He told the psychiatrist that he would send him large parts of the reconstructed manuscript in order to satisfy the doctor’s ‘strong personal interest in the outcome’. At the same time, he also asked Schmitz to show this completed section of the novel to Quick. In fact, Gerlach himself had already sent the first chapter to the magazine in October, while admitting that he did so ‘only very reluctantly, as people won’t be able to make head or tail of it as it stands’. Unfortunately, he told Schmitz, he hadn’t yet received a reply. He presumed that Schmitz’s good offices would make more headway:
It’s always better to pester people in person, and because you have a direct intellectual and material interest in the book, I am trusting that you won’t find my request unreasonable.
This letter, which came to light during the subsequent dispute between the two former partners, allows us to draw conclusions about Gerlach’s situation at the time and his plan on how to proceed with work on the manuscript. It is also interesting that Gerlach clearly thought about soliciting Quick’s interest for a second time in supporting the undertaking. His letter to Schmitz continues very much in this vein:
I hope to complete the second section in the period from March to June. This will have the added advantage of furnishing Quick with enough material to decide whether they’d be willing to finance another trip by me to Munich. Provided your schedule allows, we could then work together in July on the third – and by far the most important – section (where many things are still very unclear to me), and by August or September or at the latest October, everything would then be cut and dried. Anyhow, those are my hopes and plans; let’s hope fate conspires to make it so!
In addition, Gerlach asked Schmitz to send him the transcript of the sessions, claiming that it would ‘help me greatly in my work by prompting my rejuvenated memory’. Sadly, only a portion of the records would ever come to light, breaking off after page seventeen. He also asked about the date of manufacture, delivery address and price of the ‘small typewriter’ he’d seen at Schmitz’s practice and which he’d been very taken with. Gerlach’s letter ends with a commitment to their continuing collaboration and the positively autosuggestive confession that the novel had to be published at all costs:
My dear Herr Schmitz, I should like to assure you that since working together I feel very close to you on a personal level. I promise you that I will do everything in my power to ensure that we bring our collaboration to a successful conclusion. Money matters are the very least of my concerns here, given that I’ve got a steady job and income and no pressing needs. But I am obsessed with the thought that this book must see the light of day, all the more so in this current age, which seems hell-bent on preparing for another war and forgetting the horrors of the one just past.
In the event, this further collaboration would never come about. Similarly, Gerlach’s plan to finish reconstruction of the novel manuscript by the end of 1952 also came to nothing. By the end of April 1952, he had only written ninety pages; the complete reconstruction of his book would ultimately take him another four years. In a long conversation with me and an extensive letter of July 2012, his daughter, Dorothee Wagner, recalled her father’s working methods in the years following his hypnosis: ‘From the outset,’ she told me, ‘my father would involve other people in his writing. He asked them to recount things to them, quizzed them, and gave public readings of his work. He was happy to receive suggestions and criticism. […] He got our family engaged in the new edition of the novel and maintained close contact with friends and former fellow camp inmates. Many of them came to stay with us, and the talk then was invariably of Stalingrad and life as a POW. My father eagerly followed everything that was published on the subject and studied historical sources on the war, in so far as that was possible back then.’