The delay in work on the new novel was also due to the fact that after eleven years of military service and as a prisoner, Gerlach had to work his way back into the business of being a schoolteacher. Following his return from captivity, he first found employment at a secondary school in Berlin. From 1951, he occupied a senior master’s post at a grammar school in Brake on the Weser. He taught German and Latin to pupils in the upper school – both subjects that called for a great deal of preparation and correcting of scripts. Over and above this, he also had to deal with the sort of problems that faced all late returnees from the war. ‘My father first had to find his way back into family life,’ recalled his daughter. ‘That hardly left any time for writing, so he used the school holidays for that.’
III. The Forsaken Army –
A surprise bestseller
Finally, in the autumn of 1956 Heinrich Gerlach was in a position to send the completed manuscript to the Nymphenburg publishing house in Munich, which replaced the original title Durchbruch bei Stalingrad (Breakout at Stalingrad) with Die verratene Armee (The Forsaken Army), feeling it was more in keeping with the spirit of the 1950s. The new title not only sounded better, but also chimed in with the myth of ‘lambs to the slaughter’ that had worked its way into the public consciousness since the start of the new decade. The publisher put the Stalingrad novel on its forthcoming list for autumn 1957. And so a radical experiment that was unique in the annals of German literature came to its successful conclusion. Nymphenburg did not expend a lot of effort on promoting The Forsaken Army; the sensational story of its genesis generated enough publicity of its own. The large print run of ten thousand for the first edition of the book sold out within weeks in November 1957. Curt Vinz, who had founded the publishing house with Berthold Spangenberg and Gerhard Weiss in 1946, was ecstatic about the book’s impact:
We’ve also got firm contracts with publishers in New York, London, Milan, Stockholm and Holland, plus options for French, Spanish, Norwegian, Finnish and Danish co-editions. We’ve even received an enquiry from Poland – a first for us – and the radio station in the Soviet zone of Germany has requested an excerpt for broadcast. We’ve never experienced anything like this!
Indeed, the ‘Novel of Stalingrad’ (as the subtitle dubbed it) really did capture the mood of the age, giving a voice to those who had survived Stalingrad and Soviet captivity. Although Hans Schwab-Felisch, one of the most renowned literary critics associated with the Gruppe 47 (‘Group 47’) circle of writers, placed a caveat on Gerlach’s literary achievement by pointing to the novel’s documentary character, he was still full of praise: ‘Even so, one must give credit to the author, who gives evidence in this work of a remarkable ability to impose a tight and consistent order on an immense mass of material, but most of all for his consummate skill in squaring and blending the chance events of his personal experience with the general run of events, and his objective recounting of military matters with the demands of a novel.’ Ultimately, the critic maintained, in its portrayal of the ‘common soldier’ as well as various ‘washed-up types’ among the ranks of the officers, the novel came across as far more ‘immediate and true to life’ than Theodor Plievier’s Stalingrad. Above all, Schwab-Felisch continued, Gerlach offered an authentic account of what those who had been soldiers in the Third Reich had gone through, from gnawing hunger to being ordered to defend their positions ‘to the last man’, which amounted to a death sentence. The reviewer of the Stuttgarter Zeitung also heaped praise on the author’s achievement. Heinrich Gerlach, who unlike Theodor Plievier had ‘been through hell’ and who ‘had been trapped in the Cauldron at Stalingrad from the first to the last day’, had ‘not been able to attain the kind of distance that a novel about the “forsaken army”, about that historical event, requires’. The fact that the enterprise succeeded nevertheless and that the book ‘had such a shocking emotional impact’ on the reader ‘must be attributed above all to his careful planning and his unflinching honesty’. With regard to the lost manuscript, Gerlach’s use of hypnotism and the recreation of the novel, the reviewer stressed:
This fact alone demonstrates the urgency that drove the author to put pen to paper. It was the urgency of a man who feels a compelling need to write about his terrible experiences and the unimaginable suffering of almost three hundred thousand soldiers, lest the slaughter of Leviathan appear a wholly senseless undertaking.
It was astonishing, he claimed, how Heinrich Gerlach had managed not to lose sight of this mission despite the huge cast of characters in his novel. Although he set it in various locations – the army’s supply train, field hospitals, airstrips, field HQs and forward positions on the main front – the different strands of the narrative never got tangled: ‘On the contrary: before long, they start to form a tight network consisting of countless snapshots evoking anger and pain and bitter lament, each of them displaying an immediacy that is often compelling.’ This reviewer was evidently deeply moved and made no attempt to hide it when discussing the war and the fate of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad:
Because Heinrich Gerlach gives the reader a detailed insight into the Führer’s direct orders, into Colonel General Paulus’s decisions and into the discussions of the situation that took place in the divisional headquarters, and shows that the lower ranks, all those starving, freezing, emaciated poor wretches, knew nothing or next to nothing about the hopeless predicament they were in, you find yourself gripped time and again by a sense of impotent rage. You know that every day will be more horrific than the last, yet you can do nothing to help. Here, in order to sustain the myth of the promised ‘imminent final victory’, an entire army was knowingly and without the slightest scruple put to the sword.
Both of these reviewers drew comparisons with Theodor Plievier’s bestseller on Stalingrad. That was understandable, since Gerlach also restricts narrated time to the decisive phase in Stalingrad, namely the months from November 1942 to January 1943. As well as this compressed time frame, both novels also went in for minutely detailed depiction of selected events. In addition, a stylistic trait they both shared with the novels being criticized in the GDR at around the same time for their ‘hard-bitten writing style’ was the absence of any commentary on events by a sovereign narrator. Instead they are predominantly a personal account, in which events are seen through the eyes of the protagonists themselves. An impression of immediacy is also heightened by extensive passages of discourse and dialogue. What was not mentioned in reviews at the time, however, was Gerlach’s use of certain features of modern narration. As in Plievier’s work, frequent shifts in pacing, a multiplicity of narrative voices and the use of flashback sequences all serve to disrupt the closed epic form. This said, though, Gerlach clearly links the course of the unfolding tragedy at Stalingrad to his central character, First Lieutenant Breuer, who can be seen as an autobiographical sketch and who in the final analysis functions as the author’s alter ego.