As the hypnosis sessions with Dr Schmitz had already shown, Gerlach had structured his novel in three major sections that chronologically followed the most important phases of the battle for Stalingrad. The first part, which he gave the heading ‘Storm on the Horizon’, portrays the Red Army offensive up to the closing of the encircled pocket called the Cauldron. The second (‘Between Night and Morning’) runs from the immediate aftermath of the encirclement to the rejection of the Soviet offer to accept a German surrender, while the third part (‘The Moment of Truth’) covers the final phase of the Battle of Stalingrad up to the ultimate catastrophe. Like Plievier, Heinrich Gerlach lends events at Stalingrad an eschatological dimension by importing motifs of biblical destruction and downfall, which anticipate the end even at the start of the text, for example when he talks about a ‘huge mushroom cloud’ and a ‘blood-red pillar of fire’:
A few days later all their hopes of seeing the mountains of the Caucasus and the palm groves of the Black Sea coast were shattered. The division was diverted to the northeast and it was then for the first time that they heard the name, never to be forgotten, of Stalingrad. They marched on over the Kalmyk steppe with sand, as fine as dust, filtering into their pores and into the motors of the cars. Squadrons of Stukas pointed the way. A huge mushroom cloud of smoke reached up to the sky, silver-grey and solid as a monument by day, a blood-red pillar of fire by night.
This passage conveys the hopeless, inescapable fate of the troops as the catastrophe of Stalingrad unfolds. As an example, Gerlach shows how social order breaks down in the course of the battle of annihilation, leaving individuals helplessly exposed to the tragedy that is about to be visited upon them. Mercilessly, he shows how especially those figures he has set up as role models are not immune from the ravages of death and destruction. From the perspective of the central character Breuer – and not some commentating narrator – the reader can accompany the protagonist through to the point where he finally realizes that war inevitably leads to the dissolution of the community and the destruction of the individuaclass="underline"
Breuer began to understand what was happening. The people were struggling for priority – everyone wanted to get the first place – a senseless, hopeless, lunatic struggle, Breuer thought despairingly. Were they even human beings any more? He saw oddments of different uniforms, and various badges of rank and decorations underneath bulky winter clothing, officers’ caps with silver braid and the dirty yellow-coloured Romanian ‘sugar-loaf’ helmets. These men had once been Germans, Austrians, Luxemburgers, Croatians and Romanians. Superiors and subordinates, all comrades at one time. Workers, peasants and townspeople, Protestants and Catholics, fathers and sons… People perhaps formed and shaped by the nurturing atmosphere of a loving family home, and maybe by the humanist education they received at school, by the church they attended where they were enjoined to love their fellow man, by the communitarian ideals of National Socialist organizations or by the iron discipline of a German army steeped in tradition. People who had once set great store by such things as love and loyalty, camaraderie and duty, or who had at least had a veneer of so-called bourgeois ‘respectability’. And now? No trace of any of this. All the many and varied manifestations of two thousand years of human culture and civilization swept away, with the time-honoured norms now counting for nothing. Everything sloughed off like a crumbling, dried skin. Not even the herd instinct of primitive man, of animals, not even that! Just nothing, nothing…
What is true for Breuer also goes for all of the other characters without exception, who are bound together by the chain of military command and their oath of allegiance. Their lot is hopeless and their sacrifice senseless. Even Corporal Lakosch is forced to concede this. Looking back, the life and death situation they find themselves in suddenly dawns on him:
He saw now that the road he had followed so far was a false one but he could no longer go back. He saw himself caught like a mouse in a trap. This was the end, without sense or consolation, like a criminal’s end upon the electric chair.
If Lakosch and the other characters have no alternative and ineluctably become the victims of a war machine, then Heinrich Gerlach is following here a basic narrative trope successfully put in place by representatives of the younger generation of writers around Group 47 after 1945, namely that of the young generation as victims of tyrannical rule and war. After returning from military service and captivity, Hans Werner Richter, Alfred Andersch, Walter Kolbenhoff, Wolfdietrich Schnurre, Günter Eich, Wolfgang Weyrauch, together with Heinz Friedrich and Walter Mannzen, all harked back, initially in newspaper and magazine pieces, to a ‘common core of experience’ and presented the younger generation as tragic victims. It was Hans Werner Richter who first described this arc of shared experience, which stretched ‘from the inquisition to life at the front, and from the concentration camp to the gallows’. Undoubtedly, the dissemination of this kind of ‘narrative of soldierly victimhood’ was aimed at establishing a stabilizing frame of identity and was instrumental in forging a literary group mentality. It was therefore no coincidence that Alfred Andersch, in his 1946 essay ‘The Face of Young Europe is Starting to Emerge’, defined the younger generation as ‘men and women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five’. According to Andersch, ‘they are distinguished from older people by their lack of responsibility for the Hitler regime, and from younger people by their experience of the front and prison, in other words by their “inserted life”’. Andersch thus demarcated them (by virtue of their ‘experience of the front and prison’) just as sharply from authors who had gone into exile as from those successful writers who had chosen to remain in Germany after the Nazis came to power. Andersch’s upper age limit of thirty-five exonerated those young men who, in 1933, had been under the age of twenty-three and therefore not liable for military service. In this way, the narrative of victimhood furnished a collective symbol that became the basis of a community of (young) former German soldiers who had become the victims of Nazism and who were bound together by shared experiences and memories. Principally in novels and short stories, a quintessential figure emblematic of his whole generation came into existence, representing the common soldier as the victim of a totalitarian regime. Heinrich Gerlach’s The Forsaken Army had a clear affinity with novels such as Theodor Plievier’s Stalingrad, Hans Werner Richter’s Die Geschlagenen (The Defeated, 1949), Heinrich Böll’s Wo warst du, Adam? (And Where Were You, Adam?, 1951) or Alfred Andersch’s Die Kirschen der Freiheit (The Cherries of Freedom, 1952). Even in instances where Stalingrad did not – as with Gerlach – become the chronotope of the narration, the ‘narrative of soldierly victimhood’ provided a ready-made ‘master narrative’ that was capable of reorganizing experiences for a large part of the war generation and of gathering together in a common history the ‘disturbances’ they had suffered in the ‘service of generating social cohesion and shaping identity’. It became common public knowledge in the 1950s that only 91,000 German soldiers from the 300,000 originally trapped in the Stalingrad Cauldron had survived and been taken prisoner. Of these, a mere 6,000 returned to Germany in the years up to 1956. Heinrich Gerlach was one of this handful of men, and for that very reason wanted to ‘bear witness in the name of the dead’.