This must not be allowed to happen! My East Prussian countrymen, my fellow Germans all, whom Hitler has consigned to the same fate: now, finally, you must refuse to obey this lunatic, you must now stay the hand of the executioner of Germany.
Heinrich Gerlach’s terrifying vision would become reality, and even his own family was forced to leave Lyck, but not because of the advance of the Red Army; instead, like other families of BDO members, they were rounded up and taken into custody in July 1944. Six months after Gerlach’s article, in late January 1945, Elbing was besieged by the Red Army and doggedly defended by the German garrison. Five thousand German troops died in this pointless action. By the time the siege was over, 60 per cent of the town lay in ruins, with only six houses left standing in the old town. In sum, it is fair to say that all of Heinrich Gerlach’s journalistic contributions show him to be a perceptive analyst of current affairs and a firm opponent of Hitler.
IX. ‘They’d stared into the abyss of hell’ –
Writing as an act of liberation
Heinrich Gerlach’s involvement with the BDO and the newspaper Free Germany could do nothing to dispel his repeated flashbacks of the traumatic experiences he had gone through during the catastrophe at Stalingrad. Yet he saw an opportunity to rid himself of them through the act of writing. He began with a series of diary entries, but did not get very far, because the events began to coalesce in his mind and to become ever more monstrous with the passage of time, while the urgent necessity of processing his experiences constantly increased. At the end of 1943 he decided to switch from diary entries to an epic form of narrative. For that, he needed characters, plus locations and a time frame within which the action could unfold.
Gerlach had all that at his fingertips, given that Stalingrad and the annihilation of the Sixth Army provided him with a ready-made storyline, so to speak. In the spirit of Uwe Johnson, Gerlach could therefore hold fast to the maxim that ‘the narrative begins once the story is complete’. He spent a long time agonizing over how to begin the text and formulate his opening sentence, which would, after all, set the tone for everything that came after. With his thorough grounding in German literature, Gerlach knew full well how crucial the start of a narrative had been to a novelist he greatly admired, Theodor Fontane, who wrote to his friend Gustav Karpeles in 1880: ‘The first chapter is always the most important thing, and within that first chapter the first page, in fact pretty much the first sentence, is key. If you’ve structured your novel properly, then the first page should contain the germ of the whole narrative. That’s why I’m forever fussing and tinkering. What comes after is plain sailing by comparison.’
In order to finally put pen to paper, Gerlach began by giving his first chapter the title ‘Home On Leave?’ The question mark was quite deliberate; the German forces dug in outside Stalingrad kept hoping that they would be relieved by fresh troops and might still make it home for Christmas. After several reworkings, Gerlach settled on the following opening sentences:
Winter had sent out its reconnaissance parties into the brown steppe between the Volga and the Don. The unseasonal warmth of the first days of November had, by the sixth, given way to a snowless frost that froze the mud on the endless tracks as hard as asphalt. Along this pleasingly smooth, firm new surface sped a small grey car, lively as a colt that had bolted from its stable.
These lines, which at first glance depict an almost idyllic winter landscape, lead the reader into the actual story. The very next sentence steers us towards the heart of the action: ‘It was coming from the great depression to the south, where the general staffs and the supply trains for the German units fighting to take Stalingrad had dug in, and heading for the railway station at Kotluban.’ Only after this descriptive passage does Gerlach introduce the first of his characters, namely the car driver ‘so heavily muffled in winter clothing that all that one could see of him were a pair of crafty eyes gazing out at the world and a red snub nose’. In the version that the author pieced together from memory and rewrote fifteen years later, Gerlach opted for a different, more direct lead-in. For the start of the narrative, he chose some unspecified point in medias res and began with a snippet of dialogue, with an unnamed character exclaiming: ‘Hell, it’s cold!’ The second sentence then goes on to identify the speaker as Lieutenant Breuer, the alter ego of the author.
However, these finer points of narrative construction were as yet of no concern to Gerlach when he embarked on his novel project at Lunyovo in the summer of 1943. Other, more practical, concerns preoccupied him then. He was in need of paper, a commodity in short supply in a prison camp, and above all a typewriter. Alfred Kurella and the émigré actor and writer Fritz Erpenbeck, whose novel Emigrants (1939) was a favourite book among the inmates of Lunyovo, not only came to the rescue with paper, but also gave this literary novice the benefit of their experience. Eventually, Gerlach also acquired an old Remington typewriter, which he used on an almost daily basis. He would sit typing in the conference room until late at night.
At the same time as Gerlach was writing, another occupant of Lunyovo was also busy assembling material for a novel, with the provisional title Hitler’s Soldier. This was the exiled German author Theodor Plievier, who was known both in Germany and beyond for his anti-war novel of 1930, Des Kaisers Kuli (The Kaiser’s Coolies). Most of the officers held at Lunyovo had read it. Plievier had gone into exile in 1933, journeying to Moscow via Prague, Zurich, Paris and Oslo. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and threatened to capture Moscow, he had been evacuated to Tashkent along with other German writers like Johannes R. Becher, Gustav von Wangenheim, Adam Scharrer and Anton Gábor. Plievier returned to Moscow in 1942, where he was active on the NKFD. He used his visits to Lunyovo to find out how the military campaign was proceeding. Having neither served in the Wehrmacht nor experienced the Cauldron of Stalingrad at first hand, he would invite some of the surviving officers who had served there to come over for evenings and tell him about the battle. An added inducement for the officers were the cigars that Plievier handed out, and in this way he got to learn of the day-to-day progress of the war. He took notes at these meetings and would reappear a few days later with his first attempts at fictionalizing them. This time, roles were reversed and it was Plievier reading to the officers and enquiring after the factual accuracy of his account.
Gerlach did not want to have his confidence shaken, especially not by such a successful author, and so avoided participating in these soirées with Plievier. He felt more at ease among his fellow newspaper editors and chose this forum instead to present some completed excerpts from his novel. These included an episode depicting the desperate situation facing the encircled troops in the Zybenko sector. This piece was praised by Alfred Kurella and discussed in approving terms by the editorial board. It duly appeared in the 16 January 1944 edition of Free Germany, under the heading ‘What For?’ By this stage – only six months had passed since Gerlach embarked on his novel – he was already working on the second part and had completed 300 pages. It was an astonishing work rate. The published excerpt recounts how the central character, First Lieutenant Breuer, and his fellow officer Captain Gedig, who had returned voluntarily to the Stalingrad Cauldron, witness the sacrifice of two hundred men, who, acting on superior orders, make a futile attempt to defend a piece of high ground. Gradually the fate that awaits them dawns on the two men. The piece printed in Free Germany ends thus: