Breakout, Breakthrough, or Breakdown?

 

     

For an aging Red-state Episcopalian who tries to limit his principal reading to works written before 1600, I have ended up knowing, conversing with, and learning from a pretty large number of very with-it postmodern intellectuals.  One of these guys, whom I have never actually met in corporeal form, is a googlable Finno-Swedish journalist, rock poet, and afficionado of modern European history named Dennis Renfors, multi-talented and multi-lingual of course.  The intermediary of our liaison was Jan Valtin, in whom we share an interest.  Dennis put me onto a very remarkable novel that has much occupied me during the last week.  The book (in its English translation) is Heinrich Gerlach’s Breakout at Stalingrad (Durchbach bei Stalingrad in the German), a searing fictional treatment of that famous battle by someone who knew a lot about it.  This novel has a complicated history that even without my own erratic tendencies would be likely to invite a strange essay.

 

            I claim little expertise concerning modern military history, but I do know more about Stalingrad than other World War II battles.  It really was the turning point of the European war.  We like to think “we” won the war against Hitler, but it was really the Red Army, apparently infinite in number and prepared to take infinite casualties.  Among post-War Communists in Western Europe the idea was widespread that the Russian victory could be attributed to their soldiers’ love of socialism, whereas the actual explanation is to be found in more brutal material and military realities.  Arthur Koestler called the propagandist point of view “the Stalingrad syndrome,” and I touched upon it in my Anti-Communist Manifestoes.  To that end I studied the great history of the battle by Sir Antony Beevor (1998).  A few years ago he and I were both speakers at an academic conference, and I seized the opportunity of an informal seminar over lunch.  But back to Heinrich Gerlach.

 

            Gerlach was a highly capable German intelligence officer—a Latin teacher in civilian life—who was present at all phases of the herculean battle.  When General Paulus’s decimated, demoralized, frozen but still numerous survivors surrendered in February of 1943, the Soviet authorities, at this point novices at capturing Germans, gave special treatment to certain officers whom they hoped to re-educate and “turn” into tacit or actual allies.  Gerlach was in a prison camp until the end of the war,  and treated reasonably well, though endlessly interrogated, debriefed, and propagandized.  During those two years he had what seemed the extraordinary luxury of writing a long, beautifully crafted, panoramic fiction about Stalingrad on the basis of his own experiences and those related by fellow prisoners.  In this regard it has certain similarities to Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night (1941), which Valtin, however, tried to pass off as pure autobiography.  Much could be said to praise Gerlach’s book from the point of view of literary criticism, but other matters must occupy my attention.

 

            The campaign of political reformation, and even some recruitment efforts, did yield a small harvest in the prison camps, but came to little in practical terms.  And few German prisoners were quickly returned to the Fatherland at the War’s end.  Gerlach would face five more years of detention in Russia.  More to the point of this story, the Russians confiscated the manuscript of his novel when they moved him from the camp.  When he finally got back to Germany in 1950, he was in a pretty traumatized state of mind.  He had fancied, rashly, that he would be able to reconstruct his novel from memory.  He would later claim he had done so.  But had he?

 

                                        Gerlach and Schmitz in hypnotic pursuit

 

            So-called “recovered memory” has now become so controversial in the medico-legal world that it has been classified as a syndrome, the charge being that the “recovered” memories often have actually been instilled in the subjects by the therapeutic techniques (leading questions, psychotropic drugs) used by the analysts.  Just this week, in the closely watched Ghislaine Maxwell trial in Manhattan a credentialled  academic memory expert testified that “she had conducted hundreds of experiments on memory and determined that exposure to falsehoods can cause people to form false memories that they regard as real.”  In 1951 Gerlach had been led through a magazine article to approach a Munich physician, Karl Schmitz, who appeared to be having great success recovering memories through hypnosis.  Working together, Gerlach and Schmitz claimed to have reconstructed most of the novel in more or less exact form, and recovered suppressed memories that allowed Gerlach to reformulate the rest.  “It all came back to me…” he said.  So he published it, and watched in amazement as it become an instant best-seller.  But the divided Germany of 1952 was very far from what it had been in 1942.  Its eastern parts were now a Communist satellite state.  In the West, the denazification efforts were intense, involving strenuous psychological efforts by many to maintain some distinction between a comparatively small cohort of fanatical Nazi leaders and the much larger population of “ordinary” Germans whom they had duped or coerced.  Millions of living war veterans and relatives of dead soldiers had to ponder—or resist pondering--the extent to which they and their amazing Wehrmacht might have been complicit in the crimes of Hitler, Goebbels, or Eichmann.   Gerlach thought it best to rechristen his reborn book in a direction of German victimhood.  It was now called The Forsaken Army (Der verratene Armee)—forsaken and betrayed by the arch-criminal Adolf Hitler!

 

            Heinrich Gerlach died in 1991, his death coinciding almost precisely with the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Among so many other aftershocks of that political earthquake was one small literary miracle.    In 2012 an industrious German literary scholar, Carsten Gansel, sniffing about in Soviet military archives previously  unavailable, discovered the complete original manuscript of Durchbach bei Stalingrad seized from Gerlach in 1945!  Swiftly published under its original title, this Second Coming of a modern masterpiece was greeted with mixed elation and discomfort.  Consider for a moment the two works with the different titles as separate books.  In many respects the text seized in the prison camp (DbS) and that later resurrected or recreated under clinical hypnotism (VA) were amazingly similar in narrative, structure, dramatis personae, and even at times paragraph sequence and word-for-word sentences.  But the prison camp original returned again and again to a theme largely muted in its hypnotic restoration: the theme of the moral guilt of Germany and the Germans.  This theme is principally articulated through the thoughts of its central character, the German officer who is obviously a fictionalized reflex of the author, Heinrich Gerlach.  It is precisely this theme that for many readers would make DbS a significantly different work from the blood, guts, and camaraderie “war story” of VA.

 

            Yet where did this theme come from?  From the humanistic soul of a student of the classics?  Unfortunately, another suggestion is likewise inevitable: from the relentless NKVD re-education apparatus in Gerlach’s prison camp.  Anyone familiar with the judicial practices of the NKVD in Purge time knows their penchant for forcing suspects to write out autobiographical, casuistical essays of political self-examination and self-accusation.  Could Gerlach’s original manuscript show the remarkable influence of that strange literary genre?  One German scholar goes so far as to speak of “the repressed Soviet origins” of the novel!*  How extraordinary it would be if the supposed “recoveries” of the hypnotic writing process were actually procedures of literary revision, suppression and cleansings—a recoup of the “war story” novel he had wanted to write.   Do we know things when we are asleep that we cannot know when we are awake?  That is a question I hope to pursue in a very different venue next week.

*Jochen Hellbeck, “Breakthrough at Stalingrad: The Repressed Soviet Origins of a Bestselling West German War Tale,” Contemporary European History 22 (2013): 1-32.

 

 

Gladlylerne sends warmest Christmas greetings to all its readers.