Breakout at Stalingrad
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German prisoners march out of the ruins of Stalingrad, January 1943.
Three years ago I read Unknown Soldiers, by Väinö Linna, one of the best and most powerful war novels I’ve ever come across. Unknown Soldiers follows a company of Finnish machine gunners through the Continuation War, a three-year war against the Soviets that ran parallel to the German invasion of Russia. Following some initial successes and some years of sitting tight in trenchlines, in the final third of the book the war turns against the Finns and the story becomes one of pell-mell retreat, of sacrifice to buy time and save lives, and ever increasing desperation. The characters suffer, fight and run, scrape together whatever they can to survive, and all too frequently die.
Take that feeling of desperation, the weight of unavoidable, inescapable impending defeat, stretch it out to six hundred pages, and shift the scene from a largely forgotten war to one of the most famous battles in history, and you have Heinrich Gerlach’s Breakout at Stalingrad.
Encirclement
Gerlach’s novel tells the story of a handful of men from the intelligence section of a German division’s staff. The most prominent among them is Lieutenant Breuer, whom we meet in the first chapter as he returns to the front outside Stalingrad after a trip to the rear. Through Breuer we get to know various other officers in the middle rungs of divisional leadership, and through his driver, the kindhearted and optimistic Lakosch, we meet a number of the enlisted men who work as drivers, cooks, and mechanics for headquarters. The cast is large and wide-ranging, including the divisional commander, a newly promoted colonel; haughty Sergeant Major Harras, a man more concerned with the finery of his uniforms than with discipline or combat effectiveness; Padre Peters, a hardworking chaplain; and the officers who distribute food and pay and who command the division’s small contingents of tanks, antiaircraft guns, and other defensive measures. The commander of the Sixth Army himself, General—later Field Marshal—Paulus, even appears a few times, as does Hitler, a faraway figure in more than one sense, a man detached from and cold to the reality of what is about to happen at Stalingrad.
Our meeting with Breuer comes at an inauspicious time—mid-November 1942. The rumor, to which Breuer is privy as a member of the division’s intelligence section, is that the Russians are massing their forces along the Don River north of the city with the apparent intent of cutting off the German army there and encircling them.
Exactly that happens. The Russians attack in overwhelming numbers, and despite manful resistance, Breuer and the rest of the German army begin a constant retreat. In a skillfully described series of incidents through the middle of the book, Gerlach describes the Germans pulling up stakes and falling back to new defensive lines only to have these collapse, leading them to repeat the process. Little things go awry, and thanks to the slow accumulation of details with each retreat, we first sense and then see these tactical withdrawals turn into chaotic routs.
The Russians complete their encirclement quickly and the supply lines fail. The Germans run short of food, ammunition, and medical supplies. They eat their draft horses and every farm animal they come across before turning to civilians’ pets and strays. The Luftwaffe attempts an airlift that proves only partially successful, bringing in not nearly enough supplies and flying out only the most desperately wounded, the most important, and the most devious. As the Russians close in on the airfields the planes themselves come under attack, and even getting a pass to board a flight out is no guarantee of escape. At one point Breuer, having been wounded in the eye, finally has a chance to get out via cargo plane, and the suspense and desperation of the scene is unlike anything I’ve read in other war novels.
The final act of the novel takes place in Stalingrad itself, which Breuer and company have slowly withdrawn toward for weeks before they actually enter. The city is a tomb, full of the shells of buildings, which are themselves full of wounded and dying men. The conclusion plays out here, in these contested ruins, and even the clearly approaching end of the siege can prove no comfort—the men go on dying right up to the moment they are captured, even after the city’s surrender. Plans to escape, using German-allied Romanian troops or Russian collaborators for cover, come to nothing. The wounded linger and die. Soldiers freeze to death in their foxholes. Others go insane. And those that live to be captured can look ahead and see nothing but Soviet captivity.
What makes Breakout at Stalingrad great
You might notice that, while I describe a broad sequence of events above, I do not exactly summarize a plot. Like many other war novels, Breakout at Stalingrad is episodic, a reflection of the actual experience of these events—about which more below. What makes this a great novel is not its plotting, but Gerlach’s attention to three things.
First, Gerlach peoples this novel with vivid and interesting characters. Breuer, the character with whom we spend the most time, is an effective everyman, a dedicated soldier without much interest in politics and a whole lot to live for, and who is nevertheless burdened by terrible premonitions. His driver, Lakosch, is a hopeful true believer in the Nazi cause—which, as he understands it, is anti-Bolshevism, a cause to which he is committed owing to his miserable youth as the child of Socialist parents. The disillusionment of both characters—symbolized by different things for each man, like the moment Lakosch has to abandon his beloved but now broken down Volkswagen field car—provides two of a dozen or so fully realized character arcs in the novel.
A few of these arcs prove surprising. In the final chapters of the novel, Breuer finds himself awaiting his fate with an officer of a much more ideological mindset than himself, and in the quiet before catastrophe they have a chance to reflect that their conversation would have been impossible for both of them when the siege began. Stalingrad has changed both of them, a wry realization. But not all of these arcs are redemptive or result in any kind of epiphany. Sergeant Major Harras leads a two-month career of utter villainy, and like him some of the convinced Nazis among the German officers only fall lower and lower as the siege gets worse and they commit themselves more and more totally to either victory or annihilation.
The most powerful and haunting character to me was the chaplain, Padre Peters, a rare religious character in this kind of fiction who is treated seriously and depicted as sincere, who works himself to exhaustion and psychological collapse. The incident that awakens him from his fugue state near the end of the novel is one of the most moving and haunting depictions of religious devotion and the power of the scriptures and the sacraments that I’ve ever read.
Second, Breakout at Stalingrad abounds in vivid, carefully selected details, which is the lifeblood of realistic fiction. Gerlach’s descriptions of combat, of the sudden appearance of Russian tanks or the steady approach of a horde of Russian infantry across the snow, of the wounds and frostbite and infections and ramblings of the pitiful final survivors of the battle, of the way a half-mad crowd of men press forward toward the hatch of a cargo plane, and—throughout—the rapidly changing mental states of these exhausted and overextended men are gripping. This novel does what all the best war novels do—shows what it was like—and does it exceptionally well.
Finally, Breakout at Stalingrad is full of terrible irony. This is not to say that Gerlach’s tone is cynical, though he certainly presents the entire story as a bitter critique of Hitler’s leadership, Nazism, and the whole Nazi project. The characters, who are so vividly drawn, will be marked by this experience for life, provided they survive.
Gerlach’s irony does not stem from his tone or treatment of the story but from the story itself. Unwelcome surprises and awful turns of events occur throughout. A general who is thankful that his pilot son is flying cargo planes in some other part of Europe, Lakosch and his love for a stray dog he has adopted and keeps miraculously well fed, Harras and his attempt to blow up a wrecked aircraft to deny its use to the Russians, the trust of the more fervently Nazi or simply patriotic officers in their leaders back home—all have terribly ironic outcomes brought about by the situation at Stalingrad itself. Even the very first chapter, in which we meet Breuer and Lakosch driving through the night, is by the end an ironic memory: their trip down that road is the last time that that road into—or out of—Stalingrad will be open to any of them. It’s masterfully done, and the irony with which Gerlach generously sews the story only adds to the weight of the characters’ impending doom.
The story of Gerlach’s novel
A final, external factor that makes Breakout at Stalingrad interesting is the story of the novel itself. Gerlach was, like Breuer, a low-ranking intelligence officer at Stalingrad and was among the hundreds of thousands of men captured when Paulus capitulated. Held in prison camps in Russian for years even after the war’s end, Gerlach spent time with many other survivors of the siege and, by the end of his captivity in 1950, he had written the manuscript of Breakout at Stalingrad. But before he could be released and repatriated, the Soviets went through his papers. They confiscated the manuscript.
Following his return, Gerlach eventually decided to write his novel again, and used hypnosis to assist his recall of the original manuscript. This second “remembered” version of the novel was published in Germany as Die verratene Armee in 1957, as The Forsaken Army in 1958. It was a hit, and enjoyed great success throughout his lifetime. He died in 1991.
Then, in 2012, a German professor of literature doing research on leftist German writers in a Moscow archive stumbled upon something remarkable—the confiscated original manuscript of Gerlach’s novel. The professor, Carsten Gansel, edited and published the newly rediscovered novel in 2016, a quarter century after Gerlach’s death.
The English translation I read includes a 150-page appendix by Gansel recounting Gerlach’s wartime experiences and imprisonment and discussing the rediscovery of the manuscript itself. The chief draw of Breakout at Stalingrad is and must be the novel itself, and so while you won’t be missing anything if you don’t look into this remarkable background story, it is worth reading for its own sake. I, for one, am thankful that Gansel happened across the manuscript and that he saw it into print.
Conclusion
Is Breakout at Stalingrad an anti-war novel? I don’t know. Certainly no one would choose to live through the things Gerlach describes, and certainly Gerlach depicts the battle as a waste of brave men caused by the cruelty of far-off leaders. But the strength of whatever message Gerlach has for us lies in its story, in its characters and the things that happen to them. It condemns the war without sermonizing, like Johnny Got His Gun or All Quiet on the Western Front in its more hamfisted moments; shows the disintegration of human minds and souls without filling the story with men who are already degenerates, like The Thin Red Line or The Naked and the Dead and their casts of perverts and psychopaths; and brings us into moments of extraordinary pathos, tragedy, camaraderie, and—just occasionally—heroism without the cloying phoniness or sentimentality of so many war movies.
As I mentioned above, Breakout at Stalingrad accomplishes one of the most important things a novel of any kind, but most especially a war novel, sets out to do: create that dreamlike state of vicarious experience that conveys what it was like. Drawing on his own experiences and those of his fellow survivors of Stalingrad, Gerlach carefully constructed this novel around a diverse set of believable characters and freighted their stories with shocking and often bitterly ironic incidents that show us, the readers, the brutality and waste of the battle. Like Linna’s Unknown Soldiers, the result is not only a great war novel, but a great novel, a story we could all stand to learn from—and can be grateful we didn’t live through.
