The report primarily went into the content of the Stalingrad novel and the author’s standpoint. It stressed that the manuscript ‘has as its subject one of the most significant events of the Great Patriotic War, namely the encirclement and crushing of Hitler’s forces at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–43’, and that the writer, a former Wehrmacht officer, pointed out in the afterword that ‘nothing was fabricated’ in his novel but that it was based on ‘personal experiences and conversations with German enlisted men and officers who fought at Stalingrad’. Consequently, the author would doubtless claim that he was giving a ‘true account of events’. But, the appraisal contended, even the most cursory of readings revealed that the book was not only ‘far from being an accurate description of the Battle of Stalingrad’, but also ‘a pack of lies from start to finish’. The reason for this, the report claimed, was that the author ‘was not viewing and portraying the war from the perspective of a progressive anti-fascist mode of writing, but instead from the standpoint of the decadent bourgeois intelligentsia, which sympathizes with fascism’. The report then went on to list reasons why the novel should be dismissed out of hand. Firstly, the author ‘seldom expresses his own opinion of Hitler’s war’. Rather, fully consonant with his own ‘method of bourgeois objectivism’, Gerlach had preferred to ‘let countless figures in the novel speak, and express a variety of different viewpoints’. Some of them ‘timidly criticized the Führer, while others conversely engaged in long and openly fascist diatribes’. Secondly, the report maintained, Gerlach had depicted ‘only one side in the conflict, namely the German army and principally German officers at that’. In doing so, the author had ‘grossly distorted the real state of affairs’, for Gerlach had presented the well-known moral standpoint of the officers of Hitler’s army ‘in a false light’. In Gerlach’s portrayal, then, these officers had ‘high ideals’ and were ‘noble-minded and honourable people’.
Moreover, the author had been at pains to stress the ‘steadfastness and tenacity of German officers in combat’. As a result, the novel was full of ‘German officers waxing lyrical about their sense of duty towards their homeland and about their loyalty and honour as officers’. The author’s intention was clearly to lead his readers to conclude that, if only the kind of steadfastness and tenacity as shown by the officers in his novel had been present throughout the Wehrmacht, Hitler’s army might have triumphed over the Russians. Such a biased perspective, ‘which is very skilfully presented in Gerlach’s novel, can only have one aim, namely to strengthen revanchist sentiment and to promote the planning of a new war against the Soviet Union’. ‘It is especially enlightening,’ the report added, ‘to note the author’s attitude to fascist leaders like Hitler and Göring.’ To be sure, the novel contained a few statements by officers and generals who thought that Hitler was an ‘upstart and adventurer’. But at the same time, there are other passages where the writer ‘openly praises the Führer’. For instance, in describing a meeting between Hitler and his generals, Gerlach allegedly emphasized ‘the Führer’s humanity’, while at the end of the novel, the soldiers shout: ‘We give thanks to our Führer! Heil Hitler!’ The author made every effort to conceal his ‘hostile attitude’ towards the Soviet Union. Craftily, he had ‘put his owns thoughts in the mouths of his characters’. The appraisal ended with the following disparaging conclusion:
In general, we may say of Gerlach’s novel that he grossly falsifies actual events. The author skilfully promotes revanchist tendencies and slanders the Soviet Union. In the present climate, a book like this could prove very useful to the Anglo-American warmongers in shoring up revanchist attitudes within West Germany.
The judgement of the report was clear; in addition, it was confirmed by two further negative assessments. These are simply variations on the principal report, with the addition of a few extra quotations from Gerlach’s text translated into Russian. Even the earlier, shorter appraisal that Grigorian sent Suslov on 20 December 1950 concluded with a wildly inaccurate character sketch of Heinrich Gerlach:
It is abundantly clear from the novel that the writer was a dyed-in-the-wool SS man, and has remained so. Returning this manuscript, which represents a calumny of the Soviet people and a hymn of praise to Hitler, would be highly inadvisable. Even without a thorough edit, the book could be used in West Germany for the propagandistic aims of revanchism and remilitarization.
Studying the report on Heinrich Gerlach, one thing immediately becomes apparent: statements by his characters are equated with the alleged views of the author. In addition, the writers of the report were concerned that the writer should have stood back from the wartime events and considered them from a distance. In other words, the report writers wanted to see a sovereign authority imposed on the literary portrayal – that is, a narrator who would explicitly condemn the National Socialist system, the war against the Soviet Union, Hitler and all the officers involved, and obtrude upon the action at various points to give ideological assessments of the situation. Heinrich Gerlach’s approach was quite different: through his use of immediacy and unsparing realism, he was attempting to show what the war and Stalingrad meant for the individual. The Soviet assessors were also hamstrung by another problem, namely the translation from German to Russian. As a result, a central episode at the end of the novel is not taken in the sense in which it was intended – that is, as a sarcastic and cynical judgement on Hitler and the Nazi regime. The things that Heinrich Gerlach had experienced and suffered and witnessed induced him to create a concluding episode that is meant to be read symbolically and which largely encapsulates the message of his Stalingrad noveclass="underline"
Breuer stands leaning against the wall. He looks at the faces around him, faces upon which the three-month ordeal of the Stalingrad Cauldron – which has weighed down so much more heavily than the three and a half years of war and the decades of peace before it – has left its indelible scars. These faces are a world away from those of the young, fresh soldiers who would have stood in front of the primped-up Reichsmarschall in Berlin the day before. The soldier here had seen more than other men; they’d stared into the abyss of hell.
And now an eerie transformation comes over these faces. In their crazed desperation, they must surely have still nurtured some belief and hope in spite of everything – even in spite of the funeral oration they’d been treated to yesterday. But now they realize: it’s over, really and truly over. And their faces turn to stone, and their feeble hands form fists. And suddenly one of them shouts:
‘We give thanks to our Führer! Heiiiil Hitler!’
Others take up the chant. The cellar resounds to the drone of their voices: ‘Heiiiil Hitler! … Heiiiiiiiil Hitler!’ This cry, once uttered over and over again by millions in hysterical rapture, has never sounded like it does here now. It’s not mockery, it’s not ridicule; it’s a cold, clear, terrible reckoning. It’s like an executioner’s axe falling.
Breuer can feel his eyes growing moist.
‘Did it have to end this way?’ he thinks. ‘Yes, there was no alternative!’
‘So this is the end,’ the captain continues. ‘We didn’t want this to happen. But we followed in blind obedience all the same.’