What interested me most where the descriptions of the paranoia and corruption amongst the crumbling Reich, and of the dynamics of resentment amongst the soldiers of a punishment battalion.
Of the defeats and retreats, lack of equipment and low morale.
When you have a mass of Allied war stories, to read the other side is interesting too.
Though, we now know, was fiction based on second hand stories.
I'd recommend Heinrich Gerlach's
Breakout at Stalingrad – set during the final stages of the annihilation of the German 6th Army. The translation sometimes feels a little clunky – but this is something I’ve sometimes noticed in English translations of modern German novels, and I actually found that the occasional clunkiness added a kind of naivety to the narrative, which in turn seems to enhance the sense of tragedy.
There’s a lot about the day to day mechanics of staying alive, and of living cheek by jowl with other men in horrendous circumstances. Unsurprisingly, food is a common subject – and there’s something really quite moving about the quest for tiny home comforts in apocalyptic surroundings. At the beginning of the novel, when the action does occur it is sporadic, short and vicious – more of a side issue to sleeping, getting fed and surviving the cold than the main purpose of existence. Although, of course, that all changes.
There’s a lot on the internal feuding, both of men forced together in confined and lethally dangerous situations, but also inter rank resentments and hatred of the hypocrisy, the politics, and the politically motivated.
There’s also what might be described as a satisfyingly Fortean turn to the story of the novel itself:
Gerlach wrote his novel – based on his own experiences and that of other captured soldiers - while in captivity, and the manuscript was eventually confiscated by the Soviets. When he returned to Germany Gerlach read about recovering memory through hypnosis and sought treatment. This was allegedly at least partly successful (although it still took some years to complete).
The result of this process was the novel,
The Betrayed Army (sometimes,
The Forsaken Army). In 2012, decades after publication of
The Betrayed Army, Gerlach’s original manuscript was rediscovered in Soviet archives, and was finally published as
Breakout at Stalingrad.
I’m not sure if anyone has ever read these two novels side by side, and done a proper analysis to see if, how often, and how accurately the texts converge. Given that it may well be a unique situation – and probably impossible to replicate in any meaningful way - that would surely be a very interesting analysis to make in regard to the effectiveness, or otherwise, of recovered memory techniques
From a Russian point of view Vasily Grossman’s
Stalingrad is epic. And it's worth pointing out that although both novels are works of fiction, both authors were present at the Battle of Stalingrad, and used their own experiences and those of others as raw material. Also, there is possibly no coincidence in the fact that both Gerlach and Grossman were punished by their own sides: the Nazi authorities sentenced Gerlach to death,
in absentia; Grossman’s manuscripts were confiscated – his writings on the Holodomor and his post war involvement in Soviet Jewish groups attempts to document the Holocaust meant that it was something of a miracle that he managed to avoid the camps.