Stalingrad | Nobody demands Greater Germany

The Battle of Stalingrad lasted a long time, as Hitler ordered the German soldiers, encircled by the Red Army, to hold out. "Men turn into corpses. That's not unusual and not unnatural. That happens in the course of political and military changes... But your men, bowled over in the Stalingrad quarry—it's a fact that even the earth refuses them, and that magpies carry off their eyes, their hearts, their entrails—what are they cementing, that is the question. Greater Germany! Greater Germany on the Volga—...is the land of the Slavs a cheap human plantation? A Greater Germany stretching across the East and extending to the Volga—no one demands it and no one needs it... even Germany doesn't need it."

Powerful words and striking scenes in "Stalingrad," the monumental novel by Theodor Plievier, published in postwar Germany in 1945, after first appearing in Moscow in 1943/44 in the German-language exile magazine "Internationale Literatur." To write it, Plievier was able to speak with captured German soldiers. It was the first novel about the downfall of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. While today there is renewed talk of an impending war with Russia, as if to make up for this past defeat , a new edition from Aufbau Verlag contains the author's definitive version to remind us what war means.

Carsten Gansel, who caused an international stir in 2016 with a new edition of Heinrich Gerlach's novel "Breakthrough at Stalingrad," sheds light on previously little-known connections in his afterword. After the war, Plievier went to the Soviet Occupation Zone and worked, among other things, for the newly founded Cultural Association. Why did I know so little about this author? Because he had missed a lecture tour of West Germany in the fall of 1947. As is often the case in such cases, there wasn't much talk about him afterward. And when Hermann Kant told me that he had written his thesis on the novel "Stalingrad" in 1956, I didn't notice. I only now learned from Carsten Gansel that Kant had ensured a belated rehabilitation of the former bestseller with a laudatory afterword in 1984.

In extensive research, he follows the life of the author, who was on the Nazi expatriation list, participated in the All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1935, lived for a time in the Volga German Republic, and experienced firsthand the meaning of Stalinist terror – to which 70 percent of German exiles fell victim, as I read here. He also reveals that the headquarters of the Comintern was stationed in Ufa, Bashkir, where Plievier worked for Soviet radio stations. I always mistakenly thought he was an eyewitness to the Battle of Stalingrad. Reading the novel, there's no doubt about it, because no one could invent so many details. But he made very detailed inquiries and spoke with many eyewitnesses. "The task he set himself was monstrous, as was his empathy, his sharp intelligence, which grasped the essence at the second word, the tenacity and precision of his work," Gansel writes.

"Soldiers are murderers," Kurt Tucholsky once wrote. Perpetrators, whether voluntarily or under duress. But however they are made victims of a war machine, slaughtered for foreign interests. Theodor Plievier meticulously describes the downfall of an army as a turning point in the Second World War, even before the Western Allies opened a second front against Nazi Germany . "From then on, it was the Red Army that had the upper hand. After the end of hostilities on February 2, 1943, 91,000 men were taken prisoner of war within a few days." A mortality rate of 90 percent—this is not concealed here either. Plievier himself presents the hair-raising events before us without commenting on them. A great, lasting work of anti-war literature.

Theodor Plievier: Stalingrad. Novel. Edited and with an afterword by Carsten Gansel. Aufbau-Verlag, 624 pp., hardcover, €30.