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From The New International, Vol. XV No. 1, January 1948, p. 28.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Stalingrad
by Theodor Plievier
Appleton-Century-Crofts, N. Y., 1948, 357 pp., $3.
Theodor Plievier, whose two previous books have been widely read and acclaimed in the socialist movement, is reputed to have sold over a million copies of his new novel in Europe. Artistically it is superior to his earlier works. It has power, pathos, and a dramatic sweep which places it among the best of the war novels. Yet it is a book vastly different from Plievier’s others.
The Kaiser’s Coolies told the dramatic story of the revolt of the German sailors when they were ordered out to engage the British navy in a suicidal attack in 1918. In his later book, The Kaiser Goes; The Generals Remain, Plievier gave a vivid description of the betrayal of the struggle of the German workers by the leaders of the Social-Democratic Party in 1919. In both books the fire of revolutionary struggle is clearly felt. Plievier wrote both with all the heat and ardor of a revolutionary writer. This is not at all the case in his latest work.
Stalingrad is the story of the disaster that befell the Nazi Sixth Army at Stalingrad. It is a story of continued and unrelieved horror – the horror of an army completely surrounded by the Russians and gradually pulverized into helpless fragments. It is the story of the criminality of the Nazi High Command toward its own soldiers, and the frightful bestiality of modern warfare. Yet it is not merely a story.
Plievier himself was not a participant in the battle of Stalingrad. His book is based on firsthand observation of the war, and the stories of the German soldiers and officers who managed to survive the Stalingrad slaughter. Were Plievier a lesser writer, his non-participation might have resulted in a pale and more diffuse book. As it is, his absence from the actual scene of combat is to some extent an advantage in that it freed him from the limitations imposed by personal experience. It enabled him to give a more panoramic view of the ghastly events.
The story opens at the time when the German Sixth Army, which has battered down Russian resistance and taken Stalingrad, is in turn encircled by the Russians and cut off from the other German armies. The trapped army is gradually compressed into an ever smaller space and finally, after more than half its forces are destroyed, the remnants are driven into Stalingrad itself.
Scenes of the most nightmarish horror follow each other in quick succession. The effects of constant shelling, sub-zero cold, and hunger and disease on the German soldiers, burrowing into the frozen fields and icy ravines, are so vividly portrayed that an overwhelming feeling of frightfulness and devastation is created.
The German army was, of course, not an army of heroes fighting for a noble cause. Plievier, the anti-fascist, knows this. He writes about the bestiality of the German officers and soldiers against the Russian population. But he writes with restraint. And he also writes about the courageous but deluded German soldier with deep compassion. Alongside the degraded and brutalized, he portrays Sergeant Gnotke, a simple soldier who clings to life because of his love for a comrade. And there is Vilshoven, the courageous tank commander, later promoted to generalship, who feels deep guilt for his share in the misleading of the German soldier.
Why, when the situation became completely hopeless, did not the Sixth Army surrender? Because Hitler personally ordered it to fight a suicidal war “to the cartridge.” The world must be shown that the honor of the German nation could never be stained by the surrender of a German army, even though it meant the destruction of some 300,000 German soldiers and officers.
But why did not the High Command of the Sixth Army – the old generals to whom war was a science and their lifelong profession – why did they not order a surrender when further fighting became sheer insanity? Plievier describes the inner conflict which tore the High Command – which wanted to surrender as a matter of military logic but which could not bring itself to disobey the Fuehrer.
When surrender finally came, the shattered remnants of the Sixth Army gave up piecemeal. Field Marshal Von Paulus surrendered “as a private person” while units of his army were still fighting, and drove off in a Russian jeep discussing very amiably with the captors the merits of Russian mokhorka.
One question which Plievier avoids, however, is why the German soldiers did not revolt at Stalingrad as the German sailors did at Kiel in 1918. The answer must be sought elsewhere.
The leaven which helped ferment the Kiel revolt was the work of revolutionary socialists. The Russian Revolution which proclaimed to the world the idea of “peace without annexations” was another mighty factor. Ten years of Hitler’s concentration-camp terror had wiped out the German revolutionists. The German masses were confused, degraded and leaderless. No Lenin or Trotsky headed the Russian government. Stalin and his capitalist allies had no appeal to the German soldiers. Only the slogan “unconditional surrender” was flung at them. An enslaved Germany under Allied military occupation could not appeal to them.
Little is known of Plievier during the war. He worked for the Russian government among the remnants of Von Paulus’ Sixth Army and was connected with the Free German Committee. This was the group of generals and other high ranking Nazis which Stalin sought to foist on Germany as his quisling government. Recently Plievier broke with Stalinism but has apparently not renounced his socialist views. He denounced Stalin’s Russia as a country “where it is impossible to find the least spark of communism.” How he managed to escape from the Russian zone is not known; he now lives in the American zone.
Stalingrad is not infused with a revolutionary outlook. Its philosophy can perhaps be best described as humanitarian nationalism: the disaster of the German nation is symbolized by the Stalingrad debacle, and the German people must unite and learn to live according to “the law, justice, and reason.”
Plievier’s ideas for the reconstruction of the German nation are vague. In the last conversation between Vilshoven and Gnotke, the general and the common soldier, only the most nebulous ideas are expressed. Both grope blindly and remain confused. It has been suggested that their final friendship was inspired by the ideology of the Free German Committee. This may very well have been the case.
Plievier’s recent break with Stalinism suggests that the author of The Kaiser’s Coolies may yet regain the revolutionary outlook of his youth.
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