Stalingrad

As a historian I have read many books dealing with warfare. As a man married to a Russian woman I have read a great many books of Russian literature and history. Much of my reading about Russia in World War II has been battlefield accounts including many by former Russian soldiers. So I was somewhat prepared for the horrors of this war when I began reading this novel of the battle of Stalingrad. But this book simply went beyond anything I have read before in terms of describing the physical, mental and emotional horrors of war. This book is a fictional account of the last days of Stalingrad and the disintegration of the German resistance. The Germans are surronded by the relentless Russian army and air force. They are ordered by Hitler never to surrender. Many go down fighting, others commit suicide rather than be captured. Many others flee toward the center of the city, often committing attrocities against their fellow Germans along the way. Men are left with little to eat, hounded by the terrible Russian winter, covered with lice, with little strength they slowly plod on toward the city center. As they flee and become surronded these fictional German protaginists are forced to examine what they have done, to come to grips with the terrible barbarisms that they have followed Hitler to. One example of the horrrs described --- so many men die literally right on the main roads that trucks drive over the top of the dead bodies like cord wood. Men become automatons --- plodding, grey, barely breathing, starving, diseased, looking for food, shelter and warmth. This is a great anti-war novel. The horrors that the soldiers endure are not just German but Everyman. This book should be required reading for all generals and politicians --- that is for anyone that has the power to send men into battle or send a country to war.

Brilliant - a great classic. Unrelentingly grim, dark, bloody, as dark as Llosa. Stalingrad was the high-water mark of Hitler's nearly-successful drive to conquer Europe, then the whole world for his Herrenvolk. This was not a set-piece battle of gentlemen-generals, as in the West, but an elemental race-war for survival. The Russians knew what the Nazis were and could be - efficient robots, killing, torturing, exterminating. At Stalingrad, the Russians, people and government, stood, fought and went on the offensive. Nearly one quarter of a million Germans died before 5 thousand or so returned alive at the end of the War. I doubt if any filmmaker has the nerve to adapt this book. The best alternative is to stare at Breughel's "The triumph of Death". The battle was fought in a nightmarishly bitter winter, which forms a Boschian background, an omnipresent frozen Hell overseen by a frozen Hitler, for the whole book. Plievier shows the Germans as human beings, a wonderfully full range of them: heroes, cowards, monsters, lost, confused, dutiful, very ordinary folks. The style is superb, a tribute to the translators, Richard and Clara Winston. German literature is NOT easy to translate, as shown by the miserable translations of Kafka. Only the end disappoints. There is a small ray of hope for a more humane world of the future - the book was published in 1948. That future has not come to pass.

This referes to the spanish edition -1958 Ediciones Destino- For some strange reason, my earlier reviw was lost in cyberspace. this is tale of tragedy told form the german point of view... and goes into the soul of a group of soldiers and they came to be together in this last show. the narrative is descriptive to the point where you can hear the soviet tanks coming, you can smell the pestilence of the dead decomposing, you can feel the numbness of your feet as they frostbyte, the "mad eye" expression of the fellow soldiers as the decided to go for the meat of a dead horse... no, this does not makes the german be the "good guys", the book is above that

Written by a German Communist, who defected to the Soviet Union prior to World War II this hard to find book is a gripper. The book tells the story of the greatest battle in the history of the world, the Battle of Stalingrad, where hundred of thousands of men perished in a cauldron of lead, fire and shrapnel. It is a story of the utter defeat of Paulus 6th Army where close to 500,000 people perished. Throughout this book we find the dehumanizing and degrading effect of war on men. It is expertly written, weaving in the stories of hero's and villains, the courageous and the cowardly. The story opens and closes with the two German grave diggers Gnotke and Gimpf who epitomize the whole story. Gnotke who shows humanity by taking care of the helpless Gimpf and Gimpf who struggles with his inner demons for his slaughter of innocent civilians. In between, we find a divergent cast of characters who find themselves in circumstances that defied imagination.This is not for the faint of heart. It is not a pleasant read; nightmarish would be a better description, but it is a story you won't want to miss. As I was reviewing my copy of this magnificent book to write this review, I found a list of essay questions I wrote to use if I were ever in a position to teach a literature class. These questions give some insight into the intriguing story that Thayer tells:· What is the author's view of suicide? Is it ever justified?· What is the soldier's role in obeying orders? When is a commander justified in disobeying orders?· How is humanity preserved in battle?· Trace the author's view of Nazis, specially in the life of Wedderkolp.· How does the role of the two chaplains portrayed? How does this go with the author's communistic background?The story of Stalingrad is a reminder that war, even conventional war, is a horrible thing. For all of it's stark reality, Stalingrad proves to be one of the best antiwar novel every written; it simply is a masterpiece. As I mentioned previously, this it is a hard to find book. My copies (I wore one out by reading it again and again) were found in used bookstores. You will have to look hard to find this book, but it will be well worth the effort.

Theodor Plievier reminds us from the start that the great tragedy of Stalingrad was that it never had to occur. In that battle the German 330,000-man 6th Army was destroyed waiting for a relief force that never came. Within two days of the Soviet counteroffensive both of the Army's flanks had dissolved while Hitler vacillated, dooming 25 percent of his army in Russia. "Here was the scene of the lost battle, of the lost war, of the zenith of German power and the most crushing defeat in German military history." But this is not a study of strategy, operational art, or tactics. It is the story of a nation led astray, told by the men who poignantly felt Hitler's betrayal. Through haunting evocations carefully derived from the testimonies of the battle's survivors, Plievier forges a powerful polemic which stands beside 'All Quiet on The Western Front' and 'Born on The Fourth of July' as classics in anti-war literature. For not only are German soldiers dying, but the cosmos as well, drawing ineluctable comparisons with the stark images of Coleridge's 'Rhyme of The Ancient Mariner', where the heavens themselves grow pallid and where the faces in a "parade of marching phantoms" appear more spectral than the frozen visages of the dead. What began as a 'coupe de main' in a conqueror's dream, Stalingrad faded into a nightmare where suicide and insanity were daily occurances, with faltering defenses hurled back from an indiscernable, protean front, reeling from "air impregnated with death" from men in all stages of morbidity and narcosis. In this madness men witnessed the unprecedented: a general abandons his division under a pretense of needing to reorganize his troops. German soldiers starve to death as Nazi party officials hoard luxuries in fleeing the Russian onslaught. Meanwhile the former disciplined army disintegrates into "an assemblage of leaderless men", with many transformed into "a blind, maddened herd that would trample down all life and violate all limits imposed by reason and law." Here was a true Darwinian hell where frozen feet snapped off, the skulls of dead men smashed open and the brains eaten, and the wounded trampled to death so a few could scramble aboard evacuating transport aircraft. Those that did cling to life faced an endless pilgrimmage in search of sustenance, eating flesh off of the bones of dead horses, or ending up in the oblivion of dank basements. Through it all, a pandemic awakening to national betrayal: "What was the commander in chief doing? Why did not the generals speak out? Where was the place to stand on from which one could move this world of false calculations, vain arrogance, and vicious contempt of human lives?" Indeed, throughout the book, the ultimate question, 'why'?: "Will our wives, our children, dry their tears on the banners of victory or must they weep forever?" But such questions would only be answered by the realization among field commanders that "we are expendable", as they helplessly watch their