Customer Reviews

The Stalin Front: A Novel of World War II (New York Review Books Classics)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The worst is death, and death will have his day.

Shakespeare, Richard II.

Death had more than its share of days on the Eastern Front and it is those days during the battle of Leningrad in 1942 that provide the background for Gert Ledig's "The Stalin Front", first published in Germany in 1955.

Gert Ledig was born in Germany in 1921 and enlisted in the German army in 1939, at age 18. He was wounded seriously during the Battle of Leningrad and was sent back to Germany to work as an engineer. While back in Germany he lived through some of the horrifying air raids unleashed on Germany by the Allies. His experiences in Leningrad found their way into The Stalin Front and his experiences during the air raids informed his other major work "Payback".

It should probably be noted at the outset that the title "Stalin Front" is a bit misleading. The original title in German, "Die Stalinorgel" literally translates into English as the "Stalin Organ", a slang military term for the katyusha rockets that rained death and destruction upon German troops throughout the war. The title is important because the rockets themselves are present throughout the book and serve almost as a deathly Greek-chorus as the story proceeds. I don't know why the title was changed but can only guess that the publishers felt that readers would not know what the term Stalin organ meant. This is a minor matter I suppose but I think the decision unwarranted.

Ledig's writing is direct, brutal, and often poetic despite the horrors he portrays. The book opens with the following: "The Lance-Corporal couldn't turn in his grave, because he didn't have one. Some three versts [a verst is about ¾ of a mile] from Podrova, forty versts south of Leningrad, he had been caught in a salvo of rockets, been thrown up in the air, and with severed hands and head dangling, been impaled on the skeletal branches of what once had been a tree." After eventually falling to the ground "tank-tracks had rolled out the Lance-corporal, a fighter plane loosed off its explosive cannon fire into the mass of shredded uniform, flesh and blood. After that, the Lance-Corporal was left in peace." The matter-of-fact tone accentuates the horror.

The book consists of a number of parallel stories of German and Soviet soldiers engaged in a battle over a small sector of the front over a short period of time. Ledig does not judge any of the characters, he simply tells their stories. They each react to their surroundings in a different way and Ledig accepts that as a simple fact of battleground life. The coward trying to desert or avoid the battle for the relative comfort of battalion command, the preening military bureaucrat trying to hold a court-martial of the wrong soldier, the Soviet or German soldier are viewed simply as participants in an event over which they have no control. Value-judgments are left to the reader, to the extent that anyone who hasn't lived through these particular depths of hell can pass judgment on those who have.

The story-line itself is a bit chaotic but no more so than the events being portrayed. Military historians can, perhaps, find order in chaos by looking at `the big picture' but for the soldier on the ground there is nothing, according to Ledig, but a world in which order, rules, and morality cease to exist. Ledig portrays the lives of these men in a fashion similar to the way Thomas Hobbes portrays men in a state of nature, that in the state of nature they are "in a condition which is called war [and which] is of every man against every man." In other words, life for the protagonists in The Stalin Front is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

There are flaws in the Stalin Front to be sure. Sometimes the chaos conveyed by the story line, the constantly shifting narrative line and the shift in the voice of the speaker or narrator can be disconcerting. In other words the narrative was not seamless, but as noted above that may in fact have been Ledig's intent.


If the reader feels a sense of fear and loathing when reading Ledig's account I think his purpose has been served. To that end "The Stalin Front" can be said to stand alongside All Quiet on the Western Front. There are no heroes, only those that die and those that find a way not to.

Stalin Front should be of great interest to anyone with an interest in war fiction or for anyone with an interest in an examination of the human condition when people are subjected to that great irrational being known as war.

L. Fleisig

The Stalin Front is a closeup view of two days of confused fighting in the swamps near Leningrad, at the end of which most of the characters, German and Russian, are dead, have gone mad, or humiliated themselves. The point of view moves impassively from one character's fate to the next without making heroes out of any of them. As far as the translation is concerned, Hofmann uses Anglicisms such as "ruddy", "playing silly buggers", or "Father Christmas" (since it was first published in Great Britain) that may be unfamiliar to US readers and that don't adequately convey the terse military tone of the original German. Additionally, on page 180 of this edition, Hofmann makes what I'm sure is a mistake when he translates "Misstrauisch, nach allen Seiten sichernd,lief er weiter" as "Suspicious, LEAKING in all directions, he ran on" instead of "LOOKING in all directions."

In the 1950's, Gert Ledig (b. 1921, d. 1999) wrote three searing novels about the terrors of war. He experienced those terrors himself, first as a German soldier fighting on the Russian front (he lost part of his jaw after being shot), then back in Munich where he suffered and survived Allied bombing, and finally in devastated post-War Germany. THE STALIN FRONT draws upon the first chapter of his war experiences - the fighting between the Germans and Russians during the Battle of Leningrad in 1942. The setting of his second novel, "Payback" (which I also have reviewed), is an unnamed German city during a massive Allied aerial bombing. The third novel, "Faustrecht", which has not yet been translated into English, is set in the rubble of post-War Munich. The first two novels made a brief splash in Germany, but they dealt with matters the Germans were eager to forget and quickly faded into oblivion, and a disillusioned and disappointed Ledig thereafter made his living as a technical writer.

THE STALIN FRONT tracks the fighting for a non-descript hill and a swamp on the outskirts of Leningrad. It switches back and forth between German troops, now on the defensive, and the attacking Russians. Ledig sides with neither. They are equally dehumanized and dehumanizing. Death, gore, terror, confusion, and bureaucratic idiocy prevail on both sides of the front.

At the very outset of the novel, Ledig propels the reader into the maw of war: "The Lance-Corporal couldn't turn in his grave, because he didn't have one. * * * [H]e had been caught in a salvo of rockets, been thrown up in the air, and with severed hands and head dangling, been impaled on the skeletal branches of what once had been a tree."

Actually, that last sentence is one of the longer ones in the novel. For the most part, the prose of THE STALIN FRONT is terse and taut, often composed with jagged shards of sentences, matching the body parts, shattered equipment, and shards of glass strewn everywhere. It is an "inferno of a charnel-house."

I probably don't need to say so, but it does not make for a pleasant read. But that's not why I withhold one star from my Amazon assessment. As powerful as it is as a depiction of war and as an anti-war novel, THE STALIN FRONT is a little too heavy-handed and melodramatic.

Michael Hofmann is the translator, and he also contributes a fine Introduction. The original German title is "Die Stalinorgel", or, in English, "The Stalin Organ" - which was what German troops called the "Katyusha", a multiple rocket launcher used to horrifying effect by the Soviet Army (including flinging the Lance-Corporal's mangled corpse up into that tree). "The Stalin Organ" is a much more appropriate title than the rather academic and sanitized "The Stalin Front". I am relatively certain Hofmann was not responsible for the decision to change the title - which, speaking generally, is a lamentable practice that dishonors authors. Does a publisher such as New York Review Books feel free to also alter the text for what it perceives to be commercial considerations? I hope not, but their cavalier attitude towards a now-deceased author's chosen title is disturbing.

`The Stalin Front' (also available as 'Stalin Organ' - nickname of a Soviet mobile rocket launcher - in another edition) describes two, almost arbitrary, days at the Eastern front. Two days in a war that lasted almost two thousand days. It's late summer. A marshy, drab area in the shadow of an insignificant hill somewhere in Russia (we don't really know where; the places are as far as I understand fictitious).

The story starts with an orderly's two-hour trek, at twilight, from advanced positions to a command post behind the lines. A journey of Dantesque proportions: machine gun, katyusha and battery fire, the eerie glow of tracer bullets and flares, the threat of snipers, mounds of disfigured corpses, mines, mud, a Russian captive hanging from a tree, an odorless field kitchen ... By the time he arrives in the village we know this book will not ingratiate itself with us with a glimmer of hope.

There are several protagonists. The men on both sides have been reduced to dumb, anonymous creatures, propelled forward by fear and loathing. The homeland is all but absent. It doesn't seem to matter to the soldiers. Faces of spouses and kids have disappeared from memory. Self-preservation is the only mantra. Several figures drift into sight and away, many of them nameless, only known by their rank. Most of them die.

Nature is mutely, primevally impassive under the incessant bombardments. It has been reduced to the basic elements: mud, water, fire, and an air heavy with the smell of cordite and bodies. Swamps engulf men and armored vehicles. The sun just speeds up the decomposition of corpses.

Murderous technology itself becomes a protagonist: the hulking, animal-like threat of the tanks, the wild and extraordinary carnage inflicted by the Stalin Organ, the fury of the Stuka dive bombers.

The Russians attack early in the next morning. We know very little, if anything, about the wider strategic setting for the attack. It's just war. At the end of the book we don't know who won or lost.

It is Ledig's prose that makes this book so compelling. Describing the horrors of war can easily become drably crude or insincerely moralizing. Ledig doesn't explain, doesn't judge; he registers, with uncanny precision, in staccato prose. The scene constantly shifts. Wherever Ledig takes us, death is pervasive. As a reader we can only helplessly follow his gaze, gasping at the unfathomable scope of destruction.

`Stalin Organ' is an even more chilling work than `Payback', Ledig's graphic account of a firestorm bombing on a German city. Whilst in `Payback' death falls almost abstractly from the air, in the trench warfare the opponents are looking each other in the eye. As a result, soldiers are exposed to a much greater variety of acute existential dilemmas (do I fight to the last bullet, shoot myself, shoot my commander, shoot my terminally suffering mate, do I surrender, desert?)
Also, the action unfolds over a longer period of time and a larger territory, lending the story an ominous ebb and flow which was absent in `Payback's short, extremely violent crescendo. And then there is the contrast between the stupidity and opportunism of the higher ranks and the unbearable plight of the foot soldier at the sharp end of the action. Sometimes the most dangerous enemy is on your side.

I was deeply touched by this book.

When I put "myopic" in the title it was not meant to be a criticism. Gert Ledig obviously meant to restrict the POV of his characters (Russian and German, officers and enlisted) to about the dimensions of a rifle scope. They are concerned almost exclusively with survival in the endless meat grinder that was the Eastern Front. Ledig participated in Operation Barbarossa and it seems clear he wrote this book based on his experience of battle there.

While THE STALIN FRONT can be positioned in the literary tradition of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, it reminded me a bit more of Willi Heinrich's CROSS OF IRON. (NB: I have not read STORM OF STEEL.) While Ledig's book is less melodramatic and ideological than Heinrich's it is also less cohesive. Instead of following the relationships between a German recon squad, we see through the eyes of disparate German AND Russian characters who glance off one another during a single battle. The novel has an intentionally kaleidoscopic feel to it which was probably a bit more effective in the original GERMAN than in Michael Hofmann's translation.

All in all, I definitely think this war novel was worth rescuing from obscurity (which is what the New York Review Books Classic series is for,) because there are not a lot of well written fictional treatments of the fighting on the Eastern Front during WW2. Ledig had no intention of glorifying that war by writing a "ripping yarn," but but every sentence in the STALIN FRONT does breathe authenticity. Give it a shot.

Hannah Arendt wrote in her book 'Eichmann in Jerusalem' that our modern conception of evil is /banality/; the ubiquitousness of violence, degradation, and disrespect for human life is what roots humanity in evil. It is Arendt's version of evil that arises in Ledig's 'Stalin Front': the mechanization of death is the most insidious, and disturbing, part of the story.

There is much to be said for "The Stalin Front." Superficially, it is a war story between the Germans and the Russians ...more Hannah Arendt wrote in her book 'Eichmann in Jerusalem' that our modern conception of evil is /banality/; the ubiquitousness of violence, degradation, and disrespect for human life is what roots humanity in evil. It is Arendt's version of evil that arises in Ledig's 'Stalin Front': the mechanization of death is the most insidious, and disturbing, part of the story.

There is much to be said for "The Stalin Front." Superficially, it is a war story between the Germans and the Russians (told, either notably or not, by a German) during the battle of Pedrova, a hill outside of Leningrad. Whether to be attributed to Hoffman's translation, or the ambiguity of Ledig's own writing, it is frequently difficult to discern about which side one is reading. With the exception of an occasional 'tovarische' or italicized German or Russian phrase, there is little allusion given to the particular 'sides' in the war.

The mutual hatred between the Russians and the Germans is evident to any student of history. Regardless, there is no politicising the war (and the clash of ideologies and governments). Much like Junger's 'Storm of Steel,' the various political components underpinning the war are virtually ignored in lieu of the focus upon the day-to-day survival of those engaged in the war. There are some small bits of compassion between the two sides, and throughout the story it is evidenced how much the larger the battle is than each individual soldier and officer engaged in it. The overwhelming bureaucracy prevents units on both the Russian and German side from making proper decisions, while units remain at the mercy of their (oft far-removed) commanding officers.

Inherently, there is an amount of violence to be expected of any book regarding war. Ledig's written violence is unequivocally one of the most severe and consuming that I have personally encountered in literature. Despite the incessant barrage of brutality, there are slivers of each character attempting to preserve whatever dignity he has left despite (or, perhaps, in spite of) the circumstances.

Hoffman's translation is clearly painstakingly completed: much of the idiomatic phrases and similes are translated (in closest approximation) to their English counterparts. Some of the writing is jilted, which is either Ledig's writing, or Hoffman's translating. The difficulty, of course, is that there are no other translations of 'The Stalin Front' available at present time, and one is left with Hoffman's by default. Much of the prose is really quite beautiful, but sporadically, some remarkably stilted line or paragraph ekes its way into the work.

Similar books to explore, of course, include other works involving generally apolitical war exploration. In using the term apolitical, there is the expectation that the book is, itself, not a political manifesto of some particular ideology or viewpoint. The book's theme itself may speak a philosophical, ethical, or moral view, though without espousing a pointedly political viewpoint. As such, Ernst Junger's 'Storm of Steel,' Dalton Trumbo's 'Johnny Got His Gun,' and (of course, the perennially recommended war favourite), Remarque's 'All Quiet on the Western Front' are written in a similar vein.