Schlachtbeschreibung: Der organisatorische Aufbau eines Unglücks

by Alexander Kluge

Translated from the German by Leila Vennewitz. Dust jacket art by Leo & Diane Dillon. His second book. He records the pitiful vastness and wastefulness of war by dissecting the battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942.

Genres: Fiction, Germany

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Kluge was born in Halberstadt at the year 1932.

He studied history, law and music at the University of Marburg Germany, and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt, where befriended the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who was teaching at the Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School.

In 1960 he shooted his first films, before the launch of the New German Cinema.

He also was a remarkable fiction writer, which tended toward the short story form, significant for their formal experimentation and insistently critical thematics.

Reviews

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

German novel published in 1964. "The Battle" is the English title. Published 1967 by McGraw-Hill. About the battle of Stalingrad mostly from German viewpoint.

Really strange "novel" -- no characters, no plot in the traditional sense. Seems 100 percent like nonfictional account. Real people and places named much of the time with fictional people and places interwoven and identified only with an initial. The folly and mismanagement by German High Command is main point.

There is so much potential for confusion between what is fact and what is fiction that I hesitate to recommend this book, especially to anyone who is not very familiar with the actual battle.

[Richard Southard · Rating 5 out of 5]

FYI: Read the Leila Vennewitz translation, titled as The Battle.

I see this as a sort of "sampler" for Kluge's diverse and documentary style. We see him work with reportage, transcripts, instruction manuals, narrative anecdotes, and commentary, all within his historical "Big Bang" of Stalingrad. It's a great introduction to his approaches to both fiction and historical events, which he develop many times over with later works.

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this novel, multi-layered approach to telling the story of this German military disaster. The book inspired me to go back to Grossman's massive novel, Stalingrad. Kluge tells the story of WW 2 in other books in equally creative ways.