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The Stalin Front: A Novel of World War II
1942, at the Eastern Front. Soldiers crouch in horrible holes in the ground, mingling with corpses. Tunneled beneath a radio mast, German soldiers await the order to blow themselves up. Russian tanks, struggling to break through enemy lines, bog down in a swamp, while a German runner, bearing messages from headquarters to the front, scrambles desperately from shelter to shelter as he tries to avoid getting caught up in the action. Through it all, Russian artillery—the crude but devastatingly effective multiple rocket launcher known to the Germans as the Stalin Organ and to the Russians as Katyusha—rains death upon the struggling troops.
Comparable to such masterpieces of war literature as Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel and Erich Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, The Stalin Front is a harrowing, almost photographic, description of violence and devastation, one that brings home the unforgiving reality of total war.
Comparable to such masterpieces of war literature as Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel and Erich Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, The Stalin Front is a harrowing, almost photographic, description of violence and devastation, one that brings home the unforgiving reality of total war.
198 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1955
About the author
Gert Ledig
5 books9 followersGert Ledig was born in Leipzig and grew up in Vienna. At the age of 18 he volunteered for the army, and was wounded at the battle of Leningrad in 1942. He later reworked his experiences in the book, 'The Stalin Organ'. Switching between the German and Russian lines, Ledig brings us the experience of war from both sides of the conflict. Gert Ledig describes in horrifying detail the graphic and resourceful violence that maims and kills soldiers. In 'The Stalin Organ' Ledig has written an absolutely authentic and powerful account of the horrors encountered in war.
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August 14, 2019
Fear Without End
The Stalin Front is flippantly gruesome, a script I’m surprised Quentin Tarantino never picked up. It is a catalogue of the slaughter, degradation, and physical misery that soldiers suffer. As the translator’s introduction says, it is pure Kampfschrift: ‘fighting writing’. As such there is no deviation from the one emotion that is shared by every one of its characters: unremitting fear.
There is of course fear of the enemy, which is to be expected. But there is also fear of one’s fellows - fear of superiors, in the first instance because that’s the principal instinct trained into a soldier, but also because superiors may stop acting as superiors; fear of your peers whom you know would ultimately sacrifice your life for theirs, just as you would theirs for yours; and fear of the institutions of society that have collectively agreed to put you in a position of despairing hopelessness.
Ledig summarises the source of these fears succinctly: the fear of injustice. War can be defined as the absence of justice, of even the possibility of justice. It is the knowledge that justice is unattainable from any source within war that generates both the fear and the innumerable ways in which soldiers have discovered to mitigate the effects of injustice, from the distortion of orders to desertion.
It is not simply enemy bullets which kill and maim randomly, and therefore unjustly. The entire system of war, its protocols, procedures, and military organisation are established explicitly to avoid judgments about the relative merits of a course of action, criteria of choice, or the competencies of individuals. In fact there are no individuals, only classes into which individuals are assigned - ranks, degree of fitness, and function. None of these categories attracts the concept of justice.
Ledig’s technique for describing the universality of injustice in war is to create two opposing units, one German the other Soviet, which effectively surround each other, isolating the other unit from the rest of their army. And each of these units holds captive an enemy officer at its centre. The result is a sort of corporate enclosure in which the parts also contain the whole. The world outside this enclosure effectively doesn’t exist. Those who think they’ve escaped from it meet the fate they probably would have within it.
The last thought of the German Captain as he is shot in the back trying to rejoin his men is “Is this justice?” Of course it isn’t. Neither is the non-judicial execution of the Sergeant, nor the madness of the Cavalry Officer, nor the survival of any number of cowards and incompetents. Only after the battle subsides does a vague hope reassert itself. Standing by a graveside, the NCO comments on the pious words of a chaplain about the inscrutable justice of God: “‘I secretly hope there’s some truth in it.’ ‘Yes,’ said the Major. ‘I’d hate to think that was just another trick’.”
I suppose not allowing ourselves to think it’s just another trick is what keeps us alive, in or out of war. Injustice is after all our greatest fear
The Stalin Front is flippantly gruesome, a script I’m surprised Quentin Tarantino never picked up. It is a catalogue of the slaughter, degradation, and physical misery that soldiers suffer. As the translator’s introduction says, it is pure Kampfschrift: ‘fighting writing’. As such there is no deviation from the one emotion that is shared by every one of its characters: unremitting fear.
There is of course fear of the enemy, which is to be expected. But there is also fear of one’s fellows - fear of superiors, in the first instance because that’s the principal instinct trained into a soldier, but also because superiors may stop acting as superiors; fear of your peers whom you know would ultimately sacrifice your life for theirs, just as you would theirs for yours; and fear of the institutions of society that have collectively agreed to put you in a position of despairing hopelessness.
Ledig summarises the source of these fears succinctly: the fear of injustice. War can be defined as the absence of justice, of even the possibility of justice. It is the knowledge that justice is unattainable from any source within war that generates both the fear and the innumerable ways in which soldiers have discovered to mitigate the effects of injustice, from the distortion of orders to desertion.
It is not simply enemy bullets which kill and maim randomly, and therefore unjustly. The entire system of war, its protocols, procedures, and military organisation are established explicitly to avoid judgments about the relative merits of a course of action, criteria of choice, or the competencies of individuals. In fact there are no individuals, only classes into which individuals are assigned - ranks, degree of fitness, and function. None of these categories attracts the concept of justice.
Ledig’s technique for describing the universality of injustice in war is to create two opposing units, one German the other Soviet, which effectively surround each other, isolating the other unit from the rest of their army. And each of these units holds captive an enemy officer at its centre. The result is a sort of corporate enclosure in which the parts also contain the whole. The world outside this enclosure effectively doesn’t exist. Those who think they’ve escaped from it meet the fate they probably would have within it.
The last thought of the German Captain as he is shot in the back trying to rejoin his men is “Is this justice?” Of course it isn’t. Neither is the non-judicial execution of the Sergeant, nor the madness of the Cavalry Officer, nor the survival of any number of cowards and incompetents. Only after the battle subsides does a vague hope reassert itself. Standing by a graveside, the NCO comments on the pious words of a chaplain about the inscrutable justice of God: “‘I secretly hope there’s some truth in it.’ ‘Yes,’ said the Major. ‘I’d hate to think that was just another trick’.”
I suppose not allowing ourselves to think it’s just another trick is what keeps us alive, in or out of war. Injustice is after all our greatest fear
November 18, 2010
The Lance-Corporal couldn't turn in his grave, because he didn't have one. Some three versts 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.
The NCO, who was writhing on the ground with a piece of shrapnel in his belly, had no idea what was keeping his machine-gunner. It didn't occur to him to look up. He had his hands full with himself.
So begins The Stalin Front. The rest of the novel is similarly evocative and grotesque, but more confusing. This is just about the last point at which spatial relationships and the people occupying them will be crystal clear. From here on, it can be very hard to tell who is where, doing what to whom, for how long, and why. Most characters are only identified by their rank or job: Captain, Colonel, Major, Sergeant, Runner, Sentry. Mix and match with foxhole, trench, swamp, bunker, hill, woods. The chaos of the text is the chaos of war; the soldiers are just as turned around as the reader. I think if I reread it, made a list of the characters, and a few salient facts about them, I might be able to figure out the narrative. But I can't; it's just too dark. Good writing, and a good translation.
November 10, 2010
The Stalin Front
, also published as The Stalin Organ, by Gert Ledig (1921-1999) is a novel about Russo-German fighting during World War II. It was first published in German in 1955, sixteen years after the author volunteered in the army. The English translation by Michael Hofmann appeared only recently in 2004. The novel constitutes Ledig's graphic reminiscences of the war. Its imagery brings to my mind recent war films like Saving Private Ryan by Steven Spielberg and The Thin Red Line by Terrence Malick.
The novelist must have an acute memory to be able to indelibly register such brutal and cruel moments of war - but what else to expect of bloody wars - or else an abnormal capacity to absorb the violence. The mess and chaos are sustained throughout the entire book in a visceral, realistic, and natural prose style. Consider the opening scenes in the prologue:
Such is the cinematic power of Ledig's novel that the words paint battle scenes in color, albeit the gray and brown and black colors of smoking tanks, muddy fields, and filthy uniforms, and the deep red color of blood spurting like merry fountains. More than reading a shooting script or screenplay, the reader seems to be watching the whole thing unfold on the big screen. The sound effects are deafening; the chamber music is literally absent; the editing is sharply executed. The pauses and the silences in between the hail of bullets do not give respite to the viewer. Instead they provoke a heightened sense of danger. The novel replicates the dread, boredom, over-fatigue, and nervous breakdown in a large modern scale war.
The story follows a group of soldiers as they try to either defend their position in the front or to attack the enemy. The "Stalin organ" refers to the automatic weapon (multiple rocket launcher) used by the Russian side to efficiently wipe out the Germans. Ledig picks up both points of view of the Russian and German soldiers that the reader is sometimes confused which side he is reading about. Eventually it dawns on us that it doesn't matter whether the story told is that of the German or the Russian side. Humanity has the same face and every one is interchangeable. Every man is an everyman whose life is readily extinguished by a bullet or bayonet.
The story is broken into short chapters that show the characters in the midst of combat and deliberating moral choices that test and define their physical and moral resilience. The characters, instead of being called by their names, are often reduced to their ranks (i.e., the Lance-Corporal, the Runner, the Sergeant, the Major, the Captain). Michael Hoffman, the translator of the novel from the German, mentioned in his introduction that he purposely capitalized the ranks of the characters to make them more distinct from each other. This stylistic choice of substituting ranks to names allows for easy recognition of the characters. One can imagine the difficulty of trying to ascertain the identities of soldiers through all the chaos and wasteland. This choice of the translator, however, may have undermined Ledig's apparent vision of the universality of men. That, again, every man is everyone in war, and each soldier (the lance-corporal, the runner, the sergeant, the major, the captain) slides into anonymity in the face of annihilation. Each may be acting according to his rank, with winning the war as the primary objective, but this is superseded by a more pressing individual concern, which is the concern of all: to survive, to preserve one's critically endangered life.
I bought this book on the strength of W. G. Sebald's blurb at the back of the NYRB edition. The blurb is taken from Sebald's essay "Air War and Literature," from the book On the Natural History of Destruction. Sebald's essay takes to task the postwar German writers for failing to record the destruction wrought by wars. For Sebald, the books of Ledig, as well as that of Heinrich Böll and Peter Weiss, among others, are a rare exception to this apparent defect in the German letters. Sebald champions the kind of novels that speak plainly and precisely, and with unpretentious objectivity, as opposed to novels full of "aesthetic or pseudo-aesthetic effects." He favors the concrete and documentary style of writing over the abstract and imaginary. For Sebald, accounts of suffering must be commensurate to the magnitude of the human loss; these are the kind of novels worth writing about in the face of total destruction.
What particularly sets Ledig's first novel apart from other stories of modern war and conflict is its own sense of the poetic injustice of men fighting fellow men, its cast-iron sense of irony, and its non-compromised portrayal of a "natural history of destruction." The natural history of war, in its literal sense, can pertain to a respect for Nature and the idea of war as a direct assault against it. This is achieved through poetic engagement with the natural world and the senseless plight of human beings in this theater. One can think of the images of the flowing grass and the wildlife in The Thin Red Line, but with less gratuitous intent as the images are part of or combined in the action. The insects and the trees have their own cameo roles in the novel:
Men, together with their misplaced intelligence, play their tragic roles in theaters of war: to fight the other side to the death. The war rages on while, all around the very brave and noble and heroic combatants, millions of other species - lowly plants and animals - get on with their lives. Whether they are uprooted or remain rooted to the spot, the trees in the forest stand at attention in their precarious positions, awaiting their decimation. Yet the natural world is implacable in the face of material and human loss - the millions of human lives lost.
In The Stalin Front, wars are shown as machines that reduce humanity and nature into useless objects. Wars are shown for what in the first place they amount to: lost causes. The novel builds an argument for literature as a corrective to this dark history. It asks the same question that the purveyors of war never get to answer sufficiently. Why, after the curtain falls on these theaters of the past, do people today still want to engage in the same acts of destruction?
(Read as part of the NYRB Reading Week. First posted here.)
The novelist must have an acute memory to be able to indelibly register such brutal and cruel moments of war - but what else to expect of bloody wars - or else an abnormal capacity to absorb the violence. The mess and chaos are sustained throughout the entire book in a visceral, realistic, and natural prose style. Consider the opening scenes in the prologue:
The Lance-Corporal couldn't turn in his grave, because he didn't have one. Some three versts 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.
The NCO who was writhing on the ground with a piece of shrapnel in his belly, had no idea what was keeping his machine-gunner. It didn't occur to him to look up. He had his hands full with himself.
Such is the cinematic power of Ledig's novel that the words paint battle scenes in color, albeit the gray and brown and black colors of smoking tanks, muddy fields, and filthy uniforms, and the deep red color of blood spurting like merry fountains. More than reading a shooting script or screenplay, the reader seems to be watching the whole thing unfold on the big screen. The sound effects are deafening; the chamber music is literally absent; the editing is sharply executed. The pauses and the silences in between the hail of bullets do not give respite to the viewer. Instead they provoke a heightened sense of danger. The novel replicates the dread, boredom, over-fatigue, and nervous breakdown in a large modern scale war.
The story follows a group of soldiers as they try to either defend their position in the front or to attack the enemy. The "Stalin organ" refers to the automatic weapon (multiple rocket launcher) used by the Russian side to efficiently wipe out the Germans. Ledig picks up both points of view of the Russian and German soldiers that the reader is sometimes confused which side he is reading about. Eventually it dawns on us that it doesn't matter whether the story told is that of the German or the Russian side. Humanity has the same face and every one is interchangeable. Every man is an everyman whose life is readily extinguished by a bullet or bayonet.
The story is broken into short chapters that show the characters in the midst of combat and deliberating moral choices that test and define their physical and moral resilience. The characters, instead of being called by their names, are often reduced to their ranks (i.e., the Lance-Corporal, the Runner, the Sergeant, the Major, the Captain). Michael Hoffman, the translator of the novel from the German, mentioned in his introduction that he purposely capitalized the ranks of the characters to make them more distinct from each other. This stylistic choice of substituting ranks to names allows for easy recognition of the characters. One can imagine the difficulty of trying to ascertain the identities of soldiers through all the chaos and wasteland. This choice of the translator, however, may have undermined Ledig's apparent vision of the universality of men. That, again, every man is everyone in war, and each soldier (the lance-corporal, the runner, the sergeant, the major, the captain) slides into anonymity in the face of annihilation. Each may be acting according to his rank, with winning the war as the primary objective, but this is superseded by a more pressing individual concern, which is the concern of all: to survive, to preserve one's critically endangered life.
I bought this book on the strength of W. G. Sebald's blurb at the back of the NYRB edition. The blurb is taken from Sebald's essay "Air War and Literature," from the book On the Natural History of Destruction. Sebald's essay takes to task the postwar German writers for failing to record the destruction wrought by wars. For Sebald, the books of Ledig, as well as that of Heinrich Böll and Peter Weiss, among others, are a rare exception to this apparent defect in the German letters. Sebald champions the kind of novels that speak plainly and precisely, and with unpretentious objectivity, as opposed to novels full of "aesthetic or pseudo-aesthetic effects." He favors the concrete and documentary style of writing over the abstract and imaginary. For Sebald, accounts of suffering must be commensurate to the magnitude of the human loss; these are the kind of novels worth writing about in the face of total destruction.
What particularly sets Ledig's first novel apart from other stories of modern war and conflict is its own sense of the poetic injustice of men fighting fellow men, its cast-iron sense of irony, and its non-compromised portrayal of a "natural history of destruction." The natural history of war, in its literal sense, can pertain to a respect for Nature and the idea of war as a direct assault against it. This is achieved through poetic engagement with the natural world and the senseless plight of human beings in this theater. One can think of the images of the flowing grass and the wildlife in The Thin Red Line, but with less gratuitous intent as the images are part of or combined in the action. The insects and the trees have their own cameo roles in the novel:
As soon as he entered the wood, he felt alone. The brush, the birch trunks - everything was silent. The log-road, built by Russian soldiers who had long since died of starvation or been shot, swayed silently underfoot. A swarm of mosquitoes danced over a dead body in the murky puddle in the clearing. A beetle in shining armour dragged a blade of grass across the path. A ring of scorched grass, an uprooted tree and a pile of broken boughs indicated that death had been at work, days previously, just yesterday, or even a matter of hours ago. A few sunbeams managed to break through the leaves and reach the ground. . . .
Men, together with their misplaced intelligence, play their tragic roles in theaters of war: to fight the other side to the death. The war rages on while, all around the very brave and noble and heroic combatants, millions of other species - lowly plants and animals - get on with their lives. Whether they are uprooted or remain rooted to the spot, the trees in the forest stand at attention in their precarious positions, awaiting their decimation. Yet the natural world is implacable in the face of material and human loss - the millions of human lives lost.
In The Stalin Front, wars are shown as machines that reduce humanity and nature into useless objects. Wars are shown for what in the first place they amount to: lost causes. The novel builds an argument for literature as a corrective to this dark history. It asks the same question that the purveyors of war never get to answer sufficiently. Why, after the curtain falls on these theaters of the past, do people today still want to engage in the same acts of destruction?
(Read as part of the NYRB Reading Week. First posted here.)
January 1, 2017
This is not a book about the Katyusha rock launcher, it is a novel about the fighting in the Eastern Front graphically described. The author, Gert Ledig, was a veteran in the war at the Eastern Front and so what he described in the novel is probably from his experience in the war.
What strikes the reader immediately is the brutality of the conditions of the battle. A Russian advance bogged down, the Germans on the other hand had run out of everything, food, water, ammunition and replacements. Combatants from both sides were lost, some surrendered, if just to get away from that constant bombardment or in the case of the Runner, to avoid another run between the frontline and the Battalion HQ. Those who were injured and could not get away were either treated or ravaged, depending on the random deal of luck. And then there was the absurdity of the command, some of which appeared to have come out of "a children's storybook." (pg 79), though nothing beats the attempt to carry out a court-martial in the middle of raining bombardment and strafing planes (pg. 138).
The author's success in the graphic descriptions is helped much by his ability to describe, using the most imaginative words and sentences. Take for example:
The one failing I find was the attempt at a love story which while might just have been real enough, didn't sit well anywhere in the book and feels unnecessary. Besides that, I think this short book is a good read and one that allows readers to get a good idea of what the fighting at the Eastern Front was like. Since there does not seem to be many English (or translated) novels set in that theatre, this one is recommended for anyone who is interested.
What strikes the reader immediately is the brutality of the conditions of the battle. A Russian advance bogged down, the Germans on the other hand had run out of everything, food, water, ammunition and replacements. Combatants from both sides were lost, some surrendered, if just to get away from that constant bombardment or in the case of the Runner, to avoid another run between the frontline and the Battalion HQ. Those who were injured and could not get away were either treated or ravaged, depending on the random deal of luck. And then there was the absurdity of the command, some of which appeared to have come out of "a children's storybook." (pg 79), though nothing beats the attempt to carry out a court-martial in the middle of raining bombardment and strafing planes (pg. 138).
The author's success in the graphic descriptions is helped much by his ability to describe, using the most imaginative words and sentences. Take for example:
A geyser of earth from a shell impact swallowed him up and spat him out again. (pg. 9)"The reader immediately imagines earth and dust shooting out of the ground and 'him' having miraculously survived, emerging from the cloud of thick dust and shrapnel. Examples like this are found throughout the book.
The one failing I find was the attempt at a love story which while might just have been real enough, didn't sit well anywhere in the book and feels unnecessary. Besides that, I think this short book is a good read and one that allows readers to get a good idea of what the fighting at the Eastern Front was like. Since there does not seem to be many English (or translated) novels set in that theatre, this one is recommended for anyone who is interested.
March 3, 2022
A good presentation of the chaos, madness, and absurdity of the Eastern Front by a German soldier who served there. Definitely would recommend to anyone who studies military history, particularly World War 2.
March 7, 2008
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.
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.
April 11, 2024
“Soloviev sat down. Not quite like a man sitting down, but not like a man wounded either. Surprised, but content. He was already dead.”
October 30, 2021
Having read Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel earlier this year my initial thought was that this would be a similar book just swapping WWI for WWII. That wasn't the case, which was both a good thing and a bad thing. The Stalin Front. Is a work of fiction that is very closely representative of the actual events of the Eastern Front, as author Gert Ledig fought in the actual battle that inspired this book.
The tone and description of war definitely feels reminisent of reading Storm of Steel but that is about where the comparisons end. The Stalin Front uses a shifting perspective throughout the book that shows not just characters on the German side but also the Russian side. This is a really interesting concept and one of the stronger points of the book. It shows the similarities both sides have when it comes to life in war.
Ledig also uses the ranks of each character as their defining characteristic, instead of an actual name. I can see the reasoning why he would do this as it keeps the reader's opinion of each character to a minimal of outside influence but it didn't make for a very enjoyable read. I was often trying to remember which character was which and what they had previously experienced; as well as if this was even the same "Captain" or "Leutenent" I had read prior.
Ledig has some really great prose and moments of literary profiency that really showcase his skill as a writer but as an overall work I was left feeling a sense of lacking. Reading The Stalin Front reminded me of my overall takeaway from M Ageyev's Novel With Cocaine, there were a handful of moments that were top notch but there were just too many that felt like a lost opportunity to tie things together. If you are interested in military literature or WWII history I would still recomend this book as it does offer a perspective and takeaway I haven't seen in another work.
The tone and description of war definitely feels reminisent of reading Storm of Steel but that is about where the comparisons end. The Stalin Front uses a shifting perspective throughout the book that shows not just characters on the German side but also the Russian side. This is a really interesting concept and one of the stronger points of the book. It shows the similarities both sides have when it comes to life in war.
Ledig also uses the ranks of each character as their defining characteristic, instead of an actual name. I can see the reasoning why he would do this as it keeps the reader's opinion of each character to a minimal of outside influence but it didn't make for a very enjoyable read. I was often trying to remember which character was which and what they had previously experienced; as well as if this was even the same "Captain" or "Leutenent" I had read prior.
Ledig has some really great prose and moments of literary profiency that really showcase his skill as a writer but as an overall work I was left feeling a sense of lacking. Reading The Stalin Front reminded me of my overall takeaway from M Ageyev's Novel With Cocaine, there were a handful of moments that were top notch but there were just too many that felt like a lost opportunity to tie things together. If you are interested in military literature or WWII history I would still recomend this book as it does offer a perspective and takeaway I haven't seen in another work.
March 30, 2020
Ledig gives a realistic description of what it was like to participate on the Eastern front from multiple perspectives during the German/Russian engagement. In particular this work takes place at which point the two sides are locked in a stalemate. I enjoyed this short novel because I felt like I was there....watching the battle in a safe place in a different time.
What does one take away from this? It's difficult to read any serious war fiction, and take away any kind of idea that war is heroic or honorable (see Dulce et Decorum by Windred Owen). War is a pure debasement of what it means to be human. Ledig reveals all of the chaos, pain, irony, suffering and torture that one would expect to find. Most of the characters have no names, but although forgotten we know they or someone like them existed making this work more real than any documentary or non-fiction book on the subject.
What does one take away from this? It's difficult to read any serious war fiction, and take away any kind of idea that war is heroic or honorable (see Dulce et Decorum by Windred Owen). War is a pure debasement of what it means to be human. Ledig reveals all of the chaos, pain, irony, suffering and torture that one would expect to find. Most of the characters have no names, but although forgotten we know they or someone like them existed making this work more real than any documentary or non-fiction book on the subject.
June 28, 2012
This is a brilliant book..., rescued from obscurity by Sebald... none of the mawkish sentimentality that often mars books of this type -- tightly constructed... absolutely believable... disturbing..., raw
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August 23, 2026
This book was not a history. It is a novel about frontline soldiers from the Eastern Front of WWII Europe. A unit of Germans defending against an attack of Russians. None of the soldiers have names and are referred to by their rank or their function. The author is a veteran of this front of that war and he tells his story like only an eye witness could tell it. The author is incredibly talented though he passed away some years ago his story is haunting in its gruesome details and images. It is a short book, less than 200 pages but it is difficult to read both for its subject matter as well as its style. The point of view shifts between the two sides of the conflict and because no character is clearly identified the reader is easily confused. I was going to criticize the book for this reason but the author is too talented for this to have been a mistake. Clearly the author intended this confusion in order to dramatize the confusion of the battle and the various forces at work in this conflict. The enemy wasn’t simply the people on the other side but it was also those next to you and behind you and those not on the field at all. If you can withstand the nightmarish quality of this story you will probably be reading one of the best depictions of real infantry warfare available in print. This story confirms the fact that war is hell that makes monsters of men.
March 5, 2009
Very good novel, written in the 1950's, about the fighting between the Germans and Russians at the Eastern front in World War 2. Excellently prtrays just how horrible and futile war really is. Very powerfully written and not for the squeamish.
September 7, 2018
This novel is like a painting by Hieronymus Bosch filled with combat ravaged hills covered in bodies, mud and smoke amidst which we see many macabre tableau of man visiting violence and occasionally compassion upon his fellow man.
June 18, 2024
Gert Ledig schreef met Het Stalinorgel een ongenadige en bikkelharde oorlogsroman over de strijd om een heuvel in de omgeving van Leningrad tijdens de eerste zomerdagen van 1942. Ledig was er zelf bij en kent het geluid van het Stalinorgel (een Katjoesja-raketinstallatie die de Russen tijdens WOII gebruikten) als geen ander.
De korte, snedige stijl van Ledig brengt de harde realiteit van de oorlogswaanzin heel intens tot bij de lezer en door zijn personages alleen bij hun rang te noemen (de ordonnans, de wachtmeester, de majoor, ...) en beide kanten van het front aan het woord te laten, zorgt de auteur voor een opmerkelijke neutraliteit die de zinloosheid en confronterende realiteit kracht bijzet.
Waar die strijd allemaal toe leidt of voor zou dienen is een vraag die tussen elke regel prangend naar voren komt. Door zowel de Duitsers als de Russen een stem te geven, wordt het bovendien erg duidelijk dat de menselijke worsteling met het oorlogsgeweld, de fysieke tol die betaald wordt en de mentale schade die de soldaten oplopen, voor beide partijen identiek is.
Ledig schuwt niets van de oorlogsrealiteit: lafheid, onmenselijkheid, fysieke gruwel, waanzin, eenzaamheid, wanhoop of heldendom tegen beter weten in: alles passeert de revue zonder ideologische inkleuring, vals sentiment of opgeblazen heroïek. Heftig.
Bij elke oorlogsroman die ik lees vraag ik me af waarom we als mensheid er niet in slagen gewapende conflicten definitief naar het verleden te bannen.
De korte, snedige stijl van Ledig brengt de harde realiteit van de oorlogswaanzin heel intens tot bij de lezer en door zijn personages alleen bij hun rang te noemen (de ordonnans, de wachtmeester, de majoor, ...) en beide kanten van het front aan het woord te laten, zorgt de auteur voor een opmerkelijke neutraliteit die de zinloosheid en confronterende realiteit kracht bijzet.
Waar die strijd allemaal toe leidt of voor zou dienen is een vraag die tussen elke regel prangend naar voren komt. Door zowel de Duitsers als de Russen een stem te geven, wordt het bovendien erg duidelijk dat de menselijke worsteling met het oorlogsgeweld, de fysieke tol die betaald wordt en de mentale schade die de soldaten oplopen, voor beide partijen identiek is.
Ledig schuwt niets van de oorlogsrealiteit: lafheid, onmenselijkheid, fysieke gruwel, waanzin, eenzaamheid, wanhoop of heldendom tegen beter weten in: alles passeert de revue zonder ideologische inkleuring, vals sentiment of opgeblazen heroïek. Heftig.
Bij elke oorlogsroman die ik lees vraag ik me af waarom we als mensheid er niet in slagen gewapende conflicten definitief naar het verleden te bannen.
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July 20, 2025I don't really know how to rate books these days but this was a good book. I wouldn't read it again but it was still a good book. Definitely a read that was wayyy out of my comfort zone when it comes to NYRB historical fiction (my favorite subgenre of books) but it was interesting and that should suffice
October 18, 2021
The unbroken misery of war. I found it hard to take in places but thought many scenes and the ending were well crafted.
April 24, 2022
War is hell (part infinity). Unsparing, grotesque fog from the Eastern Front.
August 19, 2025
Sem a força de um Remarque [A oeste nada de novo], embora a tradução - às vezes algo atabalhoada - também não ajude. A ler.
November 28, 2011
This is one of the best works of fiction I have read on the Eastern Front. Told from the perspective of both Germans and "Russians" (Soviet) alike, Ledig's narrative of the events taking place over the space of two days, does much to convey the sheer horror and terror of war. The individuals whose interwoven experiences form the basis of the novel, are known simply by title: "the Lieutenant" or "the Runner" etc. The lack of names gives each man an almost anonymous character - one of countless like him - and this is reflected in their violent deaths, which are described in a very matter-of-fact manner.
This book does not glorify war. There are no heroes and villains, merely regular, unexceptional men thrown into an environment from which many will not return. Drawing on his own experiences of the war, Ledig has created a piece of work which excellently depicts the futility of war, and one which I would recommend to anyone interested in the subject.
This book does not glorify war. There are no heroes and villains, merely regular, unexceptional men thrown into an environment from which many will not return. Drawing on his own experiences of the war, Ledig has created a piece of work which excellently depicts the futility of war, and one which I would recommend to anyone interested in the subject.
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May 30, 2013Okay, this book is about as relentless and merciless as the artillery attack ("Feuerwalze") it describes. I've read it in one day, and the closest thing I can think of, it's All Quiet on the Western Front ~35 years alter on the EASTERN Front. Fascinating when and where he uses the character's actual names, too. The Russians have names, the Germans only sometimes, and late in the book. Not what I would have expected.
I have "Payback" here in German and am slightly scared to read it now. Some sentences are gorgeous, amazing, splinters rammed deep into your brain. It's a book I'll re-read, I haven't finished grappling with it, but this round, it won.
I have "Payback" here in German and am slightly scared to read it now. Some sentences are gorgeous, amazing, splinters rammed deep into your brain. It's a book I'll re-read, I haven't finished grappling with it, but this round, it won.
November 4, 2012
This book was part of the War and Literature Readalong 2012
It is set in 1942 on the Eastern front and deals comprehensively with the experiences of the German and Russian soldiers. Ledig is writing of his own experience, albeit fictionalised in stark, bleak and precise prose. There are no heroes just men on both sides trying to stay alive.
It is a book which resonates long after you've finished reading it.
It is set in 1942 on the Eastern front and deals comprehensively with the experiences of the German and Russian soldiers. Ledig is writing of his own experience, albeit fictionalised in stark, bleak and precise prose. There are no heroes just men on both sides trying to stay alive.
It is a book which resonates long after you've finished reading it.
May 31, 2013
In the concept of confusing battles the use of only the ranks of the characters added to the insanity. It has been said that war is hell. War is also confusing & terrifying. To the soldiers on the battle fields there is no big picture. There is only survival and personal honor.
August 21, 2017
"They carried a Red Guard past him. One of the kids they'd pulled out of school and shoved in his battalion. A foot dragged along the wall of the trench. On his face the astonishment of those who die without pain." (p.158)
October 14, 2014
Brutal.
July 4, 2021
Gert Ledig was of the generation of German writers who fought in World War II and lived to write about it. After brief public acclaim for his first novel, Die Stalinorgel (1955)/The Stalin Organ he was invited to join Gruppe 47, a post-war writers’ circle which included many of his war-generation peers: Gunter Grass, Heinrich Böll, Paul Celan, and many others. He refused. He could not be compared to others in the group, he said. Perhaps working through his wartime experiences was more difficult for him than for the others, having lost two fingers and part of his jaw, fighting both on the Eastern Front and the Western Front, time in a punishment battalion, and under the bombs in Munich. Perhaps also, since he joined the German Communist party after the war, he was not of the same temper as the others.
He found pick-up labor, lumberjacking and scaffolding work in the never ending rebuilding of bombed out cityscapes. He also worked as a translator for the U.S. Army. When his second novel, Vergeltung(1956)/Payback, found small audience, and even a certain amount of revulsion –described by reviewers as “brutal and tasteless,” “purposely morbid,” and an “abominable perversity”–, and his third, Faustrecht (1957)/The Brutal Years, even less, he disappeared from the writing scene, making a living by writing and translating technical articles, and running a small engineering firm. A year before Ledig’s death in June, 1999, W.G. Sebald, well known from his 1992 novel, The Emigrants, referred favorably to Payback in public lectures and a subsequent book, On The Natural History of Destruction. Sensing a change in the willingness of the reading public to deal with suppressed stories of the war years, Ledig’s triad of novels was picked up for re-publication. Translations or re-translations followed, radio plays and literary discussions brought his name to common knowledge among German readers, along with recognition of the plain-spoken, powerful depictions of war, on soldier and civilian, enemy and ally alike.
Refusing to be recognized for The Stalin Organ, newly translated as The Stalin Front: A Novel of World War II, Ledig pled modesty for his talents and for the novel itself, saying it was only a “combat novel.” And what combat, and what a novel it was. Taking place on a small area of war-territory some 45 kilometers from Leningrad/St Petersburg, where Ledig himself had actually fought, it is not a novel or heroism and shining victories of battle-savvy troops. The standard war novel could not represent the horrors of war for German soldiers, Russians soldiers, and all those affected by it. If we are to write about war, let’s write about all of it.
The first character is dead as he is introduced
“The Lance-Corporal couldn’t turn in his grave, because he didn’t have one. Some three versts 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.”
Ledig’s dark humor is introduced and doesn’t let up, nor do his macabre, explicit images of what really happens in a war.
“The bulk of the corpses were recruited from those who had died of various wounds. One stretched his arms and legs up into the air. Another lay naked on the grass, his skin chargrilled by a flame-thrower.”
In a short 198 pages, Ledig brings us, in excruciating detail, Russians and Germans fighting in the summer of 1942 in, it seems, a double envelopment, neither able to escape or over-run the other. In alternating chapters we get to know the Major, the Captain, the Sergeant, the Corporal, the Runner of the Germans, Trupikov, Zostchenko, Sonia and others of the Russians.
He uses, and his fine translator, Michael Hoffman, delivers, short, phrasal descriptions, almost as if an outline for a film.
“Mud spurted up among the wire entanglements. .. an arm flipped up. A hand-grenade spun through the air. It landed in the morass in front of them. The explosion died away. Brackish water splashed over their heads.”
And, of people:
“…his eyes had just grown round with shock. As if he had trodden on a piece of glass with bare feet. He sat down. Not quite like a man sitting down, but not like a man wounded either. Surprised, but content. He was already dead.” … How a man could die like that. Unprepared. Not even finish what he was thinking, or say the words his lips were forming.”
For a complete review see https://www.allinoneboat.org/war-as-i...
He found pick-up labor, lumberjacking and scaffolding work in the never ending rebuilding of bombed out cityscapes. He also worked as a translator for the U.S. Army. When his second novel, Vergeltung(1956)/Payback, found small audience, and even a certain amount of revulsion –described by reviewers as “brutal and tasteless,” “purposely morbid,” and an “abominable perversity”–, and his third, Faustrecht (1957)/The Brutal Years, even less, he disappeared from the writing scene, making a living by writing and translating technical articles, and running a small engineering firm. A year before Ledig’s death in June, 1999, W.G. Sebald, well known from his 1992 novel, The Emigrants, referred favorably to Payback in public lectures and a subsequent book, On The Natural History of Destruction. Sensing a change in the willingness of the reading public to deal with suppressed stories of the war years, Ledig’s triad of novels was picked up for re-publication. Translations or re-translations followed, radio plays and literary discussions brought his name to common knowledge among German readers, along with recognition of the plain-spoken, powerful depictions of war, on soldier and civilian, enemy and ally alike.
Refusing to be recognized for The Stalin Organ, newly translated as The Stalin Front: A Novel of World War II, Ledig pled modesty for his talents and for the novel itself, saying it was only a “combat novel.” And what combat, and what a novel it was. Taking place on a small area of war-territory some 45 kilometers from Leningrad/St Petersburg, where Ledig himself had actually fought, it is not a novel or heroism and shining victories of battle-savvy troops. The standard war novel could not represent the horrors of war for German soldiers, Russians soldiers, and all those affected by it. If we are to write about war, let’s write about all of it.
The first character is dead as he is introduced
“The Lance-Corporal couldn’t turn in his grave, because he didn’t have one. Some three versts 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.”
Ledig’s dark humor is introduced and doesn’t let up, nor do his macabre, explicit images of what really happens in a war.
“The bulk of the corpses were recruited from those who had died of various wounds. One stretched his arms and legs up into the air. Another lay naked on the grass, his skin chargrilled by a flame-thrower.”
In a short 198 pages, Ledig brings us, in excruciating detail, Russians and Germans fighting in the summer of 1942 in, it seems, a double envelopment, neither able to escape or over-run the other. In alternating chapters we get to know the Major, the Captain, the Sergeant, the Corporal, the Runner of the Germans, Trupikov, Zostchenko, Sonia and others of the Russians.
He uses, and his fine translator, Michael Hoffman, delivers, short, phrasal descriptions, almost as if an outline for a film.
“Mud spurted up among the wire entanglements. .. an arm flipped up. A hand-grenade spun through the air. It landed in the morass in front of them. The explosion died away. Brackish water splashed over their heads.”
And, of people:
“…his eyes had just grown round with shock. As if he had trodden on a piece of glass with bare feet. He sat down. Not quite like a man sitting down, but not like a man wounded either. Surprised, but content. He was already dead.” … How a man could die like that. Unprepared. Not even finish what he was thinking, or say the words his lips were forming.”
For a complete review see https://www.allinoneboat.org/war-as-i...
December 1, 2024
The fog of war shrouds this grim account of a German front line as it tries to hold out against a Soviet tank raid amidst swamps, thorns, concrete, and mud. That's about it for the setting. The plot such as it is isn't much more complicated. As the characters largely lack names, we know them only by their generic ranks. An effective ploy to illustrate the embodiment of troops within their duties.
Which aren't carried out with much effect, as replacements get mowed down, as those more battle-hardened resent the former, for the longer they come to fill the decimated trenches, the longer it'll take, perversely, for the veterans to be able to withdraw. You don't get to learn much about those who fight except in italicized flashbacks, and while the enemy gets some attention, it's fragmented as are the backgrounds on the Nazi cannon fodder. It makes for a predictably dispiriting ugly story.
Am I glad I read this? The few hours spent amidst this aptly described "human sludge" who have to hold their positions, to give up their lives for symbolic honor for those who command them, and the bitter lack of compassion, respite from violence, or relief from the onslaught wears you down, as is the intent of Ledig. But part of me wonders what the "point" is beyond documenting this savagery.
Which aren't carried out with much effect, as replacements get mowed down, as those more battle-hardened resent the former, for the longer they come to fill the decimated trenches, the longer it'll take, perversely, for the veterans to be able to withdraw. You don't get to learn much about those who fight except in italicized flashbacks, and while the enemy gets some attention, it's fragmented as are the backgrounds on the Nazi cannon fodder. It makes for a predictably dispiriting ugly story.
Am I glad I read this? The few hours spent amidst this aptly described "human sludge" who have to hold their positions, to give up their lives for symbolic honor for those who command them, and the bitter lack of compassion, respite from violence, or relief from the onslaught wears you down, as is the intent of Ledig. But part of me wonders what the "point" is beyond documenting this savagery.
October 28, 2021
"Just as it's only a short step from the dramatic to the comic, so in that lousy shithole under the hill of death, Prank and Terror were cheek by jowl."
An unusual novel of World War 2 in that almost all of the action focuses on German soldiers fighting along the line near Leningrad in 1942. Even more bizarrely, the words "Nazi" or "Hitler" are never mentioned once, and the entire violent takes places in a weird, politically ambiguous void which proffers anonymity to the poor suffering fuckers on the line.
Ledig served on this front and judging from the nuance of horror and the gentle eye of the veteran hell-wader he is reporting to us in prose what he experienced first hand. For this truly is a book of horrors whose gory details are hard not to take lightly when the rest of the novel, with its persistent chaos and confusion and hilarity, does something strange: it both makes light of the stupidity of war and firmly makes clear its opposition to war's futility.
With Trumbo, perhaps one of the best anti-war novels ever?
An unusual novel of World War 2 in that almost all of the action focuses on German soldiers fighting along the line near Leningrad in 1942. Even more bizarrely, the words "Nazi" or "Hitler" are never mentioned once, and the entire violent takes places in a weird, politically ambiguous void which proffers anonymity to the poor suffering fuckers on the line.
Ledig served on this front and judging from the nuance of horror and the gentle eye of the veteran hell-wader he is reporting to us in prose what he experienced first hand. For this truly is a book of horrors whose gory details are hard not to take lightly when the rest of the novel, with its persistent chaos and confusion and hilarity, does something strange: it both makes light of the stupidity of war and firmly makes clear its opposition to war's futility.
With Trumbo, perhaps one of the best anti-war novels ever?
September 15, 2026
He watched as the Runner entered the position after him. He dislodged the canvas cover and shrank back in horror. A pile of inert forms slithered out. The corpses had been stacked up into a protective wall.A brutal work in the canon of war literature, informed by Ledig's own experiences on the Eastern Front of World War II. The minimalist quality of the prose serves to further emphasize the violence depicted, but I was ambivalent about the choice to name characters solely by their titles/ranks (e.g., the Runner, the Captain, the NCO, etc.). This depersonalizing touch was obviously a deliberate aesthetic choice, but I'm not sure if it was entirely successful, as it creates a distancing effect that at times undermines the otherwise visceral nature of the book due to a lack of emotional connection. Still, it's ultimately a worthwhile read that depicts war stripped of everything except its brutality.
'Jesus Christ,' gasped the Runner.
'Don't worry about it,' said the NCO. 'The Almighty must approve, do you think He'd allow otherwise?'
August 17, 2026
Great book and a great translation. the forward by the translator is also very good, gives a little historical perspective of the book. It's a WW2 combat story, very unvarnished, no "big picture" scenarios, no glorification nor extolling the virtues of patriotism. The characters in this story are very much prisoners of the immediate horror of combat on the eastern front, and are more concerned with trying to survive and stave off imminent death than whether or not god is on their side and whether not their cause is the right one. In some ways it's a successor to Remarque's books All Quiet On The Western Front and The Road Back, and has common ground with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse 5 and Das Boot.
January 20, 2018
A brutal depiction of one tiny corner of the Second World War, where Germans and Russians find themselves pressed up against one another on the Eastern Front. Ledig's vivid language and Hofmann's translation provide an assault on the senses. The stink of human bodies and waste. The taste of blood. The roar of explosions and whimpers of the dying. The sight of mangled corpses. I felt battered by the end.
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