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Bill is one of the founders of Boffins and has been involved in selecting the books we stock since our beginning in 1989. His favourite reading is history, with psychology, current affairs, and business books coming close behind. His hobbies are reading, food, reading, drinking, reading, and sleeping.
This novel caught my attention because of the story behind it. The author, Heinrich Gerlach, served as a junior officer in the German Army at Stalingrad and was captured by the Russians at the surrender in February 1943 and held in a POW camp in Russia. While there, he wrote this novel. On release in 1950, the Soviets confiscated his novel. He returned to Germany, wrote it again from memory, and it was published in 1957. In 2012 a researcher came across the manuscript in the Russian State Military Archive and the original version was published in German, and now in an English translation. I couldn’t resist reading and it and I’m very glad that I did – it really exceeded my expectations. It starts in November 1942 with the commencement of the Russian encirclement of the German Army, and takes us on a journey through the campaign, and the reduction of the 300,000 German force to 91,000 at the time of their surrender in February 1943. The best thing about this novel is that it tells the story from the point of view of the ordinary soldier, and gives a convincing sense of how different people react to war. It’s terrible of course, but it’s a gripping story, masterfully written, that is a sort of testament to the men who were in a sense just pawns of the regime they were forced to serve.
