The Stalin Organ [Paperback]

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 Organ", 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.

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.

`Stalin Organ' 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.

The action takes place somewhere near Leningrad in 1942. You've got Germans in one corner and Russions on the other, and the last ones are going to try to breatch the german lines. This book is about the worse things in war: the suffering, the lack of hope, wishing that the bullit fired from the oder side is going to hit the friend next to you, thus letting you live. There are no heros, no longer ideals or big racionals that justifies the horror of a war. Gert Ledig has a supperb writting style and in this book you get not only the perfect picture of what a horribile thing war is, but also how horrible it is to be in one. He uses the eyes of 4 or 5 charachters on both side o the conflit to let you see the pain, the futility and the non-human side of all that business. No sides taken, no big morals. It's the human vs. animal side in each one of us, when madness, hate and death are uppon us. This book is a 5 star and if, on the end, you still like wars, seak professional help.