What do you think?
Rate this book
Stalingrad
A fictional account of the the destruction of the entire German Sixth Army in the decisive battle of the European War. Translated from German by Richard and Clara Winston.
Paperback
First published January 1, 1948
29 people are currently reading
543 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 42 reviews
March 27, 2013
Anyone who has read the histories and memoirs of the fighting on the Eastern Front, especially Stalingrad, will not find anything new in Plievier's book yet it still manages to capture that descent into Hell that was the common experience for the soldiers of this, the greatest battle of the Second World War. The book was written in 1948 and that immediately makes it stand out as a forerunner of gritty, down-to-earth literary depictions of the horrors of war. There were many occasions when I had to pinch myself to remind myself that this was a work of fiction and not a historical memoir. Pleivier was able to carry out first-hand research and visit the battlefield whilst it still held its horrors frozen in its jaws. So often I could visualise the brutality and discomfort, the cold and hunger, the loss of hope and appalling loss of life. There are images here that would be worthy of a modern-day Dante.
The book does have its flaws (if that is the correct term to use). There are times when it does read like the script to a propaganda movie where the hero argues about the futility and immorality of it all against hardened Nazis. The fanatical resistance offered by the Germans is depicted as the consequence of indecision and omission on the part of the military leadership in order to further stress the betrayal of the ordinary soldier by a corrupt elite. I am overemphasising the flaws. Overall this is a powerful read made more dramatic by the howling blizzard blowing outside and the bone-chilling cold assaulting me in this, the coldest March we've had in 50 years.
The book does have its flaws (if that is the correct term to use). There are times when it does read like the script to a propaganda movie where the hero argues about the futility and immorality of it all against hardened Nazis. The fanatical resistance offered by the Germans is depicted as the consequence of indecision and omission on the part of the military leadership in order to further stress the betrayal of the ordinary soldier by a corrupt elite. I am overemphasising the flaws. Overall this is a powerful read made more dramatic by the howling blizzard blowing outside and the bone-chilling cold assaulting me in this, the coldest March we've had in 50 years.
July 8, 2012
The darkest, most horrifyingly depressing read you could possibly imagine. An anti war book like no other, you won't enjoy a second of it, but you'll remember all of it.
March 9, 2022
Fubar !!
April 13, 2010
A hideously depressing, horrific read that will cause you to lose all faith in humankind.
September 1, 2023
Among the most brutal, intense depictions of war I've read; historical novel of the annihilation of the German 6th Army
This is probably the most brutal and intense depiction of war I have ever read. Theodor Plievier's "Stalingrad" is a graphically honest historical novel of the final days of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad. First published in 1948, "Stalingrad" became one of the books in Plievier's trinity of WWII novels whose other titles,"Moscow" and "Berlin," are about the battles for those cities. "Stalingrad" is an ensemble novel with dozens of interesting, well developed characters, both fictional and historical. Written from an omniscient point of view to give the novel greater historical appeal and to cover more characters and scenes of action, Stalingrad still manages to feel like a great literary novel of the war, a companion to other anti-war novels such as "The Red Badge of Courage" or "All Quiet on the Western Front" (A more lyrical title might have secured its place alongside such books). Yet despite its epic scope, "Stalingrad" is told entirely from the German perspective of its doomed cast. The Russians are a faceless enemy, the German leadership and citizens in the rear are only occasionally glimpsed through the thoughts and memories of the German soldiers stuck with the hopelessly encircled 6th Army. The book begins and ends with three characters who symbolize Plievier's hopes for the future of his homeland: Sergeant Gnotke, the failed storm trooper who ends up in a penal battalion for his insubordinate acts; Private Gimpf, his companion in suffering, whose catatonic behavior is the result of the intense secret guilt he carries within; and Colonel Vilshofen, later promoted to Brigadier, the tank commander and former philosophy student who spent his entire professional career charting the dangerous waters of early 20th Century German politics. Plievier was a German WWI Navy veteran and socialist who wrote several anti-war novels in the years between WWI and WWII. In 1933, he fled Nazi Germany and lived in Soviet Russia, a move that branded him a traitor and propagandist for the Soviets. But Plievier was already writing anti-war and anti-Nazi literature before he left his homeland. And his depictions of personalities and the careful way he describes the desperate fate of his fellow Germans suggests a more complicated reality. Propaganda it may have been but Plievier loved the landsers and decried their fate at the hands of Hitler and the Nazi regime. And "Stalingrad" depicts the death of the 6th Army in a historically accurate way that resonates with other accounts and the vast amount of Stalingrad film footage accessible online (Von Paulus, the thoughtful but indecisive last commander of the 6th is depicted particularly well). Yet Plievier also implies their suffering may have been a kind of divine retribution for their blood guilt and participation in atrocities associated with the Severity Order of Field Marshall Von Reichenau, the 6th Army commander prior to Von Paulus. And "Stalingrad" does have some propagandist disconnects between historical truth and reality. The Russians are all decent chaps, a laughable bit of revisionism. And some generals such as Hube and Pickert are depicted as cowards for flying out of the trap when, in fact, it was a cynical move on the part of Hitler to sacrifice the 6th while rescuing those generals he needed to re-assign to other theaters. Not that anyone associated with Stalingrad came out ahead. Stalingrad was war at its most inane, incomprehensible and bloody worst. This book is highly recommended for those with an interest in WWII history, war/anti-war literature, military leadership and philosophical, ethical or existential ideas related to conflict.
This is probably the most brutal and intense depiction of war I have ever read. Theodor Plievier's "Stalingrad" is a graphically honest historical novel of the final days of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad. First published in 1948, "Stalingrad" became one of the books in Plievier's trinity of WWII novels whose other titles,"Moscow" and "Berlin," are about the battles for those cities. "Stalingrad" is an ensemble novel with dozens of interesting, well developed characters, both fictional and historical. Written from an omniscient point of view to give the novel greater historical appeal and to cover more characters and scenes of action, Stalingrad still manages to feel like a great literary novel of the war, a companion to other anti-war novels such as "The Red Badge of Courage" or "All Quiet on the Western Front" (A more lyrical title might have secured its place alongside such books). Yet despite its epic scope, "Stalingrad" is told entirely from the German perspective of its doomed cast. The Russians are a faceless enemy, the German leadership and citizens in the rear are only occasionally glimpsed through the thoughts and memories of the German soldiers stuck with the hopelessly encircled 6th Army. The book begins and ends with three characters who symbolize Plievier's hopes for the future of his homeland: Sergeant Gnotke, the failed storm trooper who ends up in a penal battalion for his insubordinate acts; Private Gimpf, his companion in suffering, whose catatonic behavior is the result of the intense secret guilt he carries within; and Colonel Vilshofen, later promoted to Brigadier, the tank commander and former philosophy student who spent his entire professional career charting the dangerous waters of early 20th Century German politics. Plievier was a German WWI Navy veteran and socialist who wrote several anti-war novels in the years between WWI and WWII. In 1933, he fled Nazi Germany and lived in Soviet Russia, a move that branded him a traitor and propagandist for the Soviets. But Plievier was already writing anti-war and anti-Nazi literature before he left his homeland. And his depictions of personalities and the careful way he describes the desperate fate of his fellow Germans suggests a more complicated reality. Propaganda it may have been but Plievier loved the landsers and decried their fate at the hands of Hitler and the Nazi regime. And "Stalingrad" depicts the death of the 6th Army in a historically accurate way that resonates with other accounts and the vast amount of Stalingrad film footage accessible online (Von Paulus, the thoughtful but indecisive last commander of the 6th is depicted particularly well). Yet Plievier also implies their suffering may have been a kind of divine retribution for their blood guilt and participation in atrocities associated with the Severity Order of Field Marshall Von Reichenau, the 6th Army commander prior to Von Paulus. And "Stalingrad" does have some propagandist disconnects between historical truth and reality. The Russians are all decent chaps, a laughable bit of revisionism. And some generals such as Hube and Pickert are depicted as cowards for flying out of the trap when, in fact, it was a cynical move on the part of Hitler to sacrifice the 6th while rescuing those generals he needed to re-assign to other theaters. Not that anyone associated with Stalingrad came out ahead. Stalingrad was war at its most inane, incomprehensible and bloody worst. This book is highly recommended for those with an interest in WWII history, war/anti-war literature, military leadership and philosophical, ethical or existential ideas related to conflict.
December 2, 2013
This novel about the final months of the German 6th Army was basically exhausting to read. At some point the idea sinks in that masses of sick and injured soldiers had to continue fighting and moving or freeze to death in discard piles, that they were basically abandoned and wasted en masse as the tides of war began to turn. Fitting reading for winter if you can stomach it, and it ought to cure any self-pity issues you may have. Sort of like a delirious blend of The Death Ship and Catch 22 with all of the humorous parts stripped out and replaced with horror and death, but the hallucinatory insanity intact. Definitely a remarkable work, and highly recommended to anyone interested in the Battle of Stalingrad.
July 30, 2015
Definitely the most interesting fiction (but very realistic) account you can find in English language on the tragic events at Stalingrad
February 14, 2017
Habe das beeindruckende Hörspiel von Gert Westphal gehört (sogar extra im DLF aufgenommen) :)
December 27, 2025
A slap in the face of historical experience. Real instances. Real horror. It’s not just a key battle with a Wikipedia page. A reminder that we have it good, but that pushback to slippage matters.
January 12, 2019
The Battle of Stalingrad, August 23, 1942 to February 2, 1943, between the one million man German army and the million and a half man Soviet army was the largest armed confrontation in world history. At a cost of half a million dead and many more wounded, the Soviets defeated the Germans, who lost an entire army and some twenty squadrons of air-craft. The reputation of Nazi invincibility had been broken, sixteen months prior to D-Day (June 1944,) the Allies’ victory in North Africa by four months, and that of the armistice with Mussolini’s Italy by six months.
Despite at least six movies with the title “Stalingrad,” and dozens more making use of the standard war-tropes of brave men, cunning fighters, ruthless struggle, most Americans know little about the battle, or its crippling of the German army. Those who know are likely those for whom big battles, big guns, tactics, strategy and military “things” are the trail markers for their lives. Authors write about Hitler’s interference with his brilliant generals; tactics and strategy are hashed out and re-played in war-games; schematics and action photos of weapons of war are sought and appreciated.
Almost nowhere is mentioned what those six months show about the futility and stupidity of war. Ten pages of Theodore Plievier’s 418 page Stalingrad (1948,) should make the case for any reader. It begins in the earliest pages:
“What kind of gypsy camp its this?” The general pointed to a farmyard ringed in by a wall of vehicles–peasant carts, sledges, truck. Even the entrance was blocked by ambulances and masses of soldiers with bandaged heads and stumps of limbs wrapped in rags.
“This is the field hospital, general.”
And in such a hospital,
“The two men in rubber aprons, with rolled up shirt sleeves, were no longer doctors in the ordinary sense of the word, no longer medical practitioners, no longer surgeons. They were laborers with scalpel and saw, applying tourniquets, hacking through bones…”
*
Plievier was a German radical and writer who fled to the Soviet Union in 1934 after his earlier books about WWI, The Kaiser’s Coolies (1929) (my review here,) and The Kaiser Goes, the Generals Remain (1932), had been banned and publicly burned during Hitler’s rise to power. He continued to write left-wing political commentary and short fiction in Moscow and was evacuated with other foreign writers and artists to Tashkent as Operation Barbarossa began on June 22, 1941, breaking the 1939 non-aggression pact with the invasion the Soviet Union. With the defeat of the German army a year and a half later, February 2, 1943, the NKVD gave Plievier wide access to interview German POWs, from which the material of Stalingrad was drawn.
Although many men, from privates in a disciplinary battalion to the leading officers of the army, are introduced and followed, the normal interest in, and tracking of, characters in a novel is overwhelmed by the scenes in which they appear. The opening page of two men digging graves in the frozen ground tells us what is ahead.
“By October they had buried almost the entire battalion to which they belonged.”
In these graves were
” mud-coated figures, with contorted faces, insanely staring eyes, severed legs, arms, torsos, and unrecognizable fragments of flesh.”
A few pages later, Colonel Vilshoven, later to be General, is introduced, and with him Plievier’s anti-Nazi signature:
“Vilshofen stood for more than the face and personality of a single man: he signified a society convulsively taking new forms, revising boundaries, and changing governments. … [He] embodied the might that sought to shatter and crush the independence and will of other nations…
Those with a mind for battle tactics will find a fairly thorough accounting of those 164 days; for those interested but not schooled in maneuver and deployment, the lack of maps will be a major impediment to being able to follow the action. Even with battle maps available on-line, since the place-names on map and in the novel are not easily matched, the advances, retreats and references to places fought over earlier become part of the atmospheric background rather than anchors to the plot.
For a complete review see http://www.allinoneboat.org/stalingra...
Despite at least six movies with the title “Stalingrad,” and dozens more making use of the standard war-tropes of brave men, cunning fighters, ruthless struggle, most Americans know little about the battle, or its crippling of the German army. Those who know are likely those for whom big battles, big guns, tactics, strategy and military “things” are the trail markers for their lives. Authors write about Hitler’s interference with his brilliant generals; tactics and strategy are hashed out and re-played in war-games; schematics and action photos of weapons of war are sought and appreciated.
Almost nowhere is mentioned what those six months show about the futility and stupidity of war. Ten pages of Theodore Plievier’s 418 page Stalingrad (1948,) should make the case for any reader. It begins in the earliest pages:
“What kind of gypsy camp its this?” The general pointed to a farmyard ringed in by a wall of vehicles–peasant carts, sledges, truck. Even the entrance was blocked by ambulances and masses of soldiers with bandaged heads and stumps of limbs wrapped in rags.
“This is the field hospital, general.”
And in such a hospital,
“The two men in rubber aprons, with rolled up shirt sleeves, were no longer doctors in the ordinary sense of the word, no longer medical practitioners, no longer surgeons. They were laborers with scalpel and saw, applying tourniquets, hacking through bones…”
*
Plievier was a German radical and writer who fled to the Soviet Union in 1934 after his earlier books about WWI, The Kaiser’s Coolies (1929) (my review here,) and The Kaiser Goes, the Generals Remain (1932), had been banned and publicly burned during Hitler’s rise to power. He continued to write left-wing political commentary and short fiction in Moscow and was evacuated with other foreign writers and artists to Tashkent as Operation Barbarossa began on June 22, 1941, breaking the 1939 non-aggression pact with the invasion the Soviet Union. With the defeat of the German army a year and a half later, February 2, 1943, the NKVD gave Plievier wide access to interview German POWs, from which the material of Stalingrad was drawn.
Although many men, from privates in a disciplinary battalion to the leading officers of the army, are introduced and followed, the normal interest in, and tracking of, characters in a novel is overwhelmed by the scenes in which they appear. The opening page of two men digging graves in the frozen ground tells us what is ahead.
“By October they had buried almost the entire battalion to which they belonged.”
In these graves were
” mud-coated figures, with contorted faces, insanely staring eyes, severed legs, arms, torsos, and unrecognizable fragments of flesh.”
A few pages later, Colonel Vilshoven, later to be General, is introduced, and with him Plievier’s anti-Nazi signature:
“Vilshofen stood for more than the face and personality of a single man: he signified a society convulsively taking new forms, revising boundaries, and changing governments. … [He] embodied the might that sought to shatter and crush the independence and will of other nations…
Those with a mind for battle tactics will find a fairly thorough accounting of those 164 days; for those interested but not schooled in maneuver and deployment, the lack of maps will be a major impediment to being able to follow the action. Even with battle maps available on-line, since the place-names on map and in the novel are not easily matched, the advances, retreats and references to places fought over earlier become part of the atmospheric background rather than anchors to the plot.
For a complete review see http://www.allinoneboat.org/stalingra...
June 12, 2021
It’s unbelievable that my grandfather witnessed this hell. The nightmares of the war are so far away from my comfortable european middle class life that it just doesn’t seem real that the father of my father experienced Stalingrad as a Wehrmacht-Soldier, but it explains many neurotic tendencies my father has.
I read it mainly for this purpose, to know (and “knowing” is obviously an overstatement, for no one who didn’t experience it, can ever truly know how unimaginably horrifying it really was) what my grandfather went through and how that affected my dad later on.
Sometimes while reading i wished the novel would have been written from a first person perspective, just like „All Quit on the Western Front“ from Remarque, because usually one can easier feel into the protagonist when it’s written that way, but i can understand Plieviers choice to let the whole sixth army be the protagonist of the novel.
In his novel, he focuses exclusively on the experiences of the german sixth army and their encirclement, which cut them off from food and general resource supply and the consequences the soldiers had to suffer.
There were parts when I zoned out a little bit, mostly when the story jumped from one particular person to another one too fast or when there were long discussions about military and political relations, although not all of them were unimportant of course. I was just more interested in the day to day experience of surviving this traumatic hell. And the novel didn’t lack disturbing descriptions of the utterly nightmarish conditions that the german soldiers found themselves in.
Warming oneself in the dead but still warm remnants of a recently killed horse, wiping the squishy intestines of your neighbor who got bombed into pieces seconds ago out of your face, seeing whole pits filled with shredded dead bodies blow up again under artillery fire, witnessing tanks rolling over roads paved with bodies, sleeping in the freezing snow drenched in blood, breaking the skulls of dead comrades open and sucking the brain out or digging up the buried surgery waste, consisting of bloody frazzles of human meat, and eating it out of desperation. The list of ridiculously horrifying experiences goes on and on and on. It’s just absolutely nuts, complete madness.
Plievier doesn’t fail to make it clear that war is just hell, nothing more. There’s by all means nothing heroic about war, it’s just mindless and absurd killing and dying and suffering.
It was a tough read, but I’d recommend this book to everyone who is interested in wartime literature and the traumatic experiences of the first half of the twentieth century.
I read it mainly for this purpose, to know (and “knowing” is obviously an overstatement, for no one who didn’t experience it, can ever truly know how unimaginably horrifying it really was) what my grandfather went through and how that affected my dad later on.
Sometimes while reading i wished the novel would have been written from a first person perspective, just like „All Quit on the Western Front“ from Remarque, because usually one can easier feel into the protagonist when it’s written that way, but i can understand Plieviers choice to let the whole sixth army be the protagonist of the novel.
In his novel, he focuses exclusively on the experiences of the german sixth army and their encirclement, which cut them off from food and general resource supply and the consequences the soldiers had to suffer.
There were parts when I zoned out a little bit, mostly when the story jumped from one particular person to another one too fast or when there were long discussions about military and political relations, although not all of them were unimportant of course. I was just more interested in the day to day experience of surviving this traumatic hell. And the novel didn’t lack disturbing descriptions of the utterly nightmarish conditions that the german soldiers found themselves in.
Warming oneself in the dead but still warm remnants of a recently killed horse, wiping the squishy intestines of your neighbor who got bombed into pieces seconds ago out of your face, seeing whole pits filled with shredded dead bodies blow up again under artillery fire, witnessing tanks rolling over roads paved with bodies, sleeping in the freezing snow drenched in blood, breaking the skulls of dead comrades open and sucking the brain out or digging up the buried surgery waste, consisting of bloody frazzles of human meat, and eating it out of desperation. The list of ridiculously horrifying experiences goes on and on and on. It’s just absolutely nuts, complete madness.
Plievier doesn’t fail to make it clear that war is just hell, nothing more. There’s by all means nothing heroic about war, it’s just mindless and absurd killing and dying and suffering.
It was a tough read, but I’d recommend this book to everyone who is interested in wartime literature and the traumatic experiences of the first half of the twentieth century.
February 24, 2021
Any student of WWII knows the fate of German soldiers on the Eastern Front: triumph in the warmth of summer; devastation in the bitter winter. The German military was woefully unprepared for the brutality of Russian winter, with overextended supply lines, limited supplies, starving and isolated troops. Diverted resources making attempts to deliver supplies resulted in the loss of the prized Caucasus oil fields. Ultimately the entire German 6th Army was surrounded by the Russian Army in the Stalingrad area, yet forbidden by Hitler to attempt a breakout from the destroyed city he viewed as a tactical trophy.
Where the fictional "Stalingrad" stands apart from other war-based efforts is in its unvarnished truth; its unwillingness to look away as thousands of German soldiers collapse from cold, fatigue, mental crisis and hunger. We follow several individual soldiers, one who finds his way out of penal service, another who is promoted to military commander, another who has medical experience, and several others - all confronted with the same insanity, and each coping in different ways. We see the graft, the suicides, the increasing lack of humanity. The pressure is unceasing, like the debilitating cold itself.
The emphasis is not on the progression of the military battle - we hear nothing of Operation Barbarossa, Fall Bleau, or the Kotluban Operations - but on the soldiers in the cellars and foxholes, their families left behind, and their debilitating condition.
And throughout the book, we're reminded that the Russians offered surrender, with favorable terms, to the Germans - which Hitler unequivocally rejected, demanding that the army fight to the last man and the last bullet. "Stalingrad" - however hard it is to read (and it's not just due to the small print of these vintage editions), is the result.
Estimates of Germans lost at Stalingrad were between 300,000 and 400,000. Approx. 91,000 prisoners were captured by the Russians at Stalingrad; due to the malnutrition, cold, disease, and need to march through winter conditions, fewer than 5,000 survived. Some of the officers were imprisoned until 1955 for propaganda purposes.
If there was ever an anti-war book, this is it.
The author, by the way, served in the Imperial German Navy (to avoid imprisonment after a bar fight), was a part of the Wilhemshaven Mutiny against imperial rule, and a social critic of the Weimar Republic.
Where the fictional "Stalingrad" stands apart from other war-based efforts is in its unvarnished truth; its unwillingness to look away as thousands of German soldiers collapse from cold, fatigue, mental crisis and hunger. We follow several individual soldiers, one who finds his way out of penal service, another who is promoted to military commander, another who has medical experience, and several others - all confronted with the same insanity, and each coping in different ways. We see the graft, the suicides, the increasing lack of humanity. The pressure is unceasing, like the debilitating cold itself.
The emphasis is not on the progression of the military battle - we hear nothing of Operation Barbarossa, Fall Bleau, or the Kotluban Operations - but on the soldiers in the cellars and foxholes, their families left behind, and their debilitating condition.
And throughout the book, we're reminded that the Russians offered surrender, with favorable terms, to the Germans - which Hitler unequivocally rejected, demanding that the army fight to the last man and the last bullet. "Stalingrad" - however hard it is to read (and it's not just due to the small print of these vintage editions), is the result.
Estimates of Germans lost at Stalingrad were between 300,000 and 400,000. Approx. 91,000 prisoners were captured by the Russians at Stalingrad; due to the malnutrition, cold, disease, and need to march through winter conditions, fewer than 5,000 survived. Some of the officers were imprisoned until 1955 for propaganda purposes.
If there was ever an anti-war book, this is it.
The author, by the way, served in the Imperial German Navy (to avoid imprisonment after a bar fight), was a part of the Wilhemshaven Mutiny against imperial rule, and a social critic of the Weimar Republic.
Read
April 26, 2020This is one of the most extraordinary war novels you'll ever read. The author, Theodor Plievier, was a communist who served on the Soviet side during the Second World War. In that capacity he had the opportunity to visit prisoner-of-war camps and interview German survivors of the Battle of Stalingrad, of whom only a tiny fraction (around 6,000 out of a third of a million) survived to return to Germany.
The result is a incredible, often overwhelming book that not only paints an incredibly detailed picture of the battle (almost entirely from the German side), including the horrific suffering of the ordinary soldiers (and pampered lives of the senior officers). As Plievier takes the reader on a dark tour of the battlefield, we watch as the regimented society of soldiery breaks down. The book also meditates on powerful issues such as patriotism, militarism, and the thuggish passivity that allows ordinary human beings to follow Nazis to their deaths.
If you are ever able to find this book, consider yourself lucky because it's very hard to find. Plievier hated war and the harm it does to regular people; in "Stalingrad," he exposes the patriotic rhetoric, shows the blind, cruel machine of war and dares us to throw it all away.
The result is a incredible, often overwhelming book that not only paints an incredibly detailed picture of the battle (almost entirely from the German side), including the horrific suffering of the ordinary soldiers (and pampered lives of the senior officers). As Plievier takes the reader on a dark tour of the battlefield, we watch as the regimented society of soldiery breaks down. The book also meditates on powerful issues such as patriotism, militarism, and the thuggish passivity that allows ordinary human beings to follow Nazis to their deaths.
If you are ever able to find this book, consider yourself lucky because it's very hard to find. Plievier hated war and the harm it does to regular people; in "Stalingrad," he exposes the patriotic rhetoric, shows the blind, cruel machine of war and dares us to throw it all away.
August 11, 2021
A brutal, book written from a place of anguish and fury over a pointless tortuous battle that served only to build an industrial scale human misery machine. Plievier covers the battle of Stalingrad from the start of the collapse and never allows any aspect of it to seem even remotely glamorous or heroic. It's a frost bitten charnel house created entirely by stubborn and stupid leaders following orders against all sense and reason.
Yes it's to some extent Soviet propaganda written by a disaffected German veteran, but it's unflinching and beautifully written in its raw emotion. Plievier's story is a meditation on the military hierarchy that could reduce an army of 200,000 men into a crippled and starved husk of a few thousand, and it is a righteous recounting of the end result of years of Nazi brutality and arrogance carried out by farmers, historians, bakers, shoemakers, and chemists. These men are trapped in a tightening noose as they sit in frozen cellars with no food and festering wounds realizing the enormity of the horror of what they've done and what has been done to them.
Yes it's to some extent Soviet propaganda written by a disaffected German veteran, but it's unflinching and beautifully written in its raw emotion. Plievier's story is a meditation on the military hierarchy that could reduce an army of 200,000 men into a crippled and starved husk of a few thousand, and it is a righteous recounting of the end result of years of Nazi brutality and arrogance carried out by farmers, historians, bakers, shoemakers, and chemists. These men are trapped in a tightening noose as they sit in frozen cellars with no food and festering wounds realizing the enormity of the horror of what they've done and what has been done to them.
March 17, 2015
What a powerful writer...and an excellent translator, too. This book made me feel as if I were there. The German soldiers deserve praise for their courage; but those who issued the idiotic orders and those who just kept blindly following those orders deserve nothing. Idiots. I may be turning into a pacifist...I definitely need some light reading after this - say, Doestoevsky or maybe an encyclopedia...
Want to read
February 14, 2021I’ll probably never read this, but it’s on our bookshelves; an Atheneum hardback with a burgundy cover and gold lettering, published in 1948, two years after it was published in German. Translated by H. Langmead Robinson. The endpapers have clearly labelled maps; always a bonus.
December 26, 2021
Brutal ehrlich - nichts für zarte Gemüter. Ernsthaft.
December 30, 2018
War is a bummer. It's a bummer for everyone involved. But in the case of this book it was really a bummer for the German army that had to go try and conquer Russia in the winter. They got trapped and cut off. So they end up starving and shooting themselves and it just sucks. It's important to note that the characters in this story aren't nazis. The nazis are their bosses and their bosses are insane. So there's a degree of empathy that one can have for these poor fucks without compromising ones moral good vibe.
Stalingrad isn't a straightforward narrative. It's written as a pastiche of glimpses into some shitty times for a bunch of miserable soldiers from all ranks. Some scenes lean on the insanity of war. Some are just about starving and dying from having the shits. It's a bad trip all around. Lots of dying wounded. Lots of horsemeat eating (soups mostly). Starving, gangrenous, bony dudes wondering what the fuck they are dying in some snowpit for. Lots of dudes capping themselves.
While it was cool for being historical and grim, it was kinda hard to find a groove. Took me four months to finish because it'd put me to sleep.
Don't frick with veterans.
Always,
Mitters.
Stalingrad isn't a straightforward narrative. It's written as a pastiche of glimpses into some shitty times for a bunch of miserable soldiers from all ranks. Some scenes lean on the insanity of war. Some are just about starving and dying from having the shits. It's a bad trip all around. Lots of dying wounded. Lots of horsemeat eating (soups mostly). Starving, gangrenous, bony dudes wondering what the fuck they are dying in some snowpit for. Lots of dudes capping themselves.
While it was cool for being historical and grim, it was kinda hard to find a groove. Took me four months to finish because it'd put me to sleep.
Don't frick with veterans.
Always,
Mitters.
November 5, 2016
I found this at a thrift store a couple years after being mesmerized by Anthony Beevor's "Stalingrad". I was really excited to get into this, but was really disappointed. The material is dynamite, but Plievier just wasn't up to the task.
The work is too driven by Plievier's didactic narrative, and not driven by dialogue and imagery. Many of the reviewers of this book note the gore, terror, and grim outlook of the book. It is true that the book is full of the worst parts of war, but they simply don't grip the imagination or haunt the mind of the reader anything like what Beevor did in his nonfiction account of the same battle.
There are too many characters that come and go that it is very difficult to follow all of them, and they simply aren't compelling enough, with the exception of Vilshofen. If you're looking for a good book about the battle, read Beevor's book. This book is out of print for a reason, and while an interesting work, it hasn't yet, nor will it ever stand the test of time.
The work is too driven by Plievier's didactic narrative, and not driven by dialogue and imagery. Many of the reviewers of this book note the gore, terror, and grim outlook of the book. It is true that the book is full of the worst parts of war, but they simply don't grip the imagination or haunt the mind of the reader anything like what Beevor did in his nonfiction account of the same battle.
There are too many characters that come and go that it is very difficult to follow all of them, and they simply aren't compelling enough, with the exception of Vilshofen. If you're looking for a good book about the battle, read Beevor's book. This book is out of print for a reason, and while an interesting work, it hasn't yet, nor will it ever stand the test of time.
January 19, 2019
I read this a long time ago and it always hovered around in the back of my mind whenever I read anything about Stalingrad. I read it again last year and it was as good and as grim as I remembered it. For those who might like a flash, bang, wallop combat book this is not that book. I should know as I enjoy that sort of thing as well. It is however a masterful depiction of how stuff just falls apart, how people accept worsening situations and get on with things in impossible circumstances. In terms of WW2 books this is well up there with Das Boot & The Forgotten Soldier. Highly recommend
January 12, 2026
Dieses Buch ist die personifizierte Ausweglosigkeit und Grausamkeit.
Die Beschreibungen werden ich nie vergessen können.
Mehr Menschen sollten dieses Werk lesen und gleichzeitig wünsche ich diese Erfahrung keinem.
Die Beschreibungen werden ich nie vergessen können.
Mehr Menschen sollten dieses Werk lesen und gleichzeitig wünsche ich diese Erfahrung keinem.
February 27, 2017
Doesn't wear all that well. About the third time I've read this, not recently. Depressing but seems real.
October 3, 2019
This book is among my top 10 books of all times. It is brilliant. Very impressive story line, strong feeling of reality and historically accurate.
December 13, 2021
One of the most brutal and intense depictions of war I have read; historical novel of the annihilation of the German 6th Army
June 15, 2022
Magistral et terrifiant.
October 25, 2024
Incredible and horrific historical fiction. It hurt my feelings, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
August 17, 2018
After reading Stalingrad it seems inadequate to describe the battle in the way so many military histories do. While it was "the turning point of the war" and "Germany's greatest defeat" this ignores the immense waste of human life, the incredible suffering, the brutality, the bravery and the pointlessness of the battle. Stalingrad is not an easy book to read. In part because Plievier spares the reader nothing in his descriptions of war and the consequences of war. But the novel, like its sequel, Berlin does not follow a normal narrative. Plievier's prose is powerful, florid and complicated at times. It is a shame that he's forgotton today as his books repay reading.
Stalingrad is the first of three novels. It depicts the battle from the Germany point of view, focusing on a few individuals who experience the war in very different ways. Ultimately the destruction and violence degrades and destroys them. One of the soldiers, Gnotke, is a member of a punishment troop given the most dangerous tasks. Him and his comrades lose their minds as they constantly bury the dead in the face of withering fire.
Little of the book is devoted to narrative. Most of the story is a series of experiences, vividly painted, as the end of the Sixth Army approaches. Large parts deal with the appalling casualties, the wounded and their suffering as they wait for treatment, for water, for painkillers. None of these are forthcoming and Plievier's account of the suffering of the few doctors who operate on wounded men without bandages, morphine or hope is truly awful.
The book concludes with the appalling march of the tens of thousands of German POWs into Russia's interior. Few returned. Plievier draws parallels with the Nazi death marches of Jews and concentration camp inmates as one of the POWs was a guard on such a march. This soldier believes that what is happening to him and the German Army are retribution for the acts of the regime and his own personal crimes. In a sense this is correct, but it is only a foreshadow of what is to come.
Stalingrad is the first of three novels. It depicts the battle from the Germany point of view, focusing on a few individuals who experience the war in very different ways. Ultimately the destruction and violence degrades and destroys them. One of the soldiers, Gnotke, is a member of a punishment troop given the most dangerous tasks. Him and his comrades lose their minds as they constantly bury the dead in the face of withering fire.
Little of the book is devoted to narrative. Most of the story is a series of experiences, vividly painted, as the end of the Sixth Army approaches. Large parts deal with the appalling casualties, the wounded and their suffering as they wait for treatment, for water, for painkillers. None of these are forthcoming and Plievier's account of the suffering of the few doctors who operate on wounded men without bandages, morphine or hope is truly awful.
The book concludes with the appalling march of the tens of thousands of German POWs into Russia's interior. Few returned. Plievier draws parallels with the Nazi death marches of Jews and concentration camp inmates as one of the POWs was a guard on such a march. This soldier believes that what is happening to him and the German Army are retribution for the acts of the regime and his own personal crimes. In a sense this is correct, but it is only a foreshadow of what is to come.
July 27, 2013
Hitler's decision to launch “Operation Barbarossa” and open an eastern front with the invasion of Russia, proved once again the cynical observation: “the only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.” Napoleon faced a disastrous outcome in 1812 and even Germany saw less than stellar results in World War I but Hitler insisted. As his army streamed into Russia in 1941 it was decided that perhaps the Fuehrer had been right, at least until an early winter arrived in 1942 and Hitler told his troops to “dig in” at Stalingrad. The Russians surrounded the 330,000 strong German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, resulting in 150,000 of Hitler's finest lying frozen in Russian soil and a total of 450,000 deaths overall. In this unusual view of the German Wehrmacht, we see them as more than strutting SS or the fanatical Sturmabteilung adults of the Hitler Youth. Here are the farm boys of small villages and the young officers who had enlisted to advance civilian careers now facing eminent death for the Fatherland. Although a fictional chronicle, it's based on diaries and first hand accounts of witnesses and participants and the author continually pushes the reader's face into the horror, muck and gore of war's lunacy. As the deaths, anarchy and casualties mount and the orders from Berlin continuously insist that “capitulation is forbidden!” even most of the high command begins to realize that there is no escape. At one point an argument and various discussions ensue within the high command as to whether one should commit suicide or be taken prisoner, both of which are forbidden by Berlin. This revealing insight into the Nazi mindset is alone worth reading the book and could make an fascinating stage-play about totalitarianism.
April 20, 2016
Loves: History
Likes: Military/war novels
Dislikes: Novels that ramble on about nothing
Hates: German literature
I'm really not sure why I started this book since it's pretty much a big part of my Hates category, but I'm a sucker for history novels, whether they're based on actual history or fictional. Add to that my interest in WWII and that's how I ended up reading this behemoth (and yes, at a measly 400 pages, I would consider this a behemoth since it literally took me 4 months to get through it!).
One of the reasons why I have a bias against German (and Russian) literature is that the sentences seem to just go on and on for no real reason. This novel has plenty of that. Details about the surroundings, about character's history that have nothing to do with the story, etc.
I will admit it did end up getting to be a decent read around the 250 page mark but that is way too long for a novel to "get started". The last half of the book took me about a week to read. The rest of the 4 months was struggling to get through all the nonsense of those first 250 pages.
I can proudly say I survived this book. Now it's time to get a little mindless reading in because if I have to start another novel like this again in the near future, I will end up quitting reading! And I mean reading in general! :)
Likes: Military/war novels
Dislikes: Novels that ramble on about nothing
Hates: German literature
I'm really not sure why I started this book since it's pretty much a big part of my Hates category, but I'm a sucker for history novels, whether they're based on actual history or fictional. Add to that my interest in WWII and that's how I ended up reading this behemoth (and yes, at a measly 400 pages, I would consider this a behemoth since it literally took me 4 months to get through it!).
One of the reasons why I have a bias against German (and Russian) literature is that the sentences seem to just go on and on for no real reason. This novel has plenty of that. Details about the surroundings, about character's history that have nothing to do with the story, etc.
I will admit it did end up getting to be a decent read around the 250 page mark but that is way too long for a novel to "get started". The last half of the book took me about a week to read. The rest of the 4 months was struggling to get through all the nonsense of those first 250 pages.
I can proudly say I survived this book. Now it's time to get a little mindless reading in because if I have to start another novel like this again in the near future, I will end up quitting reading! And I mean reading in general! :)
July 3, 2024
(6 June, 2020)
A deeply disturbing account of Germany's doomed Stalingrad campaign. Dehumanising, horrifying and demoralising, towards the end 'Stalingrad' imbues all of these onto a specifically defeated army (but, in truth, the same goes for victorious armies - and add 'pride of atrocious acts' when victorious so, in effect, 'winning' is somehow worse. Bravo!). How can any person cope with the life-altering psychosis resulting from the murder of another person, 'evil sub-human enemy' or not?
Plievier shows us what we are capable of when we are at our weakest, how supreme stupidity, avarice, blind obedience and apathy can lead to the lowest levels of shit-covered cruelty humanity can descend to. All too often he sees us as we truly are: ignorant brutes that collapse inwardly at the slightest threat to our so-called creature comforts. True, some strive to something better, but they are surrounded by mostly unthinking, unbearably all-too-familiar dregs and scum of soldiery and their heartless, brainless leaders. To think Hitler and most of his Nazi sycophants killed themselves but couldn't let an army surrender to the enemy...
This novel is devoid of anything flashy or attention-grabbing, it simply tells, in horrific detail, the story of a defeated army filled with desperate people.
A deeply disturbing account of Germany's doomed Stalingrad campaign. Dehumanising, horrifying and demoralising, towards the end 'Stalingrad' imbues all of these onto a specifically defeated army (but, in truth, the same goes for victorious armies - and add 'pride of atrocious acts' when victorious so, in effect, 'winning' is somehow worse. Bravo!). How can any person cope with the life-altering psychosis resulting from the murder of another person, 'evil sub-human enemy' or not?
Plievier shows us what we are capable of when we are at our weakest, how supreme stupidity, avarice, blind obedience and apathy can lead to the lowest levels of shit-covered cruelty humanity can descend to. All too often he sees us as we truly are: ignorant brutes that collapse inwardly at the slightest threat to our so-called creature comforts. True, some strive to something better, but they are surrounded by mostly unthinking, unbearably all-too-familiar dregs and scum of soldiery and their heartless, brainless leaders. To think Hitler and most of his Nazi sycophants killed themselves but couldn't let an army surrender to the enemy...
This novel is devoid of anything flashy or attention-grabbing, it simply tells, in horrific detail, the story of a defeated army filled with desperate people.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 42 reviews