as far as your feet take you

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Early edition of As Far As Your Feet Can Take

As far as your feet can carry is a novel by Josef Martin Bauer (1901–1970), first published in 1955, about a German prisoner of war who escaped from an East Siberian prison camp after the Second World War in 1949 and embarked on an adventurous escape home.

The novel was the basis of a six-part television film of the same name from 1959 , which became one of the first street sweeps on German television, a cinema drama (2001) and a radio play.

action

The book tells the story of the German soldier Clemens Forell , who was sentenced to 25 years of forced labor in a mass process in the Lubyanka in 1945 . Forell is one of 3.5 million German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union . The story begins in Omsk, West Siberia . Forell and his comrades have been in a freight train on a prisoner transport to Chita since October 24, 1945 .

Of the approx. 3200 people, only 1950 arrived there alive, the rest froze to death , died of typhus or starved to death. From there it goes first by dog ​​sledding, then on foot to the extreme northeast of the Soviet Union to Cape Deschnjow on the Bering Strait , which is about 5370 km as the crow flies from Omsk. The 1236 survivors of the forced march live and work in the tunnels of a lead mine. Bauer describes in detail the living conditions of people who barely get to see daylight. There is talk of flight again and again. After the Americans have handed over the prisoner Willi Bauknecht, who managed to escape to Alaska , it becomes clear that only the almost hopeless route through the vastness of Siberia remains.

When Clemens Forell found himself in the hospital in 1949 because of a serious illness , new thoughts of escape awoke in him. Supported by the cancer camp doctor Dr. Heinz Stauffer, who originally wanted to escape himself, managed to escape from the camp in October. The first time he's all alone. One night he is found by reindeer herders. At first he is suspicious, but after a while he trusts and becomes friends. He spent almost a year traveling through eastern Siberia with three Russian prisoners who fled a gold mine in the Kolyma Mountains . First of all, they secretly mine gold, because in this part of Russia only gold and Machorka have any real value. At the beginning of winter, they leave the digging site and head down into the valley, steal six reindeer and arrive at a survey team's station. There the four pretend to be hunters who have lost their sleds. The commandant Lederer, who later ended up in the gold mine himself, authorizes them in writing, although none of the four has a passport, new equipment, which they have to pay for with their captured skins in spring.

A hidden nugget of gold leads to a deadly altercation in which two of the Russians die and Trout is left unarmed by the gunman. He is attacked by wolves and rescued by Yakuts who help him with food, clothes and a dog. At this point it is near the city of Ayan on the Sea of ​​Okhotsk. He learns from the Yakut Kolka the fate of his last companion and that the Russians are looking for him, but actually consider him dead.

He manages to reach a railway line and to get to Ulan-Ude with a timber transport that covers approx. 1600 km, pretending to be a released Baltic convict named Lemengin, who has his passport, without which one cannot go far in the Soviet Union is supposed to be picked up in Tschita by a superior. You put him alone on a train to Tschita (Cita) because he is now considered a complete idiot. Forell then changes the train and drives in the opposite direction. From Ulan-Ude it reaches the border with Mongolia , probably near K'aachta and Suchbaata . An attempt to escape across this heavily guarded border fails and his dog Willem is shot.

A forest worker of German descent advises him to go further west and try to escape via Iran . He walks on with almost no hope. He survives mainly by stealing food. He reached Kasalinsk via Abakan . When he begins to come to terms with a life in the Soviet Union, he meets the Armenian Jew Igor, who is ready to help him. He is in contact with a group of smugglers who illegally bring goods and sometimes people into Iran. He sends trout to Uralsk , where he makes contact with the smugglers. He reached the border via Novoalexandrowsk and Grozny , across the Caucasus .

He reached Iranian territory through a ford in a border river. When he reached Tabriz a few days later , he surrendered to the authorities there. They do not want to believe his story and consider him a Russian spy. He will be arrested. He is only released with the help of his uncle Erich Baudrexel, who initially does not recognize him, but who ultimately identifies him on the basis of old family photos. He flies via Ankara , Istanbul and Rome to Munich , where he arrives back home on December 22, 1952, but broken mentally and physically by the experiences.

Historical background

The novel is based on the experience report of a former Wehrmacht member and prisoner of war , whose identity the author Josef Martin Bauer kept secret according to the contract. It is Cornelius Rost (1919–1983). As part of research on Bauer's 100th birthday, the Ehrenwirth publishing family made audio recordings available in which Rost describes his story in January 1955, which for Bauer formed the basis for the novel's composition. Extensive research into details of these recordings casts doubt on the historical authenticity of the events described. For example, there was no prisoner of war camp at Cape Deschnjow during the period described. Arthur Dittlmann , a journalist with Bayerischer Rundfunk , reports on the genesis of the novel in a three-hour radio feature . In response to his inquiry, the Munich City Archives found that Cornelius Rost, who, according to the German office, was not an officer but a team rank, was returning to Munich on October 28, 1947, according to the records of the Munich residents' registration office , after he had been released from Soviet captivity. Thus, two years later, he could not possibly have started the three-year escape from an East Siberian camp.

In the novel, Rost / Bauer submit various social-psychological relief offers to the German readers, who are often ashamed of the Nazi crimes exposure and the defeat in the war, which ensured a large part of the success of So Far Off the Feet . The reception of the novel was also favorable to the spirit of the Cold War , which can be seen in the roughly simultaneous success of Hans Hellmut Kirst's 08/15 romance trilogy (published 1954–55) and a large number of relevant magazine stories. One of the offers of relief in these publications and in the novel As far as feet carry was the clean, decent German soldier , generally skeptical or even negative towards the Nazis, basically a cultural bearer in enemy territory who did not fail to have an effect on women. The contrast between the ordinary Russian , kind-hearted, helpful and childlike, and his cruel oppressors in the party, the secret service and the military, who are often portrayed as Asians , also had a socio- psychological relief . Finally, the description of the rescue of Jews by German soldiers also served a wishful thinking that we encounter again and again : In the tape record, Rost claimed that the Jew who had approached him in Siberia (to help him as a member of a so-called Kulaki underground organization ) was the only one his family survived a pogrom organized by the Soviet regime in early 1943 - shortly after Stalingrad. Bauer, however, refrained from adopting this statement and the description of the Jew by Rost corresponding to all anti-Semitic clichés in the novel or smoothing it out considerably here.

distribution

The novel has been translated into 15 languages.

According to Christian Adam's research into bestsellers up to around 1960, the novel was at number 6 of the best-selling books in the FRG.

Adaptations

radio play

The novel was also the template for a radio play of the same name. It was produced in eight parts by WDR in 1956 . Directed by Franz Zimmermann . The main speakers were:

In the 1960s, the tapes were accidentally deleted from the WDR. The production sheet with information on the contributors comes from the German Broadcasting Archive in Frankfurt.

Film adaptations

In 1959, four years after the book was published, Fritz Umgelter filmed the material for the first time for television in a six-part series .

A second film adaptation by Hardy Martins from 2001 differs considerably from the original version of the book.

expenditure

  • Josef Martin Bauer: As far as the feet can carry , Ehrenwirth, Munich 1955, 51st edition 2006, ISBN 3-431-02718-0

literature

  • Sascha Feuchert : Escape into the counter-discourse: A few remarks on Josef Martin Bauer's 'As far as your feet carry' - a bestseller of the economic miracle . In: ders. (Ed.) Flight and expulsion in German literature. Frankfurt u. a. 2001, ISBN 3-631-38196-4 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Arthur Dittlmann: “As far as your feet can carry.” A world success - poetry and truth. (No longer available online.) BR-online , archived from the original on October 20, 2010 ; accessed on December 15, 2016 (information about the broadcast on Bayern 2 ).
  2. ^ S. Fischer: False post-war memories - yesterday's snow . Süddeutsche Zeitung , March 23, 2010, accessed on December 15, 2016 (with references to Arthur Dittlmann's research for a three-hour radio feature).
  3. ↑ Arthur Dittlmann: "As far as your feet carry": A long night about fiction and truth of a world success . Deutschlandfunk , 17./18. December 2011, accessed December 15, 2016.
  4. ↑ Christian Adam, The Dream of the Year Zero. Authors, bestsellers, readers. Galiani, Berlin 2016.