Storm (Ehrenburg)

Ilja Ehrenburg
on November 15, 1947

Sturm (russ. Буря , Burja ) is a novel about the western campaign and the German-Soviet war , the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg January 1946 to June 1947 wrote and until August 1947 month of April in the literary journal Novy Mir published .

Volk und Welt held the rights to the translation into German since 1948. The novel was translated from Russian into Czech ( Bouře , 1948), English ( The Storm , 1948) and Turkish ( Fırtına , 1969).

overview

Subject of the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union : This subjectively tinged novel does not feature a German soldier who had no choice but to follow the draft order and who nevertheless remained morally upright until the end of the war. Written and published during the rule of Stalin , the text conveys a largely one-sided picture of the beating, murderous German aggressor versus the indulgent, indulgent in every situation, fearlessly fighting with far too little ammunition and dying to death. The communists are portrayed as the best among the Russians, namely the commanders and commissioners of the Red Army . At the time of writing, shortly after the war against the Germans and their European allies had been won , Ilya Ehrenburg found it easy to present his idea for a global romance: the Russians - apart from a few fickle- minded ones - believe in the victory of their weapons, despite all the initial setbacks at any time . From the background, Stalin speaks sparingly as a good father to the Soviet people. His adversary Hitler looks from his empire with a Janus-faced eye to the West and the East.

On closer inspection, Ilya Ehrenburg's loyalty to the line, which is evident everywhere in the text, must be relativized to Stalin’s doctrine of Soviet communism, which alone is blissful . Ilja Ehrenburg, who had to spend in exile in Paris from 1908 to 1917 - fled from the Ochrana - has created a workable, manageable framework in which the current location between Paris, any of the countless Russian and later Eastern European theaters of war and finally the sinking one German Reich changes. The extraordinary creative power of the author is to be sketched in a few female characters - around the two heroes of the novel. These two protagonists are the young captain of the pioneer troops, bridge construction engineer Sergej Wlachow and the young battalion commissioner Ossip Alper from Kiev . The latter neglects his young wife Raissa Michailowna Alper - called Raja; can be sent to the Pechora a year before the war without contradiction until the outbreak of war . The couple, of course, lost contact entirely during the war. Raja signs up as a nurse at the beginning of the war, but with a heavy heart he has to leave the beloved only little daughter Alja in Kiev in the care of the devoted mother-in-law Chana. After Chana and Alja were murdered by the Germans in Kiev during the war, the nurse Raja only wants to kill Germans. How proud the battalion commissar Ossip Alper is when, after such a long time, he learns from the mouth of his superior that his Raja - Sergeant Raissa Alper - has been awarded the Red Star medal for bravery as a Red Army sniper !

The other of the two heroes - Sergei Wlachow - had been with his friend Maurice Lancier on business for a long time in Paris. When Sergej Wlachow returned to his Russian homeland, he had to leave behind his first love, Lancier's only daughter, the painter Madeleine, called Mado. He had categorically ruled out living together. While Sergej Wlachow - back at home - entered into a marriage of convenience with the sensitive, tender Valja in April 1941, Mado married the industrialist Joseph Berty in Paris - also for reasons of reason. The "couple" Mado-Berty hates each other. Mado runs away from her husband and goes into hiding; goes into the Resistance . In mid-1942 the Germans want to relocate the war-important engine factory of the engineer Joseph Berty to the Reich because of the French saboteurs, if the factory owner does not solve the problem of sabotage in the near future. Joseph Berty betrays sixteen suspicious employees to the Germans. All sixteen will be liquidated. Mado then lures the unloved husband into the Parisian restaurant Belle Hôtesse and shoots the traitor.

As I said, it is easy on the German side to disparage Ilya Ehrenburg on the basis of various passages of text as an unacceptable Soviet author who unilaterally portrayed German war criminals in the 1940s. At least two places in the text speak against this. First, in the summer of 1942, before the Battle of Stalingrad , Colonel Gabler spoke to one of his subordinates, Sergeant Richter, in Rshew . In times of peace Private Kurt Richter had been the Colonel's architect at home in Germany. Colonel Gabler comments on the problem of Stalingrad: “Our situation is unfavorable ... the Führer cannot ease the pressure in the south. We have to defend ourselves ... It's a shame that we're giving up the prime of our army ... here. ”Or secondly, the fighter pilot Louis Lancier - that is the son of Maurice Lancier - has already shot down several German opponents and is waiting in London under de Gaulle for German opponents. They are apparently deployed on the Eastern Front. So Louis Lancier wants to continue fighting on the side of the Russians. His English interlocutor Major Davis advises to wait and see: “... Hitler should win again, but it will be a Pyrrhic victory . We will deal the last blow to him ... When the Bolsheviks are crushed, we will help the Russians to create a state with a regime that suits us better. ”With all this, the English admires the defenders of“ Stalingrad ... even if they are communists Are pure culture. "

Regarding the German Colonel Gabler, it should be said: In the first half of the novel, senior officers rarely appear as acting persons. The first general to act is the Soviet major general Petrjakow, who at the end of the fourth of the six books promoted Captain Sergej Wlachow to major in Stalingrad and decorated it with the Order of the Red Banner . Otherwise lower ranks usually appear in the battalion or company. Ilya Ehrenburg even goes so far that he allows Soviet commanders who are involved in the Stalingrad house warfare to experience the encirclement of the enemy as an incredible miracle. This fits a narrative element that is valid throughout the first half of the novel: the Soviet fighters act largely as encircled or dispersed without information. For example, a dying Russian soldier asks what Stalin said on the radio. While Ilja Ehrenburg in the Paris chapters of the novel allows French businessmen and intellectuals to have their say in detail when they risk assessing the situation among themselves, he avoids the "royal level" in the chapters set in Russia and usually prefers to describe everyday war life in close proximity of the suffering civilian population.

If the passages interspersed with Soviet ideology are overlooked, the reader can also learn a lot about the command of the armed forces in the war of aggression . For example, the Soviet partisans hidden in the Russian swampy forest area know that when drought sets in, they have bad cards against the motorized enemy. Otherwise, the opposing battle sequence is known. Stukas crash after the reconnaissance plane, the artillery roars and then things get dangerous. The advancing tanks must be brought to a standstill.

action

prehistory

The cutter Naum Alper lives in Kiev with his wife Chana and their two sons Leo and Ossip. Before the war , Naum went to Paris with Leo against his wife's wishes . Chana stays in Kiev with her younger son Osip. Leo is five years older than Ossip. Hardly mend the poor clothes in Paris and falls as a volunteer in Champagne . Leo studied mathematics, married the pretty milliner Leontine, made a name for himself as a talented engineer and became a partner in the company of the Frenchman Maurice Lancier from Niort in Paris . The architect Osip lives with his wife Raja and their little daughter Alja in Kiev together with their mother Chana. Raja has two girlfriends in Kiev - Valja and Galotschka, who are four years older. The latter is the laughing dove that often suddenly laughs. Valja befriends 20-year-old Natascha. Natasha's father, the 50-year-old medical officer Dmitri Alexejewitsch Krylow, a communist from Lipetsk , works in the hospital as an ear, nose and throat doctor.

Summer 1936 to May 9, 1945

The Russian engineer Sergej Wlachow, on business in Paris, falls in love with Mado, the daughter of the 54-year-old Pétain admirer Maurice Lancier and his wife Marceline. Love is returned but is unhappy. Sergei Wlachow has to go back home and marries Valja there. Lancier's partner Leo, meanwhile French, was called up in 1939 and sent to the Belgian border against the Germans. In the war against Germany, Leo shoots a German scout. Leo's wife, Leontine, gives birth to a son. One of Lanciers staff, the communist Henri Lejean, is in prison. Lanciers and Marceline's son Louis is trained as a fighter pilot.

Almost all of Paris, including Leontine with her youngest child, flees from the advancing Wehrmacht. The child dies on the mother's breast on the way to the Loire . Lancier manages to escape to Bordeaux with Marceline, Mado and Louis . Marceline dies. Mado and Louis - the latter now lieutenant - call Pétain, who is demobilized, a traitor. Louis leaves the widowed father. The Jew Leo Alper withdraws from the German-friendly Maurice Lancier.

In 1940 the young Berlin architect Kurt Richter was sent to Moscow by his company. Richter knows one of his Russian interlocutors from a meeting in July 1932 in Kuznetsk . On behalf of his superior, Richter questions the non-party Russian partner in vain. Richter, posted to the UK when the war broke out , travels back to his wife Hilde in Berlin without having achieved anything .

Valja, who is now 26 years old and unsuccessfully studies acting in Moscow, spends the summer in Kiev with her friend Raja. Her husband Ossip - lazy to write - is still working at the Pechora. Valya returns to Moscow and falls in love with Sergei Wlachow. Natascha marries Sergej Wlachow's brother, Vasily, who was born in Moscow, called Wassja, in Minsk when the Wehrmacht invaded Belarus . Natasha's father Dr. Krylov wants to send the daughter to relatives in the hinterland in Atkarsk , but the young woman drives to the front. Dr. Krylov calls the daughter a magnificent girl.

Wassja serves in a pioneer battalion. Without further ado he shoots an alarmist. The Wehrmacht approaches the Beresina . The regiment in which Vasja serves is surrounded. Raja works in a hospital. It was opened in the forest near Poltava . Dr. Krylov operates in such a forest hospital. A young German tank soldier also comes under his knife. Krylov asks why he is trembling. The wounded man replied: “We were told that the Reds would castrate the prisoners. You'd better kill me. "

Although the Red Army sometimes even counterattacks, although order is being created - a few fickle are shot - it has to give up Chernigov , Romny and Kiev. In Kiev, Valya's father, Alexei Nikolayevich Steschenko, lost his composure in September 1941; blames the communists and Jews for the German invasion.

On October 12, 1941, when the battalion commander fell, Commissioner Ossip Alper led the battalion. The Germans have occupied Odessa , Kharkov , the Donets Basin and the Crimea when Sergei Wlachow joins a pioneer battalion that is being set up on the Volga . After the first missions, Sergejs Oberst praised the “civilist” pioneer.

Ilja Ehrenburg (right in the picture) in 1942 in conversation with tank soldiers of the Red Army

At the end of March 1942, Natascha gave birth to little Wassili. His father Wassja, the great Vasily, commands a partisan detachment. On the eve of May 1st, Stalin also addressed the partisans by radio and said that they should learn to hate the enemy. In a village Vasja shoots a Russian woman who is living with a Gestapo man .

The Red Army gives up Kerch and Rostov-on-Don . From Rostov the German tanks advance to Salsk and Kotelnikowo . Wassja takes in displaced people and civilians from the Brjansk and Oryol area. There is fighting in Voronezh .

Ossip is deployed against Germans, Italians and Romanians near Stalingrad . He faces both worn-out and fit for action, both SS and replacement troops. The battalion led by Major Ossip Alper is covered with barrage and, tired and gloomy, starts a counterattack; bleeding to death. Raja writes Ossip from Uzbekistan ; hides the loss of their little daughter Alja from her husband. The captain of the pioneer troops Sergej Wlachow is building a Volga crossing there, which the Germans want to destroy. Ilja Ehrenburg describes the attack on the bank: “It was as if all iron from the Ruhr area , the Biscay , from Lapland and Lorraine , melted and glowing, was falling on the narrow strip of earth, on the earthworks, the trenches and the mortal people, on your chest, lungs, arteries, eyeballs ... "

As they retreated, the Germans took on the Russians in the Tiger tank near Kursk in the summer of 1943 . The latter, however, use thermite bullets against the armor. German companies occasionally shrink to four men. Ossips battalion takes action against well-fortified German positions. In the battle in the Kursk Arch , Sergei's pioneers are supposed to pave the way for Osip's troops. The two fighters meet. Since Ossip does not mention his name in the conversation, the talk does not turn to their wives - the friends Raja and Valja. They talk about the enemy bombing near Katarsha in February 1943. Sergej meets Lieutenant Louis, who flies against the Germans in Russia. Sergej learns from Mado's brother that Mado has married. Sergei can hardly hide his excitement. The married Sergei has no time for inappropriate jealousy. After taking Oryol, the Desna , the Dnepr and the Vistula must be bridged by the pioneers.

Louis' machine is shot down by a German in a dogfight. The French did not survive the crash. Vasya falls. Natascha returned to Moscow in the spring of 1944, worked there in the hospital and looked after her little Vasya. Regimental commander Osip crosses the Desna and only rests briefly amid the ruins of Chernigov.

Valja's mother dies in May. The father, school director Alexej Nikolajewitsch Steschenko, an opponent of the Bolsheviks , is not protected by the Germans retreating from Kiev, but beaten and hanged himself. Valya Wlachowa, who is a respected worker at a workbench in the arms industry far away, hopes to see her parents again.

A police officer asks Leo Alper on the street in Paris: “Are you a Jew?” The careless Leo - his former partner Maurice Lancier had appropriated his shares but did not help him - is arrested and killed by the Germans in the Auschwitz concentration camp .

When Ossip visits neighbors in Kiev and learns of the murder of his mother and daughter, he realizes that Raja had borne the pain alone. Ossip writes Raja. It turns out that Raja, who had not been back to Kiev, was still secretly hoping for her daughter Alja to survive. Raja, who continues to fight as a sniper despite being wounded, is hit by a grenade during a break in the fight in the forest near Smolensk and found dead.

Mado, who continues to fight in the Resistance, learns from fellow combatant Bär how he met Sergej in Russia in the summer of 1942, got to know him and learned that Sergej is married. The news triggers neither jealousy nor pain in Mado.

Valja confesses her father's betrayal to the director of her armaments factory and is still employed in spite of everything. Sergei is wounded while taking Vilnius . Valja writes to Sergej: "May my love protect you."

Leo's wife, the widow Leontine, returns to Paris, fights the Germans with gun in hand and falls. On August 24, 1944, French tanks enter Paris. In Paris, Mado sees her father in his right hands. She gets along with her stepmother Martha right away.

The association in which Sergej serves penetrates into Yugoslavia via Bulgaria . In a Serbian town, SS men from Greece have holed up in a cellar of the local fortress. When Sergei tries to attack the enemy with a hand grenade , he falls.

Wassja knows how Valja loved her husband and hopes that her return to the stage will help her with the grief work. Wassja takes part in the Battle of Berlin and returns by plane to Natascha and Klein-Wassja on May 9, 1945 in Moscow.

Subplots

In this sketch, the numerous passages that describe the path of the German perpetrators and followers have been left out. Some of these side stories stick in the reader's memory - for example, how the German Christine Staube tortures the Russian forced laborer Galotschka or how the story of the above-mentioned architect NCO Kurt Richter and his wife Hilde runs through the entire novel. Likewise, the intertwined network of actions in France was largely left unmentioned.

Atrocities of war

From the war crimes that are always briefly described in the text, three are selected in addition to those mentioned above.

• In the Ukrainian village of Letki , the farmer's wife Vera Platonovna is beaten by a German and when he finds a picture of Lenin in her apartment, she is killed.
• Because the residents of Oradour-sur-Glane have hidden numerous Jews, they are killed by the SS - with the exception of 18 residents - from infants to bedridden old people. Mothers are cremated with their children.
• In Trostyanets the SS brings people into "gas vans".

Sergej and Mado

One narrative idea that clings to the novel, even carries it, is the miracle of first love. “I will never forget Mado, thinks Sergei.” Mado thinks the same way. Sergei has long since lost his lover, but he keeps thinking of her and wants to write to her. Mado appears to him as a phantom between Russian trees. The unhappy couple remains separated.

Self-testimony

"In my opinion, a lot went wrong with the storm - the events were probably all too fresh and I had not yet understood everything."

reception

• January 1948 issue of the literary magazine Oktjabr : M. Schkerin writes that the author made two cardinal errors. First, Ilya Ehrenburg asked why did the Red Army withdraw to Moscow in 1941? answered as follows: Apparently a force was lacking that could have stopped the rampant anarchy among demoralized, confused soldiers. And those Red Army soldiers who were already surrounded by the call We are! flee, then occasionally inflict losses on the Germans. That is "illogical and improbable". JW Stalin had already answered the question correctly on July 3, 1941: The Germans had struck surprisingly and “completely mobilized”. The Red Army, however, was only mobilized during the war. And the second big mistake of the author: The factory workers and collective farms, who would have defeated the Germans, were completely missing. Instead, the ensemble of figures of the driving forces on the Soviet side consists exclusively of intellectuals. Then there are other errors to be chalked up. The main hero Sergei Wlachow glorifies the French. So he's not a real Soviet person in character. Natascha (Vasily Wlachow's wife) reminded me of a Soviet woman, but the character trait in question was not memorable.
• January 30, 1948: Nikolai Shdanov's meeting in Izvestia consists essentially of praise.
• February 6, 1948: S. Kedrina praises the novel in the Trud "completely unreservedly".
• February 1948 issue of the literary magazine Oktjabr : S. Schtut writes that Ilja Ehrenburg shows how energetic Soviet characters outgrew themselves in the course of the war. The author of this psychological novel only had poor artistic means. The epic subject is missing - that is, “the monumental aspect of the epic and the pathos of heroic art”. Instead, a juxtaposition of everyday life and pathetics, weakening the work of art, is offered.
• March issue 1948 of the literary magazine Oktjabr : J. Lukin writes that the author denounces capitalism , the father of the monster fascism . Realistic representation and revolutionary heroic romanticism as well as satirical sharpness and delicate poetry stand side by side in the novel. The love of the protagonist Sergej Wlachow for Mado plays a major role. Mado even acts as a symbol in the novel. The author probably does not know the life of the Soviet workers and peasants at all. That is why they do not appear in the text. Even more - Ilja Ehrenburg describes life in the Soviet Union in 1939 as if the first five-year plan had not yet been fulfilled. J. Lukin refers to "the justified dissatisfaction of a considerable part of the Soviet readers": "Apparently the too hasty writing of the novel has also made reading difficult by the kaleidoscopic appearance and disappearance of persons, episodes and countries."
• July 1979: Schröder writes: “In the storm , Ehrenburg tried, out of revolutionary impatience and out of the spirit of the time, despite all the given relativization, to anticipate a dialectical suspension of his art-revolution problematics in a higher cultural concept in a romanticizing way ... For the edition of the novel from 1965, which is presented here for the first time in a German translation, Ehrenburg has deleted contemporary anthemic passages from the first print version of Sturm . "

Web links

• Full text
  • online at rulit.me (Russian)
  • online at librebook.me (Russian)
  • online at royallib.com (Russian)
• Entry at fantlab.ru (Russian)

literature

German-language editions

• Ilja Ehrenburg: The storm. Foreign language publisher. Literature, Moscow 1948
• Ilja Ehrenburg: The storm. People and the world, Berlin 1951
• Ilja Ehrenburg: Storm. The German translation was edited by Maria Riwkin. Volk und Welt, Berlin 1953 (4th edition)
• Ilja Ehrenburg: Storm. Novel. Maria Riwkin was responsible for editing the German version. With an afterword by Ralf Schröder . Volk und Welt, Berlin 1987 (2nd edition, ISBN 3-353-00075-5 , edition used)

Secondary literature

• Alfred Antkowiak (ed.): Soviet literary criticism. A selection. Publishing house culture and progress. Berlin 1953

Remarks

1. ↑ Of course, Ilja Ehrendburg is a skilful, experienced author who, in his extremely extensive text, allows some exceptions to this rule of the deluded, characteristically condemnable German. For example, the German communists are consistently counted among the European avant-garde of that time.
2. ↑ For example, there is a story of the vandalizing German Wehrmacht member Vergau, who hanged a civilian woman on her balcony in Kharkov. His comrades starving to death in the Stalingrad basin are appalled when Vergau overflows during the night (Edition used, p. 435, 9th Zvo to p. 437, 2nd Zvo and p. 437, 9th Zvo).
3. ↑ Ilja Ehrenburg introduces Colonel Gabler as a friendly philosopher in uniform. Gabler can do it differently. He wants to bring soldiers to court martial who are in retreat and do not hold the Desna crossing. The retreating colonel lets barns burn down with the grain they contain (edition used, pp. 512–513). Gabler is arrested after the assassination attempt on Hitler .
4. ↑ For example, 30 members of the Wehrmacht are billeted in a Russian village. Sergeant Reckmann tortures and shoots an old Jewish couple who were kept hidden by the Russians. During the subsequent attack by 80 partisans under the command of the Kievan Strishow, the sergeant died of a shot in the stomach (edition used, p. 394, chapter 14).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ see German-language edition from 1953, p. 4, 3rd Zvu
2. ↑ Edition used, p. 226, 18. Zvo
3. ↑ Edition used, p. 356, 20. Zvo
4. ↑ Edition used, p. 362, 14. Zvo
5. ↑ Edition used, p. 362, 4th Zvu
6. ↑ Edition used, p. 437 below to p. 439 above
7. ↑ Edition used, p. 424, Chapter 20
8. ↑ Schröder quotes Ehrenburg in the edition used, p. 759, 15. Zvo
9. ↑ Edition used, p. 209, 5th Zvu
10. ↑ Edition used, p. 367.8. Zvu
11. ↑ Russian Катаржа
12. ↑ Edition used, p. 619, 3rd Zvu
13. ↑ Schröder quotes Ehrenburg in the afterword of the edition used, p. 761, 14. Zvu
14. ↑ ru: Октябрь (журнал), October (magazine)
15. ↑ M. Schkerin: About Ilja Ehrenburg's novel "Der Sturm" , pp. 107-130 in Antkowiak: Soviet literary criticism , Russian Михаил Романович Шкерин
16. ↑ Russian Николай Жданов
17. ↑ J. Lukin, p. 161 middle in Antkowiak
18. ↑ J. Lukin, p. 161, 12. Zvu at Antkowiak
19. ↑ S. Schtut: "The Storm" by Ilja Ehrenburg , pp. 131–148 in Antkowiak: Soviet literary criticism , Russian С. Штут
20. ↑ J. Lukin: The novel "The Storm" by Ilja Ehrenburg , pp. 149–162 in Antkowiak: Soviet literary criticism , ru: Лукин, Юрий Борисович (1907–1998)
21. ↑ Lukin in Antkowiak, p. 161
22. ↑ Schröder in the afterword of the edition used, p. 762, 1. Zvu and p. 763, 17. Zvu