Siberian trilogy
The main work of the German-Russian writer Edwin Erich Dwinger is called the Siberian Trilogy or also: German Passion . The three volumes were published by Diederichs Verlag between 1929 and 1932 , have been translated into many languages and have been reissued until recently. They deal in autobiographical form with the period from 1915 to 1924 and are essentially based on the diaries which Dwinger kept in Russian captivity ("The Army behind Barbed Wire") and as an officer in the Kolchak Army ("Between White and Red"). In a third volume (“We call Germany”) the return of prisoners of war to a changed Germany is reported. In post-war editions of the 1950s and 1970s, the first two volumes came onto the market partly as the “Siberian Diary”.
The Army behind Barbed Wire - The Siberian Diary (1929)
In the opening credits of the book Dwinger writes: “This book contains records from the years 1915 to 1918. It reports neither battles nor heroic deeds, but from the other side: from the 'backyards' of the war - where people died without a report from the front. "
During the First World War , Cossacks win a battle against German soldiers in Windau in Courland , many of whom are captured. The seventeen-year-old ensign and narrator is seriously wounded and picked up from the battlefield and transported to the hinterland. On the transport and in the hospital he can stay with a few regimental comrades. The prisoners of war are gradually being decimated due to inadequate medical care, weeks of rail transport and hunger. In the winter of 1915, a typhus epidemic broke out in the overcrowded earth barracks of the Totzkoje camp . The camp commandant refuses to provide any assistance, so that the frozen dead are soon piling up in front of the barracks by the thousands or are being eaten up by rats between the bed frames. The group around the ensign, the farmer Podbielski, the sergeant Schnarrenberg, the womanizer Brünninghaus, the artist Hatschek, the little Blank, the Prussian Seydlitz and a few others survived the time through mutual support. In addition to the physical, mental disintegration phenomena also occur increasingly. In the Irkutsk camp in Siberia, conditions are better thanks to Elsa Brandström's efforts . In summer, some prisoners can live in a harvest mission with a Russian farmer's wife on Lake Baikal . In a camp in the Transbaikal area, where officers are separated from the men by a fence, Seydlitz and the ensign change to the officers at the onset of winter 1917. The chances of survival are much better here. Homosexuality is spreading among the prisoners of war : some couples are walking around holding hands. Blank also gave in to the insistence of another prisoner and is already referred to as a "real whore". Others become insane or depressed . The revolution and the peace treaty in Brest-Litovsk raised hopes of a return home, but ultimately disappointed. The Bolsheviks take over the camp and abolish the division between officers and men - you can even go to the neighboring village. However, the former camp manager Vereniki returns with Semyonov's army and defeats the red garrison, so that everything is back to normal. The ensign has now joined a new group around Dr. Berger connected. In order to escape the dullness, lectures and theater evenings are held. Podbielski dies in the team camp, Brünninghaus cuts off his testicles. Only the second volume, "Between White and Red" (page 108), provides information about his whereabouts, after the narrator and Seydlitz visited a madhouse in Omsk, where they suspect Brünninghaus and other comrades to be. Schnarrenberg commits after Germany's defeat suicide . Since there is no end to his captivity in sight, Seydlitz joins the white army near Vereniki . Due to his knowledge of Russian, the ensign dares to attempt another escape to the west.
Between White and Red (1930)
It is the continuation of the book “Army Behind Barbed Wire” and ties in directly with it.
With the help of a smuggler, the ensign passed some posts in the white army and was able to hide in Tschita with abducted East Prussians . He feels sexually attracted to Hildegard, the young daughter of the house. She reciprocates his feelings, but is psychologically traumatized after being raped . The ensign realizes that both of them have disturbed sexualities due to the war . As he continued to flee by train, the ensign was arrested in Irkutsk, imprisoned and sentenced to death due to a false identity. With the help of the former camp commandant Vereniki, he is rescued, but has to join the White Army. Vereniki is training a Cossack company in Chita. Seydlitz and the young Konstantin von Kongrin, called "Kostja", are also among the officers. After the Japanese intervention in Transbaikalia , the four officers travel to Omsk to see Admiral Kolchak . Vereniki was given a front-line command in General Kappel's corps in the Volga region. The officer corps is supplemented by the student Ilya, two Francophile counts and three survivors of a worn out department. In addition, a former monk, called Luka, joins them, tending to the wounded and giving sermon evenings. While the offensive is making good progress until Easter, a turnaround is slowly taking place. The ensign becomes the train leader and is assigned German prisoners of war. When asked about his diaries by the Menshevik Ilya, the ensign declared his intention to record all events and views as a chronicler and to leave a judgment to later. He could only muster the necessary objectivity because he had been a prisoner for four years and this determined his attitude for life. An essential part of the book consists of conversations and views of people the ensign encounters: Tsarist officers, intellectuals, captured Red Army soldiers, German prisoners of war, Allied soldiers of the intervention army, etc.
In July 1919 the army was able to establish itself in the Urals again , but had to back down when the neighboring northern army surrendered the mountains without a fight. Fights take place between Tobol and Ishim in autumn . In the hinterland, uprisings break out by the “Reds” and “Greens”. Seydlitz shoots himself when an attempt to desert to Germany fails; the Baltic German von der Recke takes over his position as adjutant . The unit is relocated to Omsk, the capital of Kolchak, for police tasks. Morals in the city are noticeably deteriorating. The ensign finds his comrades from the prisoner of war camp and has them assigned to his entourage. In November 1919 Omsk is evacuated. The army moves with hundreds of thousands of civilians mostly on foot along the Trans-Siberian Railway to the east. More people die of hunger, cold and typhus every day. In the insurgent Krasnoyarsk , large parts of the army are dispersed, killed or overrun. Since an attack on Irkutsk is banned by the Czechoslovak legions , the remnants of the army want to cross the frozen Lake Baikal , where Semyonov's sphere of influence begins. After Vereniki remains wounded and a snow storm devastates the convoy, von der Recke and Kostja are the only ones who move on. The surviving prisoners of war want to be taken prisoner by the Reds, the ensign also gets a German uniform coat.
In the prison camp everything is the same when a new epidemic threatens to break out, Ensign Dr. Berger to escape. Disguised as English, they travel to newly founded Lithuania by train . They cross the German border at Tilsit on foot . They want to try to open a sanatorium for those returning from the war.
We Call Germany (1932)
The third part of the trilogy is about the difficulties of the surviving prisoners of war in the changed Germany of the 1920s. The ensign found employment with the East Prussian squire Wienow (his daughter is called Waltraud). When the group of prisoners from the previous book arrived on a cargo ship in 1921, the ensign offered his comrades accommodation and work with his boss. The different characters try to gain a foothold in life again, which some also succeed. Others return to the "Siberian" community because they feel misunderstood.
The various political views are expressed in discussions against the background of the events of the Weimar Republic from 1921 to 1924. The characters in the novel include the "Cuirassier", the pacifist Windt, the reactionary Merkel, the communists Roenninghof and Glitschke, the circus artist Hatschek, the Reichswehr officer Schulenburg, a homosexual couple, the "Baltikumer", the Austrian Saltin, the Russian Natascha, the Bayer "Tadpole", the hairdresser Fleetmann etc.
With farm work, people slowly recover physically and mentally, although the horrors of the past are never forgotten. As a kind of legacy of past sufferings, the ensign calls for a new social order that combines socialism with nationalism.
reception
The book was one of the great successes of the Weimar Republic and made Dwinger known. The readers came from all political directions and social classes. After the success of “ Nothing New in the West ”, a wealth of war memories of different koleur emerged in these years. Alfred Kantorowicz wrote in the Vossische Zeitung on September 29, 1929: "Don't say that we have had enough of war literature. When you read the Dwinger, it's exactly like when you read Remarque, you want everyone's book put in hand, force everyone to read and understand: this was the war at the front, this was the war behind the front, how is it possible to forget it or not want to admit it? All schoolchildren should read these books and The young students and clerks who play idyllic war games on the edge of the forest should be forced to read these books. And one of these books that should be introduced as compulsory school reading is this POW book by Edwin Erich Dwinger. "
Like its predecessor, “Between White and Red” was received positively and achieved large print runs. Even in the Red Flag and Left Bend , it was lauded as the most believable representation of the Russian Civil War . Johannes R. Becher praised the straightforward objectivity of the book, which, against its will, is a great commitment to Bolshevism .
In the third part of the book, Dwinger's political views become clearer, the novel is counted as part of the conservative revolution and Dwinger is brought into close proximity to National Socialist ideas.
Adolf Frisé wrote that Dwinger had succeeded in transforming his diaries into a work of world historical importance. He is not a creative writer and should not be seen as such. His profession is historical truth, which speaks for itself. While Ernst Jünger's violence takes on a mystical form and Hans Carossa ascends to aesthetic heights in his memoirs, Dwinger presents human experience with its ups and downs with an unrivaled economy of words. The work received praise from, among others, Hans Grimm and Arno Mulot . The trilogy was even described in the right-wing camp as "a grandiose work which, like Xenophon's Anabasis, will outlast the ages". Dwinger was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by Edgar Allan Poe's son .
Even after the Second World War , the work, especially the first two parts, saw new editions.
Historical authenticity
The first-person author expresses himself repeatedly about his diaries and intentions in "Army behind barbed wire" and "Between white and red". A dialogue between the ensign and Podbielski is given as an example:
"What do you always write down?" asks me Pod. I close my diary unobtrusively. "Everything pod" I say, distressed. "Everything? Why?" "Well," I say, "everything that occurs here. What is said, what is done, how everyone feels and gives ..." " Is that how I stand in your book?" "Certainly Pod." "Yes, for example?" "Well, what do you say tell ..." "Man" he laughs. "What for? I'm a stupid bitch, who should be interested in me?" I smile softly. "Perhaps more than you think, Pod. You forget that in my book you stand for a hundred thousand who all suffered, what you suffered, who were like you ... Brno in turn for a hundred thousand others who were like his essence, this life felt like he felt ... " " Yes, "says Pod and puts his finger to his nose," now I understand! And Schnarrenberg and Seydlitz and the artist? And Blank and our Bavarians and you? And Turks and Hungarians and Austrians "You speak of all of them, don't you? Of all two and a quarter million?" "Yes," I say, "And these ten and twelve that I am describing represent, as it were -" "Is that how you want to publish it?" he interrupts me. "Maybe, Pod" "Aha ..." He is a little silent. "Fine," he says. "Yes, write. And write about me too. It is quite right if you find out in your home country how we were sucked out the blood from living bodies and what we thought, said, felt! Then it is only worth it if you don't sugarcoat or hide anything, "he continues. "Of course, Pod" "Then it's forbidden!" he says quickly. "Why?" "Because it's so cruel, so ugly, so mean ..." "The truth doesn't need a nice dress, it's most beautiful naked, my dear Pod!" I answer. "And lies cannot help the generations to come and our world ..."
Dwinger himself has not made any statements about the truth of the two books. He described his book about Vlasov in 1951 as "poetically inflated truth". At that time, contemporary witnesses from Vlasov's surroundings criticized the character portrayals in part.
From a writing by Bruno Brehm it emerges that both met in the hospital of the Gruditzky barracks in Moscow. In Dwinger's first novel "The Great Grave" from 1920, the narrator came to the Daurija camp in 1915, still wounded. Vereniki was killed here as early as 1918.
Several stories and figures are obviously taken from Elsa Brandström's book "Among Prisoners of War in Russia and Siberia 1914/1920".
In a certain way, the post-war work "When the dams break - the fall of East Prussia" can be viewed as a partial continuation of the trilogy, especially since the fate of the people settled in East Prussia (Kürassier, Achatz von der Recke, Roenninghoff, Fleetmann, Tod Dr. Berger etc. ) is discussed further.
literature
- Edwin Erich Dwinger: The army behind barbed wire. The Siberian Diary. Diederichs, Jena 1929.
- Reprint: Army behind barbed wire, a German soldier's fate in World War II. Kettmann, Wörlitz 1995, ISBN 3-930696-05-3 .
- Edwin Erich Dwinger: Between white and red. The Russian tragedy 1919-1920. Diederichs, Jena 1930.
- Reprint: Between white and red: the Russian tragedy. Stocker, Graz / Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-7020-0929-9 .
- Edwin Erich Dwinger: We're calling Germany. Homecoming and Legacy. 1921-1924. Diederichs, Jena 1932.
- Jürgen Hillesheim, Elisabeth Michael: Lexicon of National Socialist Poets. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1993, ISBN 3-88479-511-2 .
- Gregor Thum: Dreamland East: German images of Eastern Europe in the 20th century. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-525-36295-1 .
- Jay W. Baird: Hitler's war poets: literature and politics in the Third Reich. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2009, ISBN 978-0-521-14563-3 , (online) .
- Rüdiger Overmans: In the hands of the enemy: Captivity from antiquity to World War II. Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 1999, ISBN 3-412-14998-5 . (on-line)
- Jochen Oltmer: Prisoners of War in Europe during the First World War. Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 2006, ISBN 3-506-72927-6 .
- Elsa Brandström: Among prisoners of war in Russia and Siberia 1914-1920. German Verl. Ges. F. Politics and History, Berlin 1922.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Baird: Hitler's was poets. P. 139.
- ↑ Thum: Dreamland East. P. 67.
- ^ Michael Hillesheim: Lexicon of National Socialist Poets. P. 124.
- ^ Adolf Frize: The new Rundschau. 44 (Berlin 1933) pp. 844-850.
- ↑ Baird: Hitler's was poets. P. 139.
- ↑ Thum: Dreamland East. P. 66.
- ^ Siberian diary blick + bild Verlag 1965 p. 150/151
- ↑ Der Spiegel No. 52/1951 p. 30
- ↑ Neue Literatur, 32, 9, September 1931, pp. 426-30