Reading Grossman's “Stalingrad” and ”Life and Fate”

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-21

by mathgenius • 5 years ago

93 58 5 years ago

adamtooze.substack.com

sparsely2• 5 years ago

Life and Fate is a truly incredible book - readable, thought provoking and deeply moving. Wildly underappreciated.

There's also an excellent translation with light commentary of Grossman's journalistic notes and articles from the war, "A Writer At War". Something that separates him from even certain more modern commentators is an intense concern for the experience of the ordinary soldiers, not just the cut and thrust of grand strategy and leadership.

vbtemp• 5 years ago

"A Writer at War" - the translation of his diary from 41-45 - is truly the most moving, most horrifying book I have ever read. After reading the account of the uprising at Treblinka, I was changed forever. I think it goes to show what an incredible man Grossman was, as just weeks after liberating the death camps, he resolutely chronicles the mass rape and murder of German civilians by his own forces.

MichaelMoser123• 5 years ago

He wrote an article during the war "the hell of Treblinka", (here in Russian http://lib.ru/PROZA/GROSSMAN/trebl.txt) This article was even used as evidence of the prosecution during the Nuremberg trials (says wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Grossman)

anonymousDan• 5 years ago

Agreed, great book. If you haven't read Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad as a 'non-fiction' take I can also highly recommend. I presume he must have been heavily influenced by Grossman.

sparsely2• 5 years ago

He was! He worked on "A Writer at War", and if you check the quotes and references in Stalingrad a huge number are from Grossman or Ehrenburg

pjc50• 5 years ago

It's an extraordinary historical event; a while ago I read Beevor's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalingrad_(Beevor_book) and it left a profound impression on me of the sheer meatgrinder of humanity, both German and Russian, that the battle was. Like the siege of Leningrad, a huge number of people were starved to death.

algo_trader2• 5 years ago

+1 for Stalingrad by Beevor

A soul shaking book. It changed my outlook on bureaucracy/society/humanity.

the_af10• 5 years ago

What I don't like so much about Beevor's Stalingrad is the narrative he weaves. He gets into the minds of his subjects and "tells" the reader what they were thinking, which is effectively impossible.

This is a narrative flourish meant to grab the reader's attention, but it's also an inadmissible interference by the author, and one where he inserts his own bias. I find Beevor's style very hard to take, since I don't enjoy being told what to think.

Contrast this with someone more dispassionate, such as David Glantz. He will tell you about the Eastern Front with more dry facts and less "going inside the minds" of generals or ordinary soldiers (UNLESS there is a reference that supports this). The resulting account is both more factual, with less author's ideology seeping through, but also drier and harder to read. Boring at times, even.

So Beevor is "more fun" to read than Glantz, but also way less impartial and more concerned about telling the reader what to think, and I really dislike that.

fifilura• 5 years ago

I read that book in bed with a pretty bad flu.

It certainly added an extra dimension to be shivering from fever while reading about those poor cold souls.

dahjkol• 5 years ago

Stalingrad was such hell on earth.

Mentioning it to my grandfather would break him and he would just walk away.

He stabbed dead Germans and fellow Russians with his bayonet to make sure they were dead. It's messed up.

forinti• 5 years ago

Post-war USSR must have had an enormous mental health problem (along with those who were physically handicapped).

romwell• 5 years ago

In many ways, Russia is still recovering from the PTSD of the Revolution, Stalin, and the War.

Just to give one example: the male/female ratio post-war was 3:4, and has never exceeded 9:10 ever since. It had a profound effect on gender dynamics, which persists to this day.

That's one of the reasons mail-order brides often hail from ex-USSR countries: it's to escape not only the economic conditions, but the social ones too.

globuous• 5 years ago

I’m currently half way through life and fate (just finished the famous chapter where Liss has a conversation with Mostovskoi on the similarities between the USSR and Nazi germany). It’s truly an incredible book. In the first chapters, he details the inner working of nazi camps, I did not know about Kapos[1], absolutely horrifying. Long read, but definitely check it out if a War and Peace about WWII is something that sounds interesting to you!!

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapo

trutannus2• 5 years ago

Kapos were not always prisoners, sometimes the term was applied to POW camp guards. There were also "men of confidence", who were always POWs. Their role was to basically act as ambassador for the guards to the prisoners. There were cases where the MoC had to pick between outing folks attempting to escape, or allow their entire unit to be killed in retaliation.

This podcast episode is an interesting story about an escape in WWII from an illegal labor camp (Geneva Convention prohibits slave labor for PoWs) by several American POWs. Covers a lot about the way the camps worked too: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3MnBvZGNhc3QubGl...

seniorThrowaway5• 5 years ago

There were generally three "tiers" at the camps. The SS were at the top, in command. At most camps there were very few of them, a couple of dozen. Below them were the Trawnikis/Hiwis, the soviet "helpers" who largely consisted of POW's who "volunteered" for guard duty. In German they held the title of Wachmann, watchman. They made up the majority of the guards. Then there were the prisoner workers and leaders, the kapos and sonderkommandos. They did most of the actual work of the camps.

borroka• 5 years ago

Kapo by Gillo Pontecorvo is a must see

manu3000• 5 years ago

Victor Frankl discusses the psychological makeup of kapos in "Man's Search for Meaning"

neves• 5 years ago

"The war could only be fought through freedom, through the willingness of millions of ordinary men and women to abandon life. Ordinary heroism drove the Red Army, as it drove the Wehrmacht"

Nice article. I'm always impressed with accounts of what were in the minds of Soviet soldiers. I'd also recommend Nobel's Laureate Svetlana Alexievich book "The unwomanly face of war", a book of interviews with women that fought the war.

dash22• 5 years ago

Yeah, the Alexievich book really stays with you. The teenage girl going to the front line and packing a suitcase full of chocolate. And the squad in the swamp, with a woman and her baby, and what she had to do when it started crying at a bad moment. Oosh.

myth_drannon• 5 years ago

There is another famous book by also an embedded war journalist. Volokolamsk_Highway by Alexander Bek. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volokolamsk_Highway

It's much shorter book and an easier read but still an important account of a specific part of war that Grossman also briefly touched. That is a retreating army and what happens to soldiers and the leadership. The leadership skills are an important learning part. How to inspire and lead a completely demoralized, tired and hungry group of people.

danielodievich• 5 years ago

I have long wanted to read this, and am glad to see this as a prompt to finally buy the book. Thanks for posting this great article.

My grandfather was a teen during the war, spending most of it under the occupation as a cow herder in Grodno, a small-ish city that is now on the westmost edge of Belarus. For him, war rolled over really quick one way over that town and then rolled over the other way, and in the middle was lots of hunger and keeping your head down.

I took my girlfriend to visit with them back in early oughts and we were walking around through the Grodno old town and she was asking about a certain part of town that seemed to her to be in a really poor upkeep and he answered - well this is where the ghetto was situated, near synagogue, and nobody really wanted to do much with that part of town after all the jews were "liquidated" in 43. I am sad to say that even though I spent every summer in that town, I never really noticed until then. She told me it was really the first time the war became truly real to her.

For me it was when I was little, I remember working in the garage with my family and this one older guy, we were painting something, and it was hot, so he took off his shirt. Underneath, he was completely covered by this elaborate criss-cross pattern of scars all over his body. I asked him what it was and he said he was in infantry retreating in summer of 1941 and their battalion was taking shelter in a burned out village where only the central stoves of the houses were left (wood outside, brick inside) and people were hiding behind the stoves and the tanks opened up with heavy machine guns, exploding the bricks and cutting people up with the sharp clay pieces. He said he was one of just few survivors because he hid inside one of the stoves, everyone else got cut to pieces on the outside.

GCA10• 5 years ago

Fascinating essay about a landmark pair of books. Thanks for posting. I'll argue another option on one key quote, though.

What Stalingrad demonstrated was precisely that the unfreedom of the Soviet Union, as terrible as it was, was different from that of Nazi Germany or for that matter of the West precisely because it was more historically generative, more potent. >

Not quite. What Stalingrad demonstrated is that people faced with annihilation on their own soil will fight harder than a supposed conquering army more than 1,000 miles beyond its legitimate national boundaries.

This lesson keeps being retaught -- somewhere in the world -- every decade or so. Perhaps even more often.

mrDmrTmrJ2• 5 years ago

Excellent point. And also that shorter supply lines > longer supply lines and that more troops > fewer troops. Etc.

Great read and I had never heard of these books. Though I found that to be the weakest part of the essay as Adam Tooze certainly has the background to provider the reader clearer, and less ideological, reasons for what played out

dash22• 5 years ago

As well as Grossman, can I recommend Adam Tooze. He's a historian who studied economics. He wrote the best account of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath. He's a gdmn leftie but exceedingly thoughtful and well-informed. Chartbook is worth a subscription.

gullywhumper• 5 years ago

City of Thieves by David Benioff (of Game of Thrones fame) is a fictional story of the siege of Leningrad and might also be enjoyable for those interested in Grossman's books. At around 250 pages, it's a very quick read.

Reading Grossman's “Stalingrad” and ”Life and Fate”

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