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UBC: Enemy at the Gates
Aug. 1st, 2009 11:10 amCraig, William. Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad. 1973. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
I found this book deeply problematic. Partly this is because I am irredeemably fussy and will nitpick anything to death, given half a chance. But I think my fundamental concern is a valid and important one. In this book, Craig has made some choices with which I vehemently disagree. One is to tell the story of Stalingrad rather than the history, which he does by largely turning the progress of the siege into a series of interlaced human interest stories. The other, related choice is to radically decontextualize the battle of Stalingrad.
What do I mean by that? I mean that, for the vast majority of the book, it is possible, and indeed encouraged, to forget that the German soldiers with whom we are asked to sympathize are in fact the tools of an abhorrent, genocidal ideology and government. (It is never encouraged, and rarely possible, to forget that the Russians are the tools of Communism--which Craig, writing in 1973, clearly expects his readers to find abhorrent.) Craig uses the word Nazi as little as possible, and never in connection with the men whose stories he follows; when he mentions the Germans' passionate belief in their ideology (which he does very rarely), it's only the cult of the Führer and the German Fatherland, never the equally prevalent belief in the racial inferiority of the Slavs and the German Manifest Destiny* to rule all of eastern Europe and most of Asiatic Russia also. He describes the Einsatzgruppen dismissively as "homicidal maniacs" (11), and clearly feels that he can place the blame for the genocide of the Jews only on them, leaving his German soldiers and officers untainted. He uses the word "holocaust" more than once, without any seeming awareness that it has particular connotations in any discussion of German participation in World War II, and late in the book, he says, "Paulus stopped trying to convince his superiors that further resistance was mass murder" (356)--without any recognition that "mass murder" was actually happening elsewhere in German-occupied Europe, in Auschwitz, Sobibor, and the other death camps.
Also, while Craig is quick and lavish in his description of the suffering of German and Axis POWs at the hands of the Russians, he absolutely and categorically ignores the systematic, programmatic starvation of Russian POWs by the Germans, and the equally systematic, programmatic, articulated as a matter of policy starvation of the civilian population in German-occupied Ukraine. He's stacked the deck, in other words, and I don't find that acceptable.
Do I think that the German soldiers and officers of the Sixth Army deserve sympathy? I certainly do. Their sufferings were horrible and pointless, and I feel sympathy--sometimes unwillingly--for anyone who believed in Hitler and was betrayed (which would be everyone who believed in Hitler). But I don't think that the outcome of the battle of Stalingrad, and the suffering of the Sixth Army, somehow negates the reasons and the choices that put them there in the first place. The Wehrmacht and its soldiers were not innocent of the Nazis' crimes. Craig's sentimentality and valorization of warfare are horribly misplaced in the story he's telling (even more horribly misplaced if he were actually writing history), and his belief that the battle of Stalingrad is a tragedy, the "gradual moral and physical disintegration of the German soldiers" (xii), is predicated on the idea that the Germans weren't morally bankrupt before they ever crossed the Don.
And I find that idea, as I said, deeply problematic.
---
*Yes, I'm using that term deliberately and with intentional multi-directional irony.
I found this book deeply problematic. Partly this is because I am irredeemably fussy and will nitpick anything to death, given half a chance. But I think my fundamental concern is a valid and important one. In this book, Craig has made some choices with which I vehemently disagree. One is to tell the story of Stalingrad rather than the history, which he does by largely turning the progress of the siege into a series of interlaced human interest stories. The other, related choice is to radically decontextualize the battle of Stalingrad.
What do I mean by that? I mean that, for the vast majority of the book, it is possible, and indeed encouraged, to forget that the German soldiers with whom we are asked to sympathize are in fact the tools of an abhorrent, genocidal ideology and government. (It is never encouraged, and rarely possible, to forget that the Russians are the tools of Communism--which Craig, writing in 1973, clearly expects his readers to find abhorrent.) Craig uses the word Nazi as little as possible, and never in connection with the men whose stories he follows; when he mentions the Germans' passionate belief in their ideology (which he does very rarely), it's only the cult of the Führer and the German Fatherland, never the equally prevalent belief in the racial inferiority of the Slavs and the German Manifest Destiny* to rule all of eastern Europe and most of Asiatic Russia also. He describes the Einsatzgruppen dismissively as "homicidal maniacs" (11), and clearly feels that he can place the blame for the genocide of the Jews only on them, leaving his German soldiers and officers untainted. He uses the word "holocaust" more than once, without any seeming awareness that it has particular connotations in any discussion of German participation in World War II, and late in the book, he says, "Paulus stopped trying to convince his superiors that further resistance was mass murder" (356)--without any recognition that "mass murder" was actually happening elsewhere in German-occupied Europe, in Auschwitz, Sobibor, and the other death camps.
Also, while Craig is quick and lavish in his description of the suffering of German and Axis POWs at the hands of the Russians, he absolutely and categorically ignores the systematic, programmatic starvation of Russian POWs by the Germans, and the equally systematic, programmatic, articulated as a matter of policy starvation of the civilian population in German-occupied Ukraine. He's stacked the deck, in other words, and I don't find that acceptable.
Do I think that the German soldiers and officers of the Sixth Army deserve sympathy? I certainly do. Their sufferings were horrible and pointless, and I feel sympathy--sometimes unwillingly--for anyone who believed in Hitler and was betrayed (which would be everyone who believed in Hitler). But I don't think that the outcome of the battle of Stalingrad, and the suffering of the Sixth Army, somehow negates the reasons and the choices that put them there in the first place. The Wehrmacht and its soldiers were not innocent of the Nazis' crimes. Craig's sentimentality and valorization of warfare are horribly misplaced in the story he's telling (even more horribly misplaced if he were actually writing history), and his belief that the battle of Stalingrad is a tragedy, the "gradual moral and physical disintegration of the German soldiers" (xii), is predicated on the idea that the Germans weren't morally bankrupt before they ever crossed the Don.
And I find that idea, as I said, deeply problematic.
---
*Yes, I'm using that term deliberately and with intentional multi-directional irony.
