The Stalin Front (New York Review Books Classics): A Novel of World War II - Softcover

Gert Ledig

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590171640 ISBN 13: 9781590171646

Publisher: NYRB Classics, 2013

Synopsis

1942, at the Eastern Front. Soldiers crouch in horrible holes in the ground, mingling with corpses. Tunneled beneath a radio mast, German soldiers await the order to blow themselves up. Russian tanks, struggling to break through enemy lines, bog down in a swamp, while a German runner, bearing messages from headquarters to the front, scrambles desperately from shelter to shelter as he tries to avoid getting caught in the action. Through it all, Russian artillery the crude but devastatingly effective multiple rocket launcher known to the Germans as the Stalin Organ and to the Russians as Katyusha rains death upon the struggling troops.

Comparable to such masterpieces of war literature as Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel and Erich Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, The Stalin Front, which was originally published under the title The Stalin Organ, is a harrowing, almost photographic, description of violence and devastation, one that brings home the unforgiving reality of total war.

About this title

About the Author

GERT LEDIG (1921 1999) was born in Leipzig and grew up in Vienna. At the age of eighteen he volunteered for the army and was wounded at the battle of Leningrad in 1942. He reworked his experiences during the war in this novel Die Stalinorgel (1955). Sent back home, he trained as a naval engineer and was caught in several air raids. The experience never left him and led to the writing of Vergeltung (Payback) (1956). The novel s reissue in Germany in 1999 heralded a much publicized rediscovery of the author s work there.
MiICHAEL HOFMANN is a poet. He is the translator of nine books by Joseph Roth and was awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize for translating The String of Pearls. He is also the translator of Wolfgang Koeppen s two novels The Hothouse and A Sad Affair.

Edition details

• Publisher: NYRB Classics
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1590171640
• ISBN 13: 9781590171646
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200