Theodor Otto Richard Plievier was a German author best known for his anti-war novel.
Life & career
Military service
During his youth, Plievier worked as a sailor and travelled extensively throughout Europe and overseas. Through his travels he was exposed to anarchist-syndicalist philosophies that would influence his later work. In 1914, after a fight in a quayside bar, he was forced to enlist in the Imperial Navy to escape imprisonment. During most of the war, he served on the SMS Wolf, an auxiliary cruiser which remained at sea for 451 days. He later participated in the 1918 Wilhelmshaven mutiny.
Politics & war
Under the Weimar Republic, he became a social critic and author. His early works sought to connect personal experience with documentary-style literature. He founded the "Publishing House of the 12" in Berlin during the 1920s. During this period he wrote and published Des Kaisers Kulis , a critical account of his experiences in the Imperial Navy. His books were burned after Hitler took power in 1933. Plievier fled to France, and later to Sweden, before settling in the Soviet Union in 1934. After the outbreak of World War II, Plievier gained access to the front lines, where he observed the carnage wrought there and interviewed captive German soldiers. In 1943, he became a member of the Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland.
He used his experiences as the basis for his documentary novel, which was eventually translated into 26 languages. Stalingrad is one of the most important works of literature to emerge from the eastern front. Its pitiless descriptions of battle and the failures of the German military leadership indicts Hitler's megalomania and illustrates the senselessness of war. The two main characters in Stalingrad are the Panzer commander Vilshofen and Gnotke, NCO of a Strafbattalion. Both men come from different backgrounds and experience the war differently. The Colonel is a convinced soldier who obeys orders and cares for his men. He fights with a sense of duty, but loses confidence in the German military leadership as he senses that he and his men are being sacrificed to a lost cause. NCO Gnotke's work is to collect the dead, or their dismembered parts, from the battlefield. He loses his humanity as he works under constant fire and is exposed to unrelenting horror month after month during the war, even to the point of warming up his body on freshly fallen soldiers. Stalingrad was subject to harsh Soviet censorship, even though it deals mainly with the German side. Plievier eventually broke with Moscow, leaving for the west in 1947. His later book "Moscow" presents a comprehensive picture of life in the Soviet Union.
