Gert Ledig Views
Gert Ledig entstammte einer Kaufmannsfamilie. Seine frühe Kindheit verbrachte er in Wien; ab 1929 lebte er in Leipzig. Nach dem Besuch der Volksschule übte er ab 1936 verschiedene Gelegenheitsarbeiten aus. Anschließend machte er eine Lehre als Elektrotechniker und besuchte daneben eine private Theaterschule mit dem Berufsziel Regisseur. 1939 meldete er sich freiwillig zur Wehrmacht. Er nahm als Pionier am Frankreichfeldzug teil, wurde zum Unteroffizier befördert und war seit 1941 an der Ostfront. Dort kam es wegen angeblichen Fehlverhaltens zur Versetzung in eine Strafkompanie. Im Sommer 1942 wurde Ledig vor Leningrad schwer verwundet; er erlitt u.a. eine schwere Kieferverletzung. Nach seiner Entlassung aus der Wehrmacht machte er eine Ausbildung zum Schiffbauingenieur. Im letzten Kriegsjahr arbeitete er bei der Marinerüstungsverwaltung.
One writer who l"fell through the crackso", who was not well-received by either side at the time and as a consequence stopped writing novels altogether - a loss to German fiction - was Gert Ledig. Ledig died seven years ago this month and did not live to see the strong renewed interest in his work. He only published three novels - all in the mid-1950s. With the publication last year of a new English translation of Die Stalinorgel Gert Ledig is finally getting the recognition he deserves as a master novelist of war.
Ledig's literary fortune was not done in by the overt censorship that Fritz Raddatz discusses in the essay mentioned above. It was not the censorship of the publishers (in the West) or the Party (in the East) that torpedoed his career as a writer of fiction. Rather, it was the internal censor mechanism of the readers of the time - the cordon sanitaire (Sebald) - that compelled the reading public to turn away from the truth they had witnessed with their own eyes. Today we can honor Gert Ledig for his amazing ability to look at the horror of a specific war with an unflinching eye and mold it into a universal experience that captures the truth of all wars.
Gert Ledig's novel Vergeltung begins in a graveyard, in the middle of an aerial bombardment. When the first bomb fell, he writes, the blast hurled the dead children against the wall. They had suffocated in a cellar the day before. They had been laid in the graveyard because their fathers were fighting at the front, and their mothers were still missing. Only one was found, but she was crushed under the rubble. That was what payback looked like (p. 1). This laconic reporting of unfathomable events is typical of Ledig's work, first published in 1956, but only recently translated into English as Payback. The work is graphic, shocking, and so vividly written that the reader is appalled, yet finds the book difficult to put down. Ledig opens a window into the experience of aerial bombardment that no historian's account can match.
Gert Ledig Images
