199 Days: The Battle for Stalingrad Book

It is not generally my intention to post single-star reviews here. This book is a work of nonfiction, however, and seemingly a highly-regarded one; my reasons for offering a negative review concern manifest flaws in the use of his materials. Knowledge of these flaws will significantly affect one's estimation of the book. This review, then, serves as a warning.

One of the selling points of this book is its use of archival materials, many of which, naturally, are in German. I have a long background in this language, and as I read this book back in the summer of 2001, I grew to question the author's facility with it.

At first, it was merely the appearance of typographical errors, which could have multiple explanations. I saw General Blumentritt's first name presented as Günthen, rather than Günther, and the famous sniper's name appeared as Heniz Thorwald instead of Heinz Thorwald. In both cases, the errors were replicated consistently in the index. It was not until Chapter 25 that I found evidence of comprehension errors on the author's part.

Chapter 25 covers the first half of October 1942, and concludes with an incident related by French volunteer Guy Sajer in his excellent memoir of the war, The Forgotten Soldier. Hoyt acknowledged his use of Sajer's book, and I had been happy to see this when I began Hoyt's volume, because I had recently read the same book. The incident was fresh in my mind, and this made it easy to retrieve the relevant section for comparison subsequently.

The passage in question concludes with a quote from a soldier's song. Here is the original form of the text, from page 301 of my edition of The Forgotten Soldier:

Märkische Heide,
Märkische Sand,
Sind des Märkers Freude,
Sind mein Heimatland ....

In Hoyt's book, this is reproduced with one word missing. The word "Märkers" is absent, rendering the third line ungrammatical. While I had hardly memorized the words from Sajer's memoir, the evident break in the sentence drew my attention to the fact that this text was incorrectly rendered:

Maerkische Heide,
Maerkische Sand,
Sind des Freude,
Sind mein Heimatland ...

(For non-speakers of German, the word "Maerkische" is not misspelled. The letters ae are an alternate way of writing ä.)

It was Hoyt's translation of these words that truly made me stop and wonder:

Marching on grassland
Marching on sand
Without joy
Outside my homeland ...

This reconstruction of the text is patently incorrect, relying on two key mistranslations.

The first concerns the word märkische. This is an adjective based on the noun Mark, which does mean "march" ... but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the act of marching, of walking in cadence with others. That meaning of the word "march" is Marsch in German. A Mark is a "march" or "march county," a province existing on a disputed borderland where conflict with another power is likely. In the Middle Ages, a March would be governed by a Marquis or Markgraf, who enjoys higher status than Counts because of the difficulties involved with governing a frontier zone.

My personal translation of the first two lines would be:

Frontier grassland,
Frontier sand,

Even more serious is the error implicit in the last two lines, leaving aside the absence of the word "Märkers". Hoyt's use of the word "without" in the third line and "outside" in the fourth line admits only one conclusion: that Hoyt has mistaken the German verb "sind" (third person, plural, present tense of "sein", the German verb for "to be") for the French/Spanish/Italian preposition "sin" (meaning "without").

My translation of the final two lines from Sajer's book would be:

Are the frontiersman's joy,
Are my homeland.

These errors are grave for two reasons. The first concerns methodology. The author wishes us to find value in his research because of his use of primary sources in the original language, yet his ability to use German appears to be so bad that he mistakes the German verb sind for the French preposition sin, and as for his translation of Märkische, it looks very much as if he plucked the definition out of a German/English dictionary. (In my copy of the Langenscheidt Compact Dictionary: German, page 397, there is no entry for the adjective märkisch, but there are three entries for the root noun Mark. The first is defined as "marrow" or "core" and the second is about money. The third is presented as "march" with the descriptor "hist" for historical.) If this is indeed the case, how can any of his conclusions be trusted?

The second concerns his conclusions. Hoyt attempts to argue that the morale of the German Army was already bad before the disaster at Stalingrad. His translation of the soldiers' song appears to support that conclusion, but only because his translation reverses the meaning of the song. He wishes to have us believe that it is a lament about endless marching and being away from home, when the actual meaning of the song is about soldiers happily claiming conquered territory as their own. While there is always the possibility that the soldiers sang with irony, this is not suggested by Sajer in his own book. The very next line after this quote was "We were still the masters, and no one under heaven could judge us." (Page 301) This does not sound like an exercise in gallows humor.

The effort to retrieve this information from Sajer's book revealed yet another flaw in Hoyt's book. The incident that Hoyt described was reproduced with reasonable accuracy apart from the mischaracterization of the song at the end, but it did not belong in Chapter 25. In fact, it did not belong in a book about the Stalingrad campaign at all. Chapter 25 is about the first half of October, 1942. The incident in Sajer's book (pages 296-301) are in his section "Winter, 1943 - Summer, 1944". The incident took place more than a year after the other incidents in chapter 25, and long after the capitulation of the last Germans in Stalingrad.

This calls into question every other anecdote related in Hoyt's book. The stories may well be real incidents, but how can we know that they took place when and where Hoyt tells us? And if they did not take place when or where Hoyt placed them, the book as a whole would fall apart.

Caveat emptor.