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 artillerythe crude but devastatingly effective multiple rocket launcher known to the Germans as the Stalin Organ and to the Russians as Katyusharains death upon the struggling troops. Comparable to such masterpieces of war literature as Ernst Junger'sStorm of Steeland Erich Remarque'sAll Quiet on the Western Front,The Stalin Frontis a harrowing, almost photographic, description of violence and devastation, one that brings home the unforgiving reality of total war.

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.

Michael 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.