Vergeltung

Vergeltung ("Retaliation" or "Payback") is the second novel of the writer Gert Ledig (1921-1999). It is an apocalyptic autobiographical anti-war novel. It mines the author's own experiences and is considered an important example of the literary realism genre of postwar novel. The book was originally published in late 1956, by the long established Frankfurt publishing house S. Fischer Verlag. It deals with 70 minutes of a mid-night bomb attack by the United States Army Air Forces against an unnamed German city towards the end of World War II, during which a large number of civilians and military personnel are killed. The events are described from both the American and German perspectives with great directness, and without shielding the reader from the horrific details. Ledig's first novel Die Stalinorgel ("The Stalin Organ"), which dealt with the battles of the Russian Front in the Leningrad region in the Soviet Union, had been an international success. By contrast, Vergeltung was widely rejected by readers when it appeared in 1956. The book was quickly forgotten and there were no plans for a reprint. That changed in the late 1990s, shortly before the author's death, when the book encountered much more widespread acceptance, led by scholar-critics including Max Sebald, Marcel Reich-Ranicki and Volker Hage. Vergeltung now acquired a correspondingly wider readership, with several new editions published by Suhrkamp Verlag starting in 1999. Translations followed into Dutch (entitled Vergelding, meaning "Retribution") in 2001; English (as Payback) and French (as Sous les bombes – "Under the Bombs") in 2003; Spanish (as Represalia – "Reprisal") in 2006; and Croatian (as Odmazda – "Reprisal") in 2008. At the same time a new interest in Ledig's literary output emerged among critics and readers, which would outlive the author himself. In effect, shortly before he died Ledig found himself “rediscovered” by the literary establishment.