The “Facting” of Fiction

As The Last Chapter has Shown, Naked among Wolves (Nackt unter Wölfen, 1958) constituted a foundational myth. Not that Apitz or indeed any GDR commentators on Naked among Wolves conceived of the novel in terms of myth, a term that, after all, suggests elements of the supernatural and fantastic, and even of pure invention. Apitz did, however, admit taking artistic liberties in his portrayal of real-life figures. While there really was a Walter Krämer, he was never Camp Elder; in fact, he was Kapo in the sick bay at Buchenwald, and he was murdered over three years before the action of the novel sets in. Höfel, in real-life, was indeed Kapo of the Personal Property Room but was released from Buchenwald in April 1939. As for the real-life Willi Pippig (not Rudi as in the novel), he was not murdered in Buchenwald. In fact, he died a peaceful death in the town of Dessau in 1988. And Herbert Bochow was, in real life, never even a Buchenwald prisoner. Bochow was a member of a resistance group in Dresden to which Karl Stein, Fritz Schulze, and Albert Hensel also belonged; he was executed at Berlin-Plötzensee in 1942. “Every figure in the novel is a compendium of many of my former comrades,” Apitz said in a 1973 interview. Naked among Wolves was Apitz's personal tribute to a whole range of real-life figures, aspects of whose lives and personalities were combined in the novel's individual characters. Thus Bochow in the novel is as much a personification of Bartel as of the actual Bochow. It is also quite feasible that Stefan Cyliak, while clearly modeled chiefly on Stefan Zweig, personified the fate of a number of children.

Apitz also admitted that some events in the novel had not happened at all: the SS man Zweiling did not shoot the spy Wurach, the child Stefan did not arrive in the camp in the care of a man who was not his father, and Höfel and Kropinski, or the real-life figures they partly represented, were never incarcerated in a cell in the Bunker Building. But at the same time Apitz asserted that he had “written nothing that would not have been historically possible,” and that “the principle ‘as if’ was a fact of my working method.”