Hans Fallada: A Weimar Triptych
April 2013
Fetid with the sweat of desperation, saturated with the ill effects of alcohol and drugs, laced with the Weimar Republic’s excesses, shot through with intensely pastoral moments and throbbing with an endangered humanism.
This is Hans Fallada’s nightmarish Germany of the 1920s through to the mid 40s.
Fallada’s decision to stay and not overtly repudiate Nazism positioned himself in contradistinction to esteemed contemporaries like Thomas Mann or Jewish exiles like Stefan Zweig and Walter Benjamin. Perhaps this informed the post-war international abandonment of his previously bestselling books, until his reputation’s resurgence after the 2010 English translation of Alone in Berlin. Born Rudolf Ditzen, his bizarre life story fed his fiction; murderer at 18 after a derailed suicide pact with a friend, inmate of criminal asylums and prisons and plagued by alcohol, morphine and smoking dependencies.
When Little Man, What Now? was first published in 1932, a staggering six million Germans, over 30 percent of the population, were unemployed. The terror hanging over the protagonist Pinneberg, the everyman of the title, is his consciousness of the razor fine distinction between him and the ‘masses of people … clothed in grey, and sallow-faced … waiting for something, they didn’t themselves know what’. Are these Beckettian figures, with their form of resignation, better positioned than the forever fretful white-collar working, husband and father Pinneberg?
Fallada’s style typified the conventions of the popular ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’, a neo-realist approach in which he excelled; domestic encounters are rendered in all their minutiae, as are surroundings. Even so, in Little Man a spirit of Romanticism is evident, a force residing in nature and love which undermines destructive tendencies of man; disregard, political violence, tumultuousness.
Whereas male characters are highly nuanced and detailed studies in psychology, female characters tend to be archetypal; fallen women, maidens, overbearing mothers. In both Little Man and Wolf among Wolves, they offer redemption for the male protagonists but by The Drinker, the delusion is absolute and deliverance is shunned by a venomous narrator.
Although Wolf among Wolves was penned four years into Hitler’s rule, the setting is Weimar Germany. Wolfgang Pagel, a young retired soldier with a tendency to inhabit a listless moral torpor, is addicted to gambling. It is epic both because of its length at 755 pages, and its masterful scope of characters and setting, from a Berlin that radiates with the heat of moral corruption and stratospheric inflation to a countryside which might be an idyllic haven if not for its villains, both aristocratic and labourers. Recalling Les Misérables for its social humanism and melodrama, threaded through with comedy, it is haunted by a menacing spirit, ‘It was a hungry age, a wolf age. Sons turned against parents … who is strong shall live! But the weak must die!’
Publishing these three books together suggests they might be regarded as a kind of triptych, although few will approach them as such and there was no intention of them being one. Their antihero is the treacherous times, modernism’s age of bestiality and yet, even in 1944’s The Drinker, Nazism’s crimes are not named, nor even alluded to. This eruption of first person narrative is of Erwin Sommer’s descent into decay, a study in alcoholism and self-indulgence. Fatalism pervades and the experience of reading is akin to a ruined, somewhat repulsive man, gripping one unbearably close and confiding their story. It was written over the duration of a fortnight when Fallada was again committed to an asylum, after threatening his wife with a gun.
Whilst Little Man communicates an abhorrence for virulent anti-Semitism, it also encourages an instinctual antipathy to its Jewish characters. Devoid of them, The Drinker’s landscape is accurate, for Germany is now ostensibly ‘Judenrein’. Reading it is a chilling exercise for the ghosts it invokes; the pitiful descriptions of asylum inmates call forth other, more vulnerable, prisoners in different uniforms, perishing in concentration camps throughout Europe.
Sommer lays out his fantasy before us on the last page: ‘I will no longer be old and disfigured, but young and beautiful … and we will soar into intoxication and forgetfulness from which there is never any awakening!’ This might be the dream of other fellow Germans at that time; to reverse their process of degeneration which future generations will examine with dread and declaim, ‘We shall never forget’.
Rudolf Ditzen’s pseudonym was to be prophetic. ‘Falada’ was the name of a horse in the Grimms’ fairy tale ‘The Goose Girl’; one who when killed continues to speak the truth. The writer, like Hamlet, might have cursed that he was born in a time ‘out of joint’. Fallada’s compulsion, however, was not to ‘set it right’ but to chronicle it.
Little Man, What Now?, Wolf among Wolves and The Drinker are all published by Scribe.
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