by Hans Fallada
Wolfgang Pagel reflected that, not long ago, he had thought with pride: “I’m not tied to anything; I can do what I want; I’m free …” Yes, Wolfgang Pagel—now you understand: you were free, unfettered like a wild animal. But humanity is not about doing what you want, but rather about doing what you must.
* * *
Hans Fallada wrote Wolf unter Wölfen in a frenzy. Convinced that the book would end up “in the drawer” anyway, Fallada worked with unchecked ingenuity, temporarily relieved from the depressive illness that had already resulted in several stays in sanatoriums, an illness that can be detected in personal letters such as the one he wrote to fellow writer Hermann Broch: “I must write, narrate, tell stories, but basically it is a sad business; it won’t make you happier, and it has no meaning.” Fallada began Wolf Among Wolves on July 27, 1936, without having a clear idea of the scope of what he had undertaken. Since he was inventing the plot and characters as he moved along, the introduction—intended as the novel’s rather brief opening chapter—eventually grew into the entire first book. Getting up at four o’clock in the morning, he managed, at the pinnacle of his creative powers, to produce 123 handwritten pages a week: a personal record, “which I do pride myself on,” as he acknowledged in a letter to his publisher Ernst Rowohlt on May 9, 1937. Two days later, Fallada finished the manuscript, which by now comprised 1,400 pages. With the first print-run of 10,000 copies selling out by mid-November, Wolf Among Wolves proved an instant, if surprising, success for Rowohlt.
Wolf Among Wolves is a Zeitroman—a historical novel, providing an elaborate account of a particular moment in time and of how a diverse group of characters, taken from all walks of life, cope with that time. Unlike more theoretical writers, whose fiction is shaped by a coherent worldview, Fallada is not concerned with exploring the political and economic context of the inflation years. His focus is on action, and his love for storytelling is everywhere apparent in his work. Wolf Among Wolves occupies an exceptional position within Fallada’s oeuvre, as the author successfully combines the two strands that run throughout his prose: reportage and narration. The objective and disaffected voice of the chronicler mixes with the emphatic and deeply involved voice of the storyteller. Stylistically, Fallada chose to throw all modernist pretenses overboard. His language is rooted in the everyday, and as with his other novels, the strength of Wolf Among Wolves lies in the close-up characterization. There is nothing artificial, nothing academic about his characters; they are presented “with such closeness to life,” as Hermann Hesse once put it, that the reader cannot but feel invested in their fictional fate.
In Wolf Among Wolves, we witness the culmination of a theme that was at the heart of the two novels Little Man, What Now? and The World Outside. As the German weekly Der Spiegel put it in 1947, these works depicted “the individual’s helpless entanglement in the prevailing circumstances of his times.” It is his profound understanding of the varied problems that arise out of economic misery that accounts for Fallada’s ongoing relevance up to the present day. He has been compared to predecessors such as Dickens, Flaubert and the German realist writers Wilhelm Raabe and Theodor Fontane—authors he read when he was still in his teenage years. But none of these writers, who are now credited with heralding the start of literary modernism, ever wrote fiction that could be called strictly realist in the sense of being a photographic, non-ambivalent representation of the world outside.
The same holds true of Hans Fallada. While Fallada’s famed novels of the 1930s are often classified as prime examples of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), his work transcends straightforward realism limited to the depiction of real-life events in a real-life world. It is in brief hallucinatory statements and other deviations from our shared reality that the complex undercurrents of his fiction manifest themselves. The present edition is the first-ever unexpurgated English translation of Wolf unter Wölfen. Numerous passages that were omitted in the 1938 edition, published by Putnam’s in London and New York, have been newly translated, and it is astonishing to observe how one’s overall impression of the novel is altered once the “lost” passages are restored to the text.
What, then, are the politics of translation that account for the numerous cuts in the first English edition? The omitted passages share certain features. To begin with, the 1938 edition dispenses on several occasions with paragraphs that, while not advancing the plot, elaborate on the characters’ feelings or behavior. Take this omitted passage, for example, in which the narrator provides us with an important comment on one of the main characters’ attitude to Frau von Prackwitz:
She’d paralyzed his ability to think, to analyse, and to explain himself. Herr von Studmann was over thirty-five and hadn’t believed that he would experience this any more, with such spontaneity, such power. In fact, he didn’t really know he was experiencing it. He sat there innocently, his eyes betraying nothing. His words remained thoughtful and moderate. Yet it had happened!
Recently, critics have pointed out how fairy-tales and myths provide important subtexts for Fallada’s fiction. It is often those passages that contradict the claim to naturalistic representation that were cut from the 1938 translation. Take for instance the following paragraph, which exhibits an almost surreal mode of perception:
Occasionally, in the midst of some work or worry, she would glance from the narrow prison of herself at one such picture on the wall as if seeing it for the first time. Then something seemed to want to lightly touch her, as if something asleep were waking.… Stop! Oh, please stop! Everything was very bright. A tree, for instance, in the sun, in the air, against a clear summer sky. But the tree seemed to rise up, the wind to blow gently. The tree moved. Was it flying? Yes, the whole earth was flying, the sun, the play of light and air—everything was light, swift, soft. Oh, stop, you relentless, bright world!
In short, the fully reconstructed text, with its enhanced inconsistency, provides the reader with insight into a literary aesthetics that is unique among the novels of German modernism: Fallada combines realist prose and ethical concerns with a narrative technique that renders ambiguous what is supposedly a semi-documentary representation, shaped by his very own experiences in the country.
The last chapter of the novel is called “The Miracle of the Rentenmark,” and while the title refers to the introduction of a stable currency and the return to rationality, it also refers to the miraculous outcome of a novel shaped by an atmosphere of impending doom. But the couple’s “tranquil happiness” in the novel’s final scene, embodied in the soft breathing of their child, is complicated by traumatic memory and its purchase on the present. Strikingly, the short passage that fleshes out this adverse undercurrent was omitted in the 1938 translation:
The woman examines this familiar face, but it is undisturbed by worry, and untroubled by cares. Sometimes in the night he starts to speak. He’s frightened, he cries out … Then she wakes him and says: ‘You’re thinking about it again.’
It is in this passage that the narrative comes full circle. While at the beginning of the novel Pagel had been tortured by nightmares about gambling, his sleep is now perturbed by the memory of Neulohe.
Reviewing the novel in 1938, some American critics complained about the sentimental, love-conquers-all ending. As the culmination of Pagel’s personal development, reviewers found this outcome unconvincing. Interestingly enough, Fallada himself shared these concerns. In a letter to Hermann Broch, he conceded it might have been better to let his hero founder. This statement is complicated, however, by several other private comments that suggest Fallada’s ambivalence about his work. Writing to his mother in May and August 1937, he repeatedly called Wolf Among Wolves “an absolutely positive” book, maintaining that “the brave manage to keep afloat, whereas the unfit fail.” This contrasts with Fallada’s remarks about the book being “very pessimistic” and full of “dark undertones.” The German people, especially Wolfgang Pagel and Petra Ledig, may have awoken “from a confused torturing dream,” as t
he narrator suggests in the last chapter, but this dream will continue to haunt them. On a larger historical scale, the fact that the stabilization of the economy was rather short-lived markedly undermines the narrator’s firm declaration that “once more there was a meaning in work and life.” But the “fresher wind,” which stirs the curtains in the novel’s final section and thus contrasts with the stifling heat and the “dull vapor” of the first chapter, was soon to be contaminated by the advance of Hitler and the NSDAP. The same reservations about the book’s supposedly hopeful ending hold true with regard to its protagonist: Wolfgang Pagel’s ethics of responsibility are called into question by his financial reliance on his mother. It is therefore important to note, as Geoff Wilkes reminds us, “how the novel’s optimism about personal relationships and personal morality was undermined by the very existence of the oppressive Nazi regime.”
Perhaps the finest aspect of Wolf Among Wolves is the character of Etzel von Studmann, and it is Fallada’s portrayal of this “eternal nursemaid” that further corroborates Der Spiegel’s 1947 verdict that this book could, in fact, be seen as “hopelessly depressing.” Though Studmann, who is “always ready to help,” embodies the humanist core of the novel, he finally withdraws from society, taking up a position as resident administrator in a sanatorium where he might as well spend the rest of his life:
The thought has nothing terrifying for him. He has no wish to be outside again in the world of the healthy. He has discovered that he cannot accommodate himself to life. He had his standards, wished life to adapt itself to them. Life didn’t do this, and Herr von Studmann foundered. In great and in little things.
By the time he started work on Wolf Among Wolves, Fallada had already experienced the full impact of Nazi cultural propaganda, having received several particularly vicious reviews from right wing critics for his previous book. This is the context of the peculiar “Word to the Reader” which precedes the novel. Fallada here justifies his decision to render the protagonist of that previous novel, Once We Had a Child, “such a brute.” Eager to subvert similar complaints about his new book, Fallada warns his readers “that Wolf Among Wolves deals with sinful, weak, sensual, erring unstable men, the children of an age disjointed, mad and sick.” A slap at Weimar, to placate the Nazis? The foreword was deleted from the novel after 1945. And yet, Fallada scholars such as Geoff Wilkes consider the preface to be ambiguous. As Wilkes has noted, “All this could be taken as referring to the economic and political turmoil of 1923 specifically, rather than to the Republic as such, and therefore not as placating the Nazis.”
Ultimately, one must consider whether Fallada’s note accurately reflects the attitude of the book, which it clearly does not. If anything, the note, as Wilkes suggests, is “an authentic expression of how Fallada had to walk a political tightrope in 1936–37.” And while he was not like his character Studmann—who, as it says in the book, “could make no concessions”—Fallada did walk the line with bravery. The note’s celebration of the rescue from the perils of inflation, a “both recent and yet entirely eclipsed” time, encapsulates his position in Nazi Germany rather succinctly: while at times writing warily with the official ideology in mind, he also asserted his own humane values. Utterly convinced that he had taken “a formidable risk,” Fallada himself regarded the novel as the uncompromising product of his newly awakened will to write, “regardless of the consequences” his words might have: “I was once again gripped by the old familiar passion; I wrote without looking up, nor did I look round either—neither to the left, nor to the right.”
THORSTEN CARSTENSEN,
New York University
