The Drinker

by Hans Fallada

  and begged the man to nail up Falada’s head against a large dark gate in the city through which she had to pass every morning and evening, that she might still see him sometimes. Then the slaughterer said he would do as she wished, cut off the head, and nailed it fast under the dark gate.

  Each time she goes through the gate, the princess holds brief but significant conversations with the truncated head. These come to the ears of the old king, who arranges a banquet at which both girls are present and the maid is trapped into condemning herself to

  nothing better than that she should be thrown into a cask stuck round with sharp nails, and that two white horses should be put to it, and should drag it from street to street till she is dead.

  This, the reader infers, is arranged and a satisfactory royal wedding then takes place, after which the happy couple rule ‘in peace and happiness all their lives’.

  It was from this characteristically bloody and imaginative ‘German Popular Story’ that the author of The Drinker took his lifelong pseudonym, marking it as his own by inserting a second ‘l’ and wryly adopting the forename of that other Grimm unfortunate, the simpleton who is swindled again and again and convinces himself each time that he is ‘Hans in Luck’. But the name Fallada also recalls a poem by a slightly younger writer from the opposite end of Germany, Bertolt Brecht. For he too made use of it just after the First World War for his description of a dying carthorse whose still live body is carved up by hungry Berliners, naming his powerful poem ‘Falada, Falada, there thou art hanging’. Twelve years later, at another moment of desperate crisis in Germany, when the Weimar Republic was about to fall into the lap of Adolf Hitler, Brecht turned the same poem into a revue sketch with a reporter interviewing the horse under the heading ‘A HORSE ACCUSES’. This is not to say that there was any tangible link between the great political poet and the outwardly unpolitical novelist Rudolf Ditzen who took the name Fallada. We do not even know if they knew one another’s works. But Hans Fallada was at once the probing reporter and the bleeding, accusing dying horse.

  Psychologically disturbed from an early age, he had felt the need to cloak his own identity after writing his first, Expressionist-style novel of a disturbed and self-destructive adolescence, whose publication in 1920 not only shocked and hurt but might also, he feared, disgrace the name of his father, a strict and upright north German judge. Yet he developed slowly, and it was not until the publication of The Drinker that his rare combination of objective curiosity and extreme personal despair became plain for all to read.

  All my life long I have fed on people. I have stored them in my mind along with their ways of moving, speaking, feeling, and now I have them there, ready for instant use. Nothing has ever interested me so much as the realization why people behave as they do. My otherwise hopeless memory is excellent for each detail, the most trivial facts that I learn about the habits of my fellow men.

  By then he had shed the egocentric mannerisms of his two earliest books, emerging at the end of the nineteen twenties as a compelling story-teller, a writer without frills whose interest in the lower levels of society made him one of the most successful authors of the coolly critical movement known as ‘new matter-of-factness’ or ‘Die Neue Sachlichkeit’. Of the sixteen books which he published from 1931 to 1943, his most productive years, seven were more or less instantly translated into English; their German sales by now run into millions. Yet they remain very remote from what German criticism slightingly terms ‘Trivialliteratur’, and with the writing of The Drinker at the end of that time Fallada showed the deeply pessimistic basis of his readability. Indeed he can be seen as a paradigm of his country’s moods between the establishment of the Weimar Republic and the end of Hitler’s Third Reich: its moments of rational, systematic illumination and its terrifying plunges into the dark. How, we may wonder, could a writer come to unify such extremes?

  Just twenty-one when the Great War broke out in August 1914, Fallada was already determined on a literary career. His father, the future Supreme Court judge, would have liked him to grow up with the same strict concepts of duty, justice and precision as he himself tried to exemplify; his much younger mother, daughter of a protestant pastor, seems always to have been a subordinate figure. Their son however was incorrigibly awkward and accident-prone, and although the family circle was apparently a close-knit, cultivated one, he did badly at school, was more than once dangerously ill, suffered from masturbation guilt, and had a penchant for self-destructive adventures which led his despairing parents to seek medical help before he was eighteen. All this culminated in an unprovoked and irrational duel with one of his few friends, which ended with him killing the friend under still obscure circumstances and then trying to shoot himself. At the same time he had become an obsessive reader, starting with that great adventure story of solitude, Robinson Crusoe, but soon turning to those more adult books which he had secretly discovered in his father’s library: the works of Flaubert, Daudet and Zola (before he was twelve, he later claimed), Dickens, Dostoevsky and other great nineteenth-century writers. These were not at all the sort of literature that Judge Ditzen wished him to read, yet on the other hand he was formally denied the synthetic Westerns of Karl May so beloved of his more frivolous contemporaries. It was indeed a belated act of revolt when Fallada celebrated his eventual success as a writer by buying the whole set of May’s works and reading all sixty-five of them, in some cases more than once.

  His own literary ambitions seem to have been encouraged in the first place by his aunt Adelaide Ditzen, a gifted spinster then living in Rome as a medical secretary, who came to the rescue after the tragic duel and offered to look after him in the Leipzig criminal lunatic asylum to which he was consigned. She started teaching him English, French and Italian, and introduced him to the work of Romain Rolland, to whom he then wrote offering his services as a translator. Though it seems that Rolland knew the aunt (who had an interesting circle of literary acquaintances that included Nietzsche and Malwida von Meysenbug), the only result at first was a series of rejections from leading German publishers. Then, on his release from the asylum, less than a year before the war, he was sent, once again at the aunt’s suggestion, to learn farming and estate management with a neighbouring landowner in the hope that the country life would further his recovery. This did not proceed entirely smoothly, partly because the story of the duel caught up with him, and partly because on his volunteering for the army in August 1914 he was rapidly discharged as mentally unfit. But it did determine his primary profession for the next fifteen years, and undoubtedly it also served the further purpose suggested to him by his aunt: providing him with a wide range of human and social material to observe and note.

  What she had not foreseen was the vicissitudes through which his experiences of German (and very largely Prussian) rural economy would take him. First came his work as a specialist in the potato business, which brought him to Berlin in the crucial war years 1916–17, where he was introduced to fashionable Expressionist circles and the use of morphine; this was when he wrote Der junge Goedeschal, the work for which he changed his name, an unsuccessful and (for him) untypical ego-novel about his school miseries and fiascos. Then came short spells on various estates, interrupted by periods of treatment in clinics. Then, with the apparent abandonment—or at least postponement—of his writing ambitions, his addictions led him to start fiddling his employers’ accounts, with the result that he was twice sent to prison, the first time for two months in the north German university town of Greifswald, where he had been born; the second for a term of two and a half years in the big prison at Neumünster near Kiel. Morphine, alcohol and cigarettes (between 120 and 200 a day, according to his biographer Tom Crepon) had together come to provide what he called his ‘little death’, that combination of oblivion and elevation which would seduce him off and on throughout the rest of his life.

  At first it looked as if his second term of imprisonment might have cured him of this, and he wrote hoping to renew
his links with Ernst Rowohlt, the publisher of Goedeschal, who had by now rejected Expressionism and become a leading promoter of Die Neue Sachlichkeit. There was no answer. Meanwhile he started trying to make a living addressing envelopes in Hamburg, where he came into contact with the socialist movement through the Issels, a working-class family whose storekeeper daughter became his wife and principal moral support right up to the events outlined in The Drinker. Late in 1928, even before the engagement had been announced, his parents helped him to buy himself into local journalism back in Neumünster, and, after a difficult time spent canvassing for advertisements, he got rid of his publisher/employer by denouncing him to the local Socialist mayor for misuse of election funds. As the new editor of the Neumünster ‘Advertiser’ Fallada was a close observer of the prolonged dispute between the Schleswig-Holstein farmers and the Socialist-led administration, one of the key conflicts of that critical time, and in the summer of 1929 he and his wife went to the North Sea island of Sylt on a facility trip which accidentally brought them face to face in the dunes with Ernst Rowohlt.

  These events at last established Fallada as a writer. For Rowohlt suggested that he should come to Berlin at the beginning of the new year to take a part-time job in his publishing firm, and this in turn allowed Fallada to revise and complete the novel which he had begun writing about the farmers’ campaign. The result was the publication in spring 1931 of Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben (a title that can be loosely rendered as ‘Farmers, Functionaries and Fireworks’), the first of what we now see as his characteristic books. Unlike its three immediate successors this was not translated into English, but the BBC transmission of Egon Monk’s film version in the nineteen seventies will not have been forgotten by those who saw it, while in Germany the book stood out in a year remarkable for the publication of Erich Kästner’s Fabian, the premières of Zuckmayer’s Captain of Köpenick and Pabst’s film of The Threepenny Opera, as well as the closing on economic grounds of Klemperer’s radical Kroll Opera. It sold well (though Fallada’s royalty payments were held up when the Rowohlt firm had to go into temporary liquidation during the 1931 bank closures), was serialized in the Kölner Illustrierte before publication, and was soon regarded along with Kästner’s poems and Egon Erwin Kisch’s reportages as typical of literary Neue Sachlichkeit.

  It was another Rowohlt writer of this trend, the satirical journalist and cabaret poet Kurt Tucholsky, whose long review in the Weltbühne best analysed what seemed so exceptional about this regenerated novelist’s talents.

  The technique is straightforward; it is good old Naturalism, slightly short on imagination, but then the author is not claiming to have written a great work of imaginative literature … This is no artistic masterpiece. But it is genuine, so uncannily genuine that it gives you the shivers … It is written by someone who knows that particular world like the back of his hand, yet can keep exactly the right distance needed to depict it..: close, but not too close.

  For all his critical acumen Tucholsky underrated Fallada’s artistry and his respect for the great nineteenth-century novelists, with their skill in communicating ‘slices of life … real life’. But he rightly commented on his refusal to fake, to regurgitate political slogans or invent spurious dialogue; and in particular his sharp but not hostile eye for the inadequacies of the provincial SPD, the still numerically powerful German Social Democratic Party. ‘It seems highly significant,’ he continued in the same review,

  that we have no comparable novels about doctors, or stockbrokers, or the big city; it’s as though the members of those lofty strata of the bourgeoisie have no eyes in their heads to see what is going on around them. No doubt they take it too much for granted. Fallada has seen.

  Farmers, Functionaries and Fireworks is indeed an excellent book, and not least because it so captures the climate and characters of provincial life at a moment when this was developing in a very different direction from the still comparatively progressive and anti-Nazi Berlin. Its particular importance from our present point of view however is that it at last got its psychologically handicapped author doing what he was best at. His painfully acquired insights into some of the less agreeable aspects of German life at a time of change now came into harmony with his narrative talent and stylistic directness, and an underlying urgency in the writing began to sweep the reader along. Quite clearly this is to be associated with the relative stability of his personal life following the fresh start which he was able to make in 1928; and his wife Anna (or ‘Suse’ as he called her) was central to it. ‘All those who had known me when I was young and full of hope,’ he wrote later,

  and then been concerned to observe my decline, but kept a glimmer of belief in my star none the less—there weren’t many of them, alas, but they welcomed Suse with pleasure and affection, as if she had always belonged with them.

  His rehabilitation was evidently not total, at least where drink was concerned, and at least for the two or three years when the couple were living in the area of Berlin; but the drug problem appeared to have been mastered, and once they had moved to the country following the Reichstag Fire he enjoyed a long and generally productive period of tranquillity, right up to the events that preceded The Drinker. Only a few weeks before their marriage he had written to warn her that

  I hope you realize that your prospect is one of financial insecurity, that I am in bad health, that I can and must give you no children, that I have been rejected by my social class.

  But their son was born in Berlin a year later, and a daughter and another son would follow.

  Yet Fallada’s working life after his initial success was far from being as relaxed as its outward circumstances might suggest. For he worked at high speed and with a concentrated intensity that reminded him and others of the ‘little death’ that he had previously sought in drink and drugs: a spell of utter seclusion from his normal surroundings, when he turned back to his store of experiences and encounters, and the story and the characters took over. It became another form of self-suppression, verging almost on the old self-destruction, but conducted according to timetable, with all the pedantic exactness that his father had brought to the practice of law. Meals had to be punctual, a set quota of pages per day completed, his working hours kept clear of family interruptions. ‘From the minute I sit down,’ he wrote in his extremely popular Heute bei uns zu Haus (Our Home Life Now),

  and write the first line, I am lost, a compelling force is in command. That force dictates just how and how much I must write, whether I want to or not, even if it makes me ill. Good resolutions, the most sincere promises, go by the board—I must write … A hundred times I have wondered what it is that drives me so.

  Not money, he concludes (for this was after more than ten years as a successful author), nor any fear that he might lose the thread of his inspiration; there is no risk of its breaking, and he is simply forced to follow it to its end. Often it turns out to be a lot longer than expected, then suddenly,

  in the middle of my writing I start realizing that I’m almost through. Suddenly the material is exhausted. Everything I was still planning, scenes I had imagined, turn out not to be needed, the novel has rounded itself off. It is finished.

  With great reluctance and many delays, he sets himself to revise and type his longhand manuscript, then to correct it once more with the aid of his wife. Once published he only wants to forget it. Review articles are destroyed before he can see them, and ‘never’, he claims, ‘have I been able to bring myself to reread a single line in any book of mine once it has appeared’.

  So he worked in the period between Farmers, Functionaries and Fireworks and The Drinker, the greater part of which was spent in the lake-strewn north German countryside at Carwitz near Feldberg, halfway between Greifswald and Berlin. Here he lived the life of a beekeeper and small landowner, interrupted by occasional newspaper contributions and, once or twice each year, the blindly compulsive writing of a novel. Certain features of the books would recur: the mistrustful, often devious cou
ntry-people; the generous yet worldlywise girls of the urban working class; the escape from the city to the land; the untrustworthy gentry; the policemen and criminal types whom he had known in prison; the sometimes appalling bourgeois mothers and widows. The particular tilt or balance could not be foreseen; it varied from book to book. And if we include his two wartime instalments of gently fictionalized autobiography, he wrote eighteen of his twenty-five books in those ten years. Then came the break which resulted in the present work.

  Before leaving Berlin, at the height of his country’s economic and political crisis, he had written the most famous of all his books, the story of a young shop assistant who becomes forced into poverty with his pregnant working-class wife. The employers are Jewish, the wife’s father an old Social Democrat, her brother a Communist, a fellow-employee a Nazi; the ground seems to have been prepared for a social, if not actually political novel of the last days of the Weimar Republic. But if this was the intention it got modified in the course of the writing, for as soon as the scene shifts from the provinces to Berlin the wife’s family drops out, new eccentric characters appear—drawn with something of the same affectionate understanding as Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris three years later—and although the precariousness of the couple’s life is shown in convincing monetary detail, the solutions offered are limited to a combination of lucky windfalls (of more or less fishy origin) and mutual love. Even the presentation of the book is ambiguous, for while its original cloth covers bore two characteristic (if irrelevant) drawings by George Grosz, the title, thought up in a session dominated by the publisher, was the trivializing question Kleiner Mann—was nun?: Little Man, What Now?