The Drinker
Page 27
It was a worldwide success, an American Book of the Month Club choice in 1933, a film directed by Fritz Wendhausen the same year, the first paperbook published by Rowohlt after the Second World War; it was praised by Thomas Mann, Carl Zuckmayer, Jakob Wassermann, Hermann Hesse and others; and it incidentally set the Rowohlt firm afloat once more after the crisis of 1931. And much of its success was due to the tender portrayal of the wife ‘Lämmchen’—clearly based on the personality of Suse Issel—and to that combination of humour, sentiment and a certain self-pitying resignation which lies in the popular German notion of ‘the little man’. Naturally the pressure was on Fallada to repeat it, and he decided to base its successor Wer einmal aus dem Blechnapf fribt (Who Once Eats out of the Tin Bowl) on his prison experiences. Before he could get properly started however, Adolf Hitler came to power, and the subsequent burning of the Reichstag on 27 February 1933 marked the end of parliamentary government, the suppression of all opposition to Hitler’s National Socialist (or ‘Nazi’) party, and the inauguration of the aggressive dicatorship known as the Third Reich.
Briefly Fallada was arrested, on the more or less instinctive suspicions of his neighbours in the commuter belt east of Berlin where he and his wife had hoped to buy a house. This was no great setback, for during the twelve days which he spent in the local gaol he wrote systematically, and Rowohlt quickly secured his release. But his wife was nearing the end of her second, more difficult pregnancy; the Grosz drawings had to be removed from Little Man, What Now? in favour of a feeble drawing of a smiling young couple with their child (by one Walter Müller); and a move right into the country seemed advisable. For any reputable writer the climate and the working conditions had plainly changed.
There were still six years to go before Hitler led his country into war, and five more till the final bursting of Fallada’s self-constriction with the writing of The Drinker. He never wished to emigrate, and appeared critical of those who did. He continued producing his books with much the same fitful fluency as he had shown in the last years of the republic. But when he completed the prison novel at the end of November 1933 he thought it prudent to damp down some of the details and add an apologetic foreword just in case the new regime took exception. And he almost instantly felt driven to start another long novel—some 540 pages in the German original—reflecting the loss of one of the twin girls that his wife had meanwhile borne, but at the same time giving the portrait of an egocentric male-chauvinist north German farmer deeply rooted in his ancestral soil. This took a mere three weeks to write and seemed to the author a great step forward in his work. Yet the odd thing was that, whereas Who Once Eats out of the Tin Bowl, for all his fears, was at first well received, the new book Wir hatten mal ein Kind (Once We Had a Child), with its tear-jerking title and its ideologically timely mixture of masculine dominance and blood-and-soil ruralism, was the subject of a campaign to demolish his reputation by the party purists. It seemed then that it was useless for him to make concessions, whether deliberate or unconscious, to the Nazi New Order: for, as the official Völkischer Beobachter put it, ‘He was never one of ours.’ Early in 1935 he again took to drinking. In August he had to show his ‘Ahnenpass’ (the disgusting booklet that revealed whether one had racially pure ancestors or not); in September the Propaganda Ministry declared him ‘unacceptable’ and forbade him to publish abroad; and although this was rescinded, that winter he more than once had to go into a sanatorium.
None the less his narrative power and his ability to create characters had not left him, and he had a large readership and a supportive publisher. So he decided to set his sights lower, but to stay put and continue writing—stories, articles, light novels like Altes Herz geht auf die Reise (Old Heart Goes on a Journey, which became an Ufa film), and endearing but essentially cosy works like his two warm-hearted books of reminiscence. In the second half of the decade, too, he translated two successful and eminently compatible light works from America, Clarence Day’s Life With Father and Life With Mother. It was proposed by Rowohlt and the popular film director Willy Fritsch, with the backing of Goebbels and his Propaganda Ministry, that he should write a film story for the actor Emil Jannings, but the film was stopped, allegedly because Alfred Rosenberg and his ideological purists found Fallada’s involvement unacceptable, while the novel version Der eiserne Gustav (Iron Gustav) was doctored to give it a Nazi ending. And yet it was during these years of self-censorship and official mistrust that he managed to write and publish, seemingly without official interference, the two-volume novel Wolf unter Wölfen (Wolf Among Wolves) which he wrote in two bursts of intense creativity covering ten months of 1936/37. This is a large scale, pitiless portrayal of the state of the German countryside in the early years of the Weimar Republic, with vivid pictures of those Nationalist, anti-Communist groups and individuals who were paving the way for fascism during the great inflation of 1922/23. Published in September 1937 at the height of the Nazi campaign against degenerate art, perhaps only a political innocent could have ventured to write it—or else an extraordinarily sensitive political subconscious. One friendly speaker on Berlin Radio even compared it with Dante’s Inferno and Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, adding that it could be seen as more impressive than either, since ‘it deals with an Inferno which we have all been through’. Though it finally lapses into a trusting optimism, it is not merely Fallada’s finest achievement but perhaps the one great novel to have appeared under Hitler’s Third Reich.
If Wolf Among Wolves was an exceptional product of his relatively stable forties, The Drinker represents a total rejection of that stability, beginning with his marriage, which was dissolved by mutual agreement just before his fifty-first birthday in the summer of 1944. Not long before he had prefixed one of his books of reminiscence with a public tribute to his wife Suse, the ‘Lämmchen’ of Little Man, What Now?, who
first made me what I have become, she taught an aimless man how to work, a desperate man how to hope. It was thanks to her faith, her loyalty, her patience that we managed to build up what we now possess, what we rejoice in every day. And it all came about without much talk, or fuss, or finger-wagging, but simply by her being there and sticking to me through good times and bad.
Now however he had turned against her influence and wrote, apparently in secret, this relentless first-person story (the only one among all his main novels) about a provincial provision dealer who falls out with the capable wife on whom everybody thinks he depends, starts obsessively drinking, becomes besotted with the waitress whom he calls his reine d’alcool, and from that point starts dropping irrevocably, through a richly squalid series of subsidiary tales and episodes, to the horrible bottom of his society. How much of this is hallucination, how much imagination—the reader thinks of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony—how much reality? What is its basis in the author’s own experience, what in the life of his country in the last year of the war?
Not published till after the Nazi surrender—in the Federal Republic in 1950, in the GDR three years later—it was written in the autumn of 1944, and it marks the catastrophic ending of Fallada’s most fruitful period. The war was then nearing its end, with the Russians advancing through Poland and Romania, and the Western Allies in France and Belgium. The Propaganda Ministry had listed him as undesirable; Rowohlt had been expelled from the official Chamber of Culture and gone into the army: during 1943 he was discharged as ‘politically unreliable’ and his firm, already ‘gleichgeschaltet’ (or incorporated in the officially-approved system), finally closed down. Though the Labour Service briefly commissioned Fallada to come and report on their activities in occupied France and Czechoslovakia, he was now once again drinking himself stupid and seems to have written nothing, possibly because he did not much like what he saw. What was much worse for him was that just at this juncture a smart, seemingly unattached Berlin woman arrived in Feldberg who not only reminded him of his chief Berlin attachment at the end of the earlier war, but was also an alcoholic and a morphine addict. Alrea
dy in matrimonial trouble because of an affair with his family’s au pair girl, he now became hopelessly involved with this Ulla or ‘Uschi’, with the immediate result that he and his wife divorced by mutual agreement. Then on his first visit home there was a quarrel during which he loosed off two shots from a half-forgotten gun, and was carried away to a closely guarded criminal asylum in the neighbouring city of AltStrelitz on a charge of attempted murder. It was there that, under the pretence of writing a propaganda novel, he wrote The Drinker, not in code as has sometimes been suggested, but in fine criss-crossed lines to economize paper. Dates in the margin of the original show that it took him a fortnight.
Critics of this book have complained that he wrote it without any final literary polish; that the style is too straightforward to qualify as high art. If so it is because of the immediacy with which he wrote, without (so it is said) any kind of revision either then or later. And yet it is not set down like a diary, for it has a plan and a shape like a Gadarene slope, as the whole of the narrator’s life is seen hurtling to its self-motivated perdition. Magda is Fallada’s wife Suse; la reine d’alcool a lower-class stand-in for Uschi the Berliner; Else the maid has features of the au pair; the setting is the area of his Carwitz home, and the asylum the one in which he was writing. What is above all very genuine is the self-destructiveness and the desire to hurt the wife who is in many ways so evidently his better half. The pain of this terrible paradox is stated at the beginning of the third chapter, leading to the reflective words
But man gets used to anything, and I am afraid that perhaps he gets used quickest of all to living in a state of degradation.
Nothing specifically suggests that such a state was also the state of Germany in the days of the Final Solution; for there is no direct reference either to National Socialism or to its organizations, merely to the officials of the asylum and the courts, who would not have been all that different under the Republic. All the same, it is difficult to read the book without also reflecting on the huge degradation of a great European country, as well as the lesser degradations which National Socialism inflicted on the writer himself: the false triviality of some of his lesser books, for instance, the fiasco of the Jannings film, or the commissions to report on labour in the occupied countries and to write an anti-Jewish novel about Kutisker und Barmat, a bank that went under in the nineteen twenties. Fallada was after all an artist with an acute interest in individual lives, and if it is true, as Georg Lukács has said, that
in the oppressive atmosphere of fascism, Fallada lost that inner confidence in his feelings which—for all his lack of firmly pondered and held views—characterized his initial critique of society.
then he surely will have felt a sense of shame as well as resentment.
How we take The Drinker today, then, depends in some measure on our view of its author’s attitude to the Third Reich. Personally uncommunicative, at least in his stable moods, he gave no evidence of courage but had a complex kind of obstinacy none the less. He was never pro-Nazi; he was unwilling to leave Germany; he would not risk any form of resistance. Tom Crepon, whose mildly fictionalized East German biography of 1978 was written with Suse Ditzen’s aid and approval, reports a visit of May 1934 by the younger Rowohlt with Martha Dodd and Mildred Harnack, the American who joined the ‘Red Orchestra’ group with her husband Arvid and Harro Schultz-Boysen, and was beheaded in 1943. She asked Fallada if it was still possible to write as one wished, and when he said yes, if you were prepared to compromise on unimportant points, she turned away, remarking ‘What is important, what is not?’. Martha Dodd’s conclusion was that Fallada had resigned himself, and was content in his new isolation. Yet clearly this contentment had worn through by the middle of the Second World War, and if the deterioration of his marriage was a major factor so was his plain incompatibility with the system. These two elements in his decline seem to have aggravated one another, to judge from the timing of his lapses. Thus it appears to have been a particularly severe blow when the Rowohlt firm was finally closed down, not least because its offence had been to publish such ‘undesirable’ authors as the cabaret poet Joachim Ringelnatz (who had died in 1934) and Fallada himself. It was this that led to the (unfulfilled) commission from another publisher to write the anti-semitic ‘Kutisker’ book.
That the picture of the asylum given in The Drinker stands for more than the bare events of the author’s own incarceration is clear, since it helped that he was imagined to be at work on the ‘Kutisker’ job, and he was in fact released after less than four months. Unexpectedly, in view of his announced intention to return to his wife, he then married the disastrous Uschi, with whom he would spend his last two years. These saw the breakdown of all his resolutions as they shared the ‘little death’ of their renewed addictions, first in her Feldberg house near his own and then in her flat in the ruins of Berlin; and the incoherence of their life together from then on seems reflected in the incoherence of his first, largely autobiographical postwar novel Der Alpdruck (The Nightmare), which actually appeared before The Drinker and proved much harder to write. It was the first time since the nineteen twenties that Fallada had lost his grip on the reader. Yet in its scrappy way the book gives a convincing impression of the arrival of the Red Army in Feldberg and the moral collapse of the inhabitants, and describes with a certain irony the circumstances that led to its author—who would never have accepted, nor perhaps been offered, public office under Hitler—being installed as mayor of Feldberg for four months till his strength gave out. Thereafter he looked for literary and journalistic contacts in Berlin, and found them again among the Soviet occupiers and their helpers, notably the poet Johannes R. Becher who had returned from emigration in Moscow to head the Kulturbund (or League of Culture) which the Russians sponsored, initially in all four sectors of the city.
Becher knew Fallada’s work from before 1933, and happened to have come from a curiously similar background: a stiff-collared lawyer father, a suicide pact where only the other partner died, a period of Expressionist excess (including a morphine addiction) and a sobering-up process, governed in Becher’s case by a political discipline. He now sought out Fallada, helped him to find occasional work with the Soviet German-language Berlin daily Täglicher Rundschau, got him preferential rations and housing and, at a Christmas party in 1945, introduced him to the Soviet writer Konstantin Fedin and the chairman of the German Communist Party, Wilhelm Pieck. By the former’s account Fallada was still maintaining his isolation, for he disagreed with Pieck about his party’s optimistic expectations of the German workers and the probable impact on them of the Nuremberg War Crimes trials, saying finally that ‘the business of the politician is to obey reality; the business of the artist, to portray that reality as it is’. A month or two earlier Becher had passed him a collection of documents taken from the Berlin Gestapo and the People’s Court, providing details of the case against an obscure working-class couple who from 1940 to 1942 had conducted their own private propaganda campaign against Hitler, then been caught and executed. His objective all along, it seems, was to reactivate the narrative writer whom his Moscow colleague Georg Lukács had judged ‘one of the greatest hopes of German literature’, and see if Fallada could not produce that major novel of the Third Reich for which the country—and indeed the world—were waiting.
It is not clear whether Becher was a ware of The Drinker until after Fallada’s death at the beginning of 1947, but when it finally appeared in the Federal Republic he was appalled: ‘a wholly unnecessary book’, he noted in his diary, ‘harmful and repellent, with no new human insights, no literary appeal. A pity.’
At least he cannot fully have realized what a break it had meant in its author’s approach to writing. And, to start with, Fallada was evidently doubtful how much he could make of the frightening real-life dossier which he had been given. He understood the responsibility which it imposed on him, writing a preliminary article for the Kulturbund’s magazine which concluded:
I, the auth
or of a novel which has yet to be written, hope that their struggle, their suffering, their death were not entirely in vain.
But as he came to plan that novel he became doubtful, first estimating its length as a ‘paltry three hundred pages’, then abandoning it on the ground that the material could only justify an essay of twenty typed pages and anyway ‘who still wants to read about that kind of thing?’ In the end he signed a contract for the film version with the East German state film company, DEFA, and with Uschi absent again in hospital wrote the 540-page Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Everyone dies for himself alone) in a mere twenty-four days, an achievement to match those of his great period. The result was not only more than Becher could have hoped for; it is one of Fallada’s best novels, with a great gallery of well-observed characters, both men and women, ranging from the old civil servant to the smart young SA-men and the shabbiest Gestapo informers. Who would have thought that either the resigned and untalkative Fallada of 1934 or the shattered personality of The Drinker could so sensitively penetrate under the skin of the police state?
Right-thinking German literary criticism is still uncertain where to shelve Hans Fallada: Expressionism or Entertainment, Nazi or anti-Nazi, GDR or Federal Republic?—like so many of the most interesting writers he cannot be placed under an exact label. Yet he has his position in modern literary history alongside Kästner and Anna Seghers, Tucholsky and Plievier, Renn and Remarque, as part of the new sobriety of the later nineteen twenties, and counterpart to equivalents such as Rudolf Schlichter and Paul Hindemith in the other arts. Like Feuchtwanger’s Success, moreover, and Dublin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, a number of his novels can be read as adjuncts to history proper, clues to the changing society of their particular place and time. Thus Farmers, Functionaries and Fireworks and Wolf Among Wolves bring life to the generally neglected story of Hitler’s rise to power in the provinces; Who Once Eats out of the Tin Bowl has been called the best novel of prison life under the Weimar Republic; Little Man, What Now? joins Fabian and the Isherwood Berlin stories as pictures of the Republic’s last months; while the final novel is a perceptive account of oppression and a feeling tribute to the old-style individualism of the Berlin working class. And The Drinker? It springs like a blow in the midriff from the bombast, false folksiness and anodyne classicism of National Socialist culture, and it is hard not to take its steady descent into the pit as a parable—less specific than the big novels but all the more shocking—of Germany’s march into the depths.