The Drinker

I liked the murderer Qual. It made me sad when they took him off to the annexe one day, to the death-cell where most of us will end our lives. He died of tuberculosis, the deadly scourge of this death-house.

My second cell-mate was the orderly Herbst. At first I struck up a kind of friendship with him, but it soon went to pieces when he found there wasn’t the slightest thing to be got out of me. Herbst, a young fellow of twenty-five, who had already been in this place five years and formerly had served a two-year sentence in a reformatory, was really a butcher by trade. He was a big sturdy fellow with a long fat face, almost dead staring eyes, and sandy hair which he brushed and combed for at least a quarter of an hour every morning, to the keen, but prudently suppressed, anger of the rest of us, because he was always standing in our way in the narrow cell. Herbst’s beard was a flaming red, before it came under the clippers of a Saturday (the clippers were a shaving machine used in place of the forbidden razor-blades). This gave rise to many unflattering remarks about the character of our mess-room orderly, remarks that unfortunately were only too just. Herbst was utterly unscrupulous in the way he allowed himself to take tobacco, food, soap, fruit, on the sly from all sides—without ever a thought of giving anything in return. The man who gave him a whole handful of tobacco one day, would the next day be refused a few crumbs to chew on.

I soon learned to watch keenly whose plate the orderly filled most amply. In a place where hunger rules pitilessly, the man who serves the food enjoys an easy superiority. Of course it was strictly forbidden, by rights, for the orderly to serve out the food himself, that was part of the keeper’s duties. But the keepers had to do a great deal of running about, and in any case they did not care. In this place an angel from heaven could come down and dish out the food and there would still be complaints. So everything went its old way, and all the time orderly Herbst got fatter on it. His best business was done with cutting and spreading bread. I have already said that a keeper was supposed to supervise this, but Herbst availed himself of the keeper’s every momentary absence to steal bread, margarine, jam. Since all these articles were carefully weighed out so much per head, he was obliged to shorten our rations accordingly. But if he only took ten grammes from each of fifty-six men, that meant he had already acquired more than a pound of bread, and on a pound of bread a man can eat his fill! The bread he thus obtained, the fat man either ate, or exchanged for tobacco when he needed some badly, but generally it found its way to his “friend” Kolzer, whom I have already briefly mentioned as being one of the two youngsters who trailed a whiff of corrupt love among us older men. Kolzer was not a whore like young Schmeidler, who sold himself to anybody, he was faithful to his friend Herbst. Herbst ruled him with a rod of iron, often beat him whenever he had, in Herbst’s opinion, committed some stupidity or other, but he fed him to bursting point and kept a watchful eye on him. Kolzer, a big strong youngster with ash-blond hair, had a not unhandsome face, which however gave an impression of stupidity and lifelessness. He was very feeble-minded, and could neither read nor write, but under the tireless efforts of his friend, he had at least learned to play Lotto. Yet, however undeveloped Kolzer’s mind might be, the youngster knew very well how to assert himself in our block, and in particular, how to avoid work for long periods. He always had small unpainful injuries or slight temperatures that made it impossible for him to work. On this account, a perpetual ill-humour prevailed among the patients, and they felt just the same towards Schmeidler.

“Those hefty young louts sit around the place while the worn-out old men have to do the work.”

That was indeed true, but Kolzer had a powerful mediator in the person of his friend Herbst who was constantly in and out of the glass box, and was the head-nurse’s trusted news-carrier. So Kolzer was fed on bread and jam, and as no man can ever isolate himself in this place, he was often surprised by other patients in the act of stuffing himself with stolen food.

“Kolzer was eating bread in the closet again today, that thick with butter!” (In this place, margarine is always called “butter”.) Then Herbst would be in a fury with the informer. Called to account by the head-nurse, he would declare that he had only given Kolzer the crumbs from the bread-cutting, perhaps there had been a broken-off corner of a slice among them, and Kolzer had scraped the margarine off the wrapping-paper.… Moreover, if these complaints went on, he would chuck the job up and go back to the factory. Let others see if they could fill his job better. He had—and here his voice took on a wailing, whining tone—he had always been decent and honest. But in this bandit-ridden place that was just what a man couldn’t be! No, he’d had enough of it, now he was going back to the factory.…

Then the keepers would speak soothingly to him, and he would graciously stay. He had his advantages: he looked after himself, he was clean, and he was quite unscrupulous about informing the keepers of everything. But to his comrades Herbst did not whine when he was informed on. In his rage against such accusations, he lost all self-control, he would scream at the others, white in the face, and he never forgave such insults to his “honesty”. He was devilish careful of getting into fights. Previously he had often been in the punishment cells on account of his brutal pugnacity, but the medical officer had made it clear to him that he could never reckon on release if he could not learn to control himself. And Herbst wanted his release at all costs. He had spent the seven most decisive years of his short life behind bars. Release was his great hope. For this release he had made the greatest sacrifice: he had voluntarily been castrated. Herbst had been sentenced for sexual offences against young boys, and he had been made to understand that he could never count on freedom unless he agreed to be castrated. For a year and a half the young man had wrestled with himself and finally he had consented. At the time when I was admitted, it was barely half a year, perhaps only three months since his castration. Already he was getting fat, his face looked puffy and unhealthily pale. His eyes seemed disconsolate. But he hoped for his release from day to day, the medical officer had endorsed his application, they all told him. He had steeled himself to this terrible expedient, this castration, and still he was not free. He waited from day to day, from week to week, but the longed-for decision from the Attorney-General did not come. Sometimes Herbst would rage: they’d properly done him, the doctor and the head-keeper, they’d fooled him all right! Now he’d got his testicles off, and for what? For nothing, except so that the high-ups could laugh at him!

Meanwhile, strangely enough, this castration had not altered his feelings for Kolzer in the least. Kolzer remained his friend as before, his only associate, his sugar-baby. He lived for him, he thought only of him. If the youngster had a slight temperature in the evening, Herbst would not take part in our bed-time conversations by so much as a word; he would pull the blanket over his head, but he did not sleep. Well, perhaps Kolzer noticed that in some ways Herbst’s feelings for him had changed, but we could see none of it.

Of everybody in the place, Herbst most hated a prisoner named Buck, a cobbler, a vain, stupid, conspiratorial fellow who had the same tendencies as Herbst. And when the cobbler had informed on young Kolzer one evening for illicit bread-eating, Herbst, probably driven off his head by his long, vain wait for release, fell on this Buck and beat him to pulp.

At the medical officer’s next visit, he was summoned before the doctor and informed that his release, which had already been granted by the Attorney-General, could not now take place, since by fighting in this way he had shown himself to be completely lacking in self-control. Along with the rest of the inmates, I doubt whether Herbst would really have been released, or whether this was not a pretext of the doctor’s to wriggle out of a promise, whose fulfilment had become very difficult owing to the Attorney-General’s attitude. In any case, instead of his longed-for freedom, Herbst first got fourteen days in the punishment cells, and then returned to his old job of orderly. He was a bad character and yet I had to admire the way in which he took this dreadful disappointment. He never said another word about release, he did his work as quickly, cleanly, and dishonestly as before, he lived only for the institution and its routine.

49

Of my third cell-mate, Holz by name, I have little enough to report. He was a strong young man of about thirty—looking younger than his years, and one might have thought the little fair moustache under his nose coquettish, had it not been that his immeasurably sad face forbade any thought of coquetry. He had only been some six months in the institution, but he had come straight from a convict prison, where he had spent six years.

As Qual was either silent or else talked nonsense, and as Herbst could only talk about himself, his friend, or his hated fellow-prisoners, Holz was the one I chatted with for the two hours between half-past seven and half-past nine when we usually kept ourselves awake in order not to wake up too early in the morning. Mostly it was I who talked, often of my former life, for it was essential to me to impress on one man, at least, the fact that in my own circle, I had once been an important and respected man. Or I told him of the worries and anxieties which now obsessed me, and it would have been better if I had paid more attention to Holz’s simple advice: “You want to crawl to your wife, Sommer,” he often warned me. “Don’t rely on your brains and some legal tricks, the others are better than you at that. I know how they can play about with simple people—and you’re only a simple fellow too, Sommer. The doctor will always get you tied up—and then it’ll be the Public Prosecutor’s turn! Agree to any conditions your wife makes, give up your property even, what’s the odds, only see that you get out of this hole! You don’t know yet what it’s like to be shut away for a long period. Write to her, Sommer, write to her immediately, tomorrow afternoon!”

So said Holz in his quiet even and toneless voice. Occasionally he would talk of himself. But never of his past life at liberty, of this I only found out that he was born and brought up in Hamburg. What his parents were, what he had learnt, what crimes (and they must have been serious crimes!) had earned him such a long gaol sentence, I do not know. I believe a warder once told me that Holz had formerly been a celebrated burglar. I can hardly believe it. He was so quiet, so simple, without any initiative or protest, I simply cannot credit him with sufficient energy for this dangerous calling, requiring as it does considerable presence of mind and an ability for making quick decisions. But of course it is always possible that his long stay in prison had completely changed him.

“I was six years in gaol without once being punished,” he told me on one occasion.

Simply as he said it, the words had a ring of pride. He liked best to talk of his time in prison. He told me about his work, he recounted in full detail how he had begun by weaving material for mattresses, and had progressed to shirt-material. Then he had been put on to knitting stockings on the “flat machine”—I could hardly imagine what a flat machine was, even after I discovered that there was also a “round machine” for knitting stockings.

Then came Holz’s best time in gaol; he became a washer-up in the kitchen. Here he had as much to eat as he wanted, was in the company of his comrades, and even got to see women at least once a day. These women came from the nearby women’s prison to fetch food. Despite all precautions, glances and notes were exchanged and they even managed to pass bread, sausage and margarine to the women. Holz assured me that he only did what all his companions among the kitchen-staff did, but when the affair came to light they put the entire blame on him, and he was taken out of the kitchen. Only his good conduct saved him from the punishment cells. A horrible year ensued: Holz had to pick oakum in a solitary cell—and at the mention of this task how very clearly I recalled Magda’s arrangement with the prison administration, and my journey to Hamburg. Eventually Holz, being considered not liable to escape, was put on to outside work, and the prison cell only saw him at bed-time, he worked outside the whole day through, in the open fields, or in the sawmill in winter-time, Holz liked to talk of all these simple things. He still knew every task that had been allotted to him; strands which had given him trouble in picking he could still describe with the same fresh anger he must have felt in his solitary cell.

But Holz’s speciality was his disquisitions on food. Since everybody was always hungry, they constantly talked about food, probably it was all they thought of. Talking of food was a kind of mania, it only made the pangs of our hunger worse, but we could never leave off. In this Holz was an absolute master. Not that he thought up any refined meals to make our mouths water, no, his descriptions were of a biblical plainness. The meals he described were simply the same as those a common labourer eats, they were the meals he got in the convict prison. His head, never used for deep thinking, was sufficiently clear for him to tell me of any slight change in the usually constant prison menu; he still knew the ups and downs of the bread ration; the number of potatoes a prisoner under punishment is entitled to at midday instead of bread, and the extra allocation of bread, sausage and cheese for overtime and land-workers. He still knew all the Christmas extras, and he was most eloquent when he described how a farmer, pleased at a good piece of mowing, had given the convict-party pieces of bread spread thick with “good butter” or dripping, and five cigarettes per man as well. Each experience of this kind had engraved itself deep in his memory, and even today his voice trembled as he described how his stomach had not been able to stand the unwonted rich food, and he had brought it all up again. Holz’s accounts of food were as simple as that, yet I always liked to hear them over and over again, they were so moving! But each time, it struck us that a convict got about twice as much to eat as an institution inmate.

“There, you can see,” Holz would say, “how they rob us! But what can you do? A donkey is there to carry turnips and get beaten, and we’re worse off than a donkey, because he is worth a few marks whereas with us, they’re glad when we’re dead.”

Holz would say such things without any reproach, without bitterness even. For him, they were the matter-of-fact evidences of the unalterable way of the world.

In the asylum, Holz enjoyed a good reputation, both among the keepers and the prisoners. Here too he had immediately been put on to outside work without any probationary period, he worked in a gravel pit, for a building contractor. There he came into contact with many “civilians,” and had all kinds of things given him. He always had a couple of matches to spare for a friend, or a little onion, and he was the much-envied possessor of a glass containing salt, and of nutmeg and pepper. With these, he beautified his water-soup. From an old sardine tin which he found, he made a grater by punching holes in the bottom with a nail, and with this he would grate parsley-roots, celery-roots, carrots, raw potatoes even, if his hunger was very keen. With all these trifles, which a man “outside” would take entirely for granted, he garnished his plain life, and brought a little joy into it, and always had something to look forward to. He never joined in any game, either because he could not play or did not want to. He never read a newspaper, and only listened to the lightest dance-music on the radio.

“That cheers me up!” he would say then. A little light would come into his eyes, and he would smile, a rare and touching smile. All in all, a modest courageous man—I am glad that I never seriously tried to find out about his crime, I do not want to blacken this picture.

50

These were the three companions with whom I shared the cell that first night, to whose heavy breathing I listened, while shame, remorse and anger shook my heart. Outside the window stood the night, sometimes I raised my head and saw a few stars twinkling; I read a poem about them once, how they have been looking down for thousands of years, with the same cool glitter, on human joy and human sorrow. At the time, it had not touched me, but now it did, and I wondered whether the stars had ever witnessed such a desperate, so foolishly-occasioned sorrow as that which had overtaken me. It seemed almost impossible. And as the night-hours slowly dragged on, one after the other, from chime to chime, towards the new morning, I thought more leniently of Magda and the cunning doctor, and I swore to myself once again that next time I would be shrewder and more truthful. I convinced myself that nothing was lost yet, and I imagined long conversations with the doctor, in which I displayed a rare wit and a charming candour.

Eventually—an hour or so before unlocking-time—I really fell asleep. In my dream I was in my home town, I went through its streets and alleys, I saw many friends and acquaintances but they did not see me and passed by me without a greeting. Eventually I saw Magda sitting on that bench that is associated with our earliest schoolday friendship. I went towards her and sat down beside her. But she did not notice me. I wanted to touch her dress, I reached out my hand, but I could not grasp her dress. I tried to speak to her, and I did speak too, but my voice made no sound, I could not hear it, and Magda could not hear it either. Then I realised with a sharp terror that I was only a shadow wandering among the living, that I was dead. I was so terrified that I awoke—the head-nurse’s key was rattling in the lock and his voice cried “Get up!”

Yes, a new morning was beginning and now I was no longer a guest in the death-house, instead I was enrolled in the ranks with the others, like all of them I whiled my gloomy hours away here. They made no more fuss of me, they spoke to me, and then they began to quarrel with me, in the washroom they shoved me away from the basins, and sneered at me when I tried to keep my fingernails clean with a sharpened stick.

Look at him! What’s he doing that for? He’s as deep in the mud as we are!” And I made my little deals like them. I saved a slice of bread from my roaring hunger and traded it for a few crumbs of tobacco, and the first time I was cheated, there was very little tobacco, and a great deal of dried roseleaves mixed in it. Once, too—I will confess—I stole from our orderly Herbst two slices of bread thickly spread with butter, which he had hidden under his bolster. But I was so excited, that I neither enjoyed them, nor did they agree with me. That is the only thing I ever directly stole. I am a weak man, I know that now, but I am no thief. My fear is always greater than my appetite, and in that I am weak too.

And on this first day, when the order to “Fall in” sounded, I lined up with the others, enrolled among them, I had no advantage now over any of them. A keeper came and took me to a single cell in which there was no bed, only a table, a stool, and a number of different working materials, at which I stared with anxious and wondering eyes, convinced that such a clumsy man as I would never in my life be able to learn such strange work. I saw the ready-cut brush- and broom-holders, and hair bristles, the rice-straw and millet and fibre for the various kinds of brushes and brooms, which I was to learn to make. I saw rolls of thick and thin wire, and a knife—no, I would never learn it! Nobody came, I was shut in my cell—now that I had so urgently begged the doctor to deliver me from Lexer, was I to make brushes without my instructor? I tried it, I seized a few bristles and tried to fasten them in the holes which were already bored. But they were too few, and they fell out again. The next time I took more, but now it was too many and when I tried to force them into the holes, some broke and the others fell to the floor. I bent down and quickly tried to tidy up the mess, the key rattled again, and in sprang little Lexer with his discoloured fangs, and seized me by the breast and cried shrilly: “What did you do with that razor-blade? You’re not going to shit on me, Sommer!”

I tore myself away furiously and cried: “Keep your hands off me, I tell you! What have your lying tales got to do with me?”

The little scoundrel looked at me for a moment, astonished and silenced, then he laughed again in an ugly way and said: “All right, just as you like. But one day, I’m going to shit on you!” (However he has mostly let me alone since then, as I have said.) And suddenly changing, he asked: “Haven’t you got a chew of tobacco for me, Sommer, just a little one?”

I had none, and I told him so, and he said angrily: “There is nothing to be done with you. What did they want to shove a fellow like you in here for? Hang the wire up on the stand. No, not the thick wire, you ox, you’re supposed to make hand-brushes first, out of good bristle, they’re the easiest. Take the fine wire. Two hundred holes a day is your task for the first week, the work inspector will tell you, and if you don’t do it they put you in the cooler with the hard bed and make you get a move on! I can do a thousand holes a day, two thousand when I want to, but I don’t. Why should I? So the fat boys can make more out of us? We’d still have to go hungry! Look, first you pull the wire through the hole like this, so it makes a loop, and then you stick the bristles in, just as many as you can pick up with two fingers, that’s just right. And now you pull the loop tight, and there’s your bristles already fixed! That’s the whole knack, a kid could learn it in five minutes, and now you do it and show you can do as much as a kid!”

And while Lexer had been breathlessly declaiming all this in his shrill voice so that the spittle stood on his lips, I had been watching with astonishment how his dirty fingers with their bitten nails had drawn the fine wire through the hole with incredible dexterity, had seized just enough bristles to fit exactly into the hole without any space between, and finally had gently and quickly pulled the loop tight. As he did it, it really seemed childishly simple to me too. But what happened when I tried this simple thing myself? My wire would not go into the hole, it buckled instead of making a loop, and I picked up too few or too many bristles, and scattered them on the floor. Meantime Lexer was abusing me ceaselessly and he pushed me and nudged me and splashed me with his spittle, till I threw the brush down and cried again furiously: “Leave me alone, I tell you!”

So we worked the whole morning, I absolutely desperate over my clumsiness, and convinced I would never learn, and he all the time getting shriller, more triumphant, more overbearing. At the end of the morning we had finished only one single brush, of eighty holes, and it did not look right, as even I could see.

“Stick this on the rubbish-heap yourself, Sommer!” yelled Lexer. “Pull the plug on it before the work inspector gets to see it, or he’ll put you under punishment for wasting material! I’m not coming back into this stinking hole this afternoon. You know now how it’s supposed to be done, and if you don’t do it, that’s your look-out, you’ll have to answer for it. I’m not going to have anything to do with it!”

So after five hours I was free of my disgusting instructor and I could have saved myself that sudden outburst of antipathy that had been so ill-received by the doctor. But I was absolutely in despair over my brush-making that afternoon, and by evening I had not finished more than thirty-seven holes, and those badly done. That night for once I did not brood over myself and my adverse fate and Magda and the medical officer, but only about brush-making. But this must have been far more welcome to my head, for I fell asleep over it, and for the first time I had a fairly good night.

51

The days went by, one after another, and one day, before I had expected, I was a tolerable brush-maker. I had learned it, I made nailbrushes and hand-brushes and hair-brushes and dairy-brushes and windowsill-brushes. I could make brooms too, millet brooms and fine hair brooms. Eventually I learnt to make shaving-brushes and dusting-brushes and all kinds of paint-brushes. My fingers were now as skilled as Lexer’s, they took up just as many bristles as were necessary, neither more nor less, and the wire gave me no more trouble. Now when I met Lexer in the leisure-hour and he shouted at me in his shrill voice: “Well, Sommer, how many have you done?” I would answer: “Eight hundred holes,” or: “a thousand,” or even: “eleven hundred.”

Then Lexer would pull an angry face and yell: “Are you trying to suck up to the bosses? You won’t get any better grub than the rest of us, you arse-creeper!”

But I did not work so hard in order to curry favour, I worked for my own satisfaction. Work passed the time for me; before I expected it, the key would rattle and the keeper’s voice cried: “Lunch-time!”

The days, long as they sometimes seemed to be individually, went quickly enough: a week, a month had passed, I said to myself: “Now I’ve been here a month already, now two, now nearly three.…”

Now that my hands did the work of their own accord, now that I no longer had to think and worry about it all the time, my mind was free to reflect and brood on my own fate. But work imparted quite a different tone even to this brooding. Sometimes I stood for a while by the window and looked out over the country, in which they were already cutting the corn, then bringing it in, then ploughing the stubble, then mowing the hay. I had a good bright cell which, so they told me, kept warm even in winter. I looked out, and when my heart plagued and urged me to get out into freedom again, it was probably the work which made me say to myself: “Patience, it’ll all come right. For the time being, let’s get on with finishing this lot of washing-up brushes!”

Yes, I enjoyed my work. It was humble work that, sure enough, any child and almost any of my feeble-minded companions could have done, but there is always consolation in a job well done, however insignificant it may be.

I had no fear of the punishment-cells now, nor of the work inspector; he occasionally came into my cell to take the finished work away, and he never said a hard word to me, but often: “Good, good, Sommer.” Or perhaps: “You needn’t do more than your quota, Sommer, it’s not necessary.”

And once he gave me a crust with jam on. When my first month’s work was finished, I lined up with the other workers outside the glass box and drew the tobacco which had been bought out of my “wages” (four pfennigs a day, one mark a month), namely, one packet of fine-cut and one packet of shag. Half the shag I swapped for a little pipe, for I did not want to roll cigarettes in newspaper like the others, it always either blazed up or else it charred and tasted horrible. The bowl of my pipe was quite small, it only held enough tobacco for ten or twelve pulls; that was fine, I could have five smokes a day and still last the whole month. Not that first month though, for I was still foolish and let myself be talked out of some of it, and lent some which I never saw again. I learnt, too, the dread which all property-owners have of thieves; nothing in the cells was safe from them, however cleverly it might be hidden. Constantly the agonised cry echoed through the building: “They’ve pinched my tobacco!”

So we were obliged to carry all our belongings about with us in our pockets, even the spoon which was our only eating utensil, much to the annoyance of the head-keeper, who complained of all the bulges in our clothes. I got myself a small box in which I kept all my possessions, a little salt, perhaps a saved-up piece of bread, my pipe and tobacco. I always had this by me, in the mess-room and the lavatory, in bed, and even on my visits to the doctor. Later, the kindly Qual who was working in the carpenter’s shop, made me a little wooden box with a sliding lid and a handle of string, and would take nothing for it. Yes, now I was really enrolled, I belonged, and to tell the truth, after those first few weeks of getting used to the place, I did not feel too bad about it. I became accustomed to starvation, constant quarrels, bad air and boils, and many of my companions who were unresponsive and dull I just did not notice any more. I belonged; and yet I did not quite belong, I was only “provisionally admitted”, and later I was merely “pending report”. One day, my hearing would be held, I would serve my sentence for uttering threats, and then—I hope, I hope!—I would be able to return to freedom. What I was going to do there, I did not know. It seemed fairly certain to me that I would not go home to Magda, nor did I want to work in my old business again.

The time I spent in my cell, this constant isolation, had made me rather shy of my fellow-men, I preferred to be in the narrow room among my brushes, and I thought with aversion of the noisy crowded streets of my home town. I had the notion of going to some quiet village and spending the evening of my life there as an unknown, rapidly-ageing man, in a quiet room in which I could go on making brushes.…

I imagined something of the sort. Yes, a little joy had come back to me, an almost cosy contentment filled me—this time is best compared with the time I spent in the wood-yard of the remand prison. True, Mordhorst was lacking here but I did not really miss him. Mordhorst had always been driving on, complaining and agitating—and now I was all for peace. This place was horrible, with its filth and meanness and envy, but that was how it was, and what was the use of rebelling against it? We prisoners, we patients, were not worth it.

At the end of the second month I swapped my whole packet of fine-cut tobacco for a rimmed magnifying glass and now I could always light my pipe, even in my work-cell, provided the sun was shining. I imagined myself richer and happier than ever before when I leaned by my window and smoked my little pipe. I felt I had never enjoyed my life so deeply or been so happy as here in my warm cell. Perhaps the contentment of my cell-mate Holz, his gift for extracting pleasure from the slightest things, had already affected me.

52

In the quiet peacefulness of those days, my interviews with the doctor were the only disturbing thing, and their effect lasted but a few days at most, before I had become completely at ease again and returned to my calm and agreeable condition. On the whole the interviews did not go favourably for me, though none were as bad as that first one. Unfortunately it was quite impossible for me to behave naturally with him, in my dealings with him I never achieved that freedom and self-assurance which, outside, would have been so much a matter of course for me. I was always oppressed by a dark sense of guilt, as if I had at all costs to hide something from him. I was never quite free of my fear of his hidden cunning and trickery; at the most innocent question I was hunted by one thought: “What’s he trying to trip me with now?”

I never thought of him as the helpful doctor, only as the ally of the Public Prosecutor who in a confused and difficult moment had charged me with the attempted murder of my wife, and who would do anything to keep me inside these walls.

Whenever I really managed to overcome my feelings, and to tell the doctor what moved my heart, it unfailingly ended in disappointment. For instance, one day I told him quite freely about my changed plans for the future, how I was going to retire to some quiet village and just live by brush-making. I had expected to get the doctor’s approval of this plan, his praise even, and I was astonished and disappointed beyond measure when he vigorously shook his head and said: “Those are just fantasies, you’re pulling the wool over your own eyes. You can’t live like that, and you don’t want to. You need your fellow-men, and above all, Sommer, you need a helping and guiding hand. No, that only comes from that quite unwarranted aversion of yours to your wife. Get the idea out of your head that your wife wants to harm you. You are the one who has wronged her and if your wife weren’t such a decent sort she would have every reason for being a bit spiteful towards you. But she hasn’t given a single unfavourable word of evidence against you, she tries to excuse you all the time! And here you tell me you don’t want to live and work with her any longer! What a fellow you are, Sommer! Can’t you see anything as it really is? Must you always invent some rigmarole?”

Naturally I was bewildered and indignant at this unwarranted attack; as Magda had not written me a line and never made any attempt to see me, I quite justifiably assumed that I was irksome to her, that she considered me dead and buried. And, as is the custom, she spoke no ill of the dead. But it was decent of me to keep quietly out of her way, to make no trouble for her, to leave her in full possession of my property. That the doctor refused to acknowledge my generosity, and instead assailed me with hard spiteful words, proved to me how prejudiced he was against me, and that made me keep my mouth shut all the tighter in future, made me still more reticent and shy. Really he was nothing but my enemy, a pitiless enemy who tried by all the means at his disposal to outwit me and who unscrupulously used his weight as head of the institution against me. The other prisoners had been right when they constantly warned me of him.

“Don’t trust that Stiebing! He’s friendly to your face, but behind your back he makes a report about you so you never get out of this hole alive!”

They were right.

During these few weeks, the doctor did not often send for me, and his demands on me did not become more frequent after he informed me that he had now been asked to prepare my report. Quite the reverse, in fact, another proof that he had a preconceived opinion about me, and did not want to find out anything further. In general, unless there was something specially urgent, the medical officer visited the institution twice a week, every Tuesday and Thursday evening. But I was sent for much more rarely, hardly once a week. Of course I rather welcomed this, since every visit was, as I have said, a torture that took me days to recover from. But these rare summonses showed me, too, how lightly he took this report on which the fate of my whole life depended. Yet in itself, my case was a particularly interesting one for a psychiatrist. In education, I was head and shoulders above the other inmates, I had achieved something in my lifetime, I was a respected man—and now I was in this death-house. The medical officer must have been able to see there was more in me than in the others, I had more to lose, I was more sensitive, too, and more prone to suffering than these utterly dull, stupid fellows. But no, he treated me like any Tom, Dick or Harry, he was often quite rude to me, called me an incorrigible liar and romancer! I had every reason to mistrust him and to be on my guard. When he upbraided me for my lack of frankness, that was just one of his baseless charges, to which I remained completely silent.

53

A change in my relations to the doctor only came when he visited me in my cell one day at an unusual hour—early in the afternoon, in fact. I had just been smoking, which is forbidden in the work-cells, but he made no comment on the tobacco-laden atmosphere, even although he usually insisted on a strict observance of the regulations. That day, he was not wearing his light doctor’s overall, and was without his eternal shadow, the head-nurse. For a moment Dr Stiebing looked at my work and then asked absently: “Well, how are you getting on with the brush-making, Sommer?”

“Quite well, doctor,” I answered. “I think the work-inspector is pleased with me.”

He nodded, still rather absently, my good work did not seem to interest him much. He reached in his pocket, took out a silver cigarette case, and then he did something that completely astonished me, that almost bowled me over: he offered me the case.

I looked at him disbelievingly, and a thin smile lay on his face as he said: “You can quite safely take one, Sommer, if your doctor offers it to you.”

He even gave me a light first, and then stood for a moment calmly smoking under the high-set cell-window, in silence.

Then he said: “I had a long talk about you yesterday with your wife, Herr Sommer. I had asked her to come in and see me some time, and yesterday she came.”

I did not answer, I only looked at him, my heart hammered; it moved me, it shook me that this man had been with Magda just yesterday. I could not speak, I think I was trembling in every limb.

“Yes,” said the doctor thoughtfully. “I got your wife to go over everything again, from the very beginning of your marriage, up to that unfortunate evening. A psychiatrist hears much more from relatives than they themselves would guess.”

A wave of furious indignation began to rise in me. “So you’ve been trying to trick Magda too, and very likely have tricked her,” I thought. “Magda is so innocent, she has no notion what sort of man you are!”

But the wave ebbed away again.

He said: “On the whole, I have a not unfavourable impression from this account of your wife’s. I really think it is possible we may be able to do something with you, Sommer. You have a very brave and efficient wife.…”

Again I felt on the defensive: I would have preferred that the doctor had used some other word than “efficient” in connection with Magda.

“Yes, Sommer, of course I can’t say anything definite just yet, I’ll have to keep you here under observation for a few weeks more. But if you go on behaving quietly and working hard, and if nothing special happens …”

“Nothing special will happen, doctor,” I cried excitedly, “I’ll go on behaving quietly and working hard …”

The doctor smiled again, and in that very moment when he was being so kind to me, I did not like his superior smile at all.

“Well,” he said, “we keep all temptations away from you here, Sommer! To behave yourself here means nothing much. You have to be sure that you can resist every temptation outside, particularly alcohol …”

“I’ll never touch alcohol again,” I assured him. “I decided that long ago. Not even a glass of beer. I’m going to be a total abstainer, I give you my firm promise on that, doctor.”

“Oh Sommer,” he said sadly, “you’d better not promise me anything, what sort of promises do you think I get to hear, when people want to get out of this place? And three months outside, one month even, and one man’s stealing again, the other drinking. No, I don’t think anything of promises—I’ve been disappointed too often.”

“But I really have changed,” I said and for the first time I could speak quite frankly to the doctor. “I would never have believed that it could happen to me. I thought I could do anything I liked, and Magda spoilt me, too, in that respect. But now that I’ve seen what has come from my drinking, this is going to be a lesson to me for ever. When I am tempted, and I look back on the weeks and months in this place …”

I shuddered. The medical officer watched me attentively.

“That was honestly spoken, Sommer,” he said at last. “If this experience has given you such a shock that it has quite cured you of drinking, then we really can take a chance on it. But now you’ll have to try to put your attitude towards your wife in order as well. You’re an easily-offended man, Herr Sommer, but I must tell you quite frankly that in your marriage, your wife is the guiding hand, the superior partner. She’s your good angel, Sommer, and when you drifted away from her, you fell. So get used to the idea that your wife only has the best intentions towards you, subordinate yourself to her a little.… There’s nothing to be ashamed of in that, it doesn’t make a henpecked husband of you. It’s a good thing when the weaker one lets himself be sheltered and guided by the stronger.…”

So the doctor went on talking to me for a long time. It was not easy for me to hear him out without contradiction. It really was not quite as he imagined. Certainly Magda was efficient, but ever since we owned the house, I had managed the business perfectly well without her. True, lately things had not gone so well as before, but that was due to other causes, a few unfortunate accidents, not to my bad management. But anyway, once I got out of this accursed place, I would find my feet again. Let Magda be the guiding hand, I wouldn’t make any trouble for her. So I kept silent and I was reconciled to my new position vis à vis Magda by the thought that she had spoken so well of me to the doctor. So she still loved me!

“So,” said the doctor finally, “I don’t promise you anything definite, I can’t do so. In let’s say three or four weeks’ time I shall present my report, then the court will arrange your hearing, you will get a light sentence, perhaps four weeks, perhaps only fourteen days.…”

“So little?” I cried in astonishment.

“Well, you had better ask a lawyer about that, I don’t want to raise any false hopes. I’m only a doctor. And then when you are at liberty again.…”

“I shall always think of this place, doctor, I promise you!” I concluded.

54

This visit altered at one stroke my thoughts, my feelings, my whole life. Suddenly I saw the most recent past through quite different eyes: I had not been living in an almost comfortable calm and self-sufficiency, but in a paralysis of the will, in almost complete hopelessness, in apathy. Now I understood for the first time how slight my hopes had been of getting out of this dreadful place, how near I had been to renouncing life. Holz’s joy in the little things of life seemed cheap and stupid to me and of an evening I bored the patient fellow with long harangues about all the things I was going to do after my release. For I intended to be very active. Though the doctor had asked my pardon for his frankness, I could not forgive his remarks about Magda’s superior efficiency. The more I thought about it, the falser it seemed. The moment I was out, I would show him and Magda and the whole world how efficient I could be. And I pestered the good-natured Holz with long descriptions of the opportunities offered by the market produce business, opportunities which I, of course, was going to seize on and exploit as quick as lightning. In vain he warned me out of his long experience.

“Sommer, you’re not out yet! Don’t make too many plans! You never know what might happen yet!”

I cried: “What could happen now? It’s up to me entirely, and I’m sure of myself.”

In my work at brush-making I had changed, too. It wasn’t that my work was bad, my hands couldn’t do that now, they could manage without any conscious guidance, and my productivity hardly fell off, either. But I worked now by fits and starts. I would stand half the day at my cell-window, looking for hours on end at the quickly scudding clouds in the sky, enjoying the meadows, the cattle, the woods, and smiling after the girls who raced by on their bicycles. Soon I would belong to all this again, I would be part of the world, no more kept away from it and already a living corpse. Then again I would apply myself to my brush-making with a burning zeal. The work simply flew through my hands, every gesture was just right, in two hours I had finished the finest nailbrush. Sometimes as I worked, I thought with longing of Magda and I heartily wished she could see me at work for once. I could be efficient too, extraordinarily efficient! Even my attitude to my workmates had considerably changed since this interview. If I had avoided them up to now, and never interfered in their quarrels, and left them all to go their own way however disgusting it might be, my present good mood made it possible for me to take part in their conversations, and even on one occasion to call out to a disagreeable fellow: “Thiede, don’t lick the table with your tongue! If the gravy’s been spilt, use your spoon!”

I can’t say that my fellow-sufferers took very kindly to this lively change in my bearing. My witty remarks were mostly received in deep gloomy silence, and my exhortations to good manners brought down vile insults on my head. But all this had little effect on my good-humour.

I only thought to myself: “You poor idiots! In a few weeks I’ll be out, while you’ll have to spend all your lives inside these walls. What do I care about your insults? You just don’t exist for me!”

The change in my way of thinking showed not only in my attitude to things inside the asylum, but also in relations to matters outside. After I had wrestled with myself for two nights, and had talked the matter over thoroughly with Holz, who advised me strongly against it, I got old Herr Holsten to come, a somewhat old-fashioned lawyer, who enjoyed the greatest respect among the respectable citizens of my native town, and who had occasionally advised my firm in odd legal questions that cropped up. With him I drew up a document conferring authority on Magda by power of attorney, and I made a will in which I named Magda as my sole beneficiary. I charged the old gentleman to place the power of attorney in my wife’s hands the very next day, but to deposit the will in court. This was my thanks to Magda for the beautiful way in which she had spoken of me to the medical officer. I was delighted that I could thank her in such an impressive fashion. To be sure, Holz, who at this time did not like to go about with me, groaned: “You’ll regret that in a few days’ time, Sommer. A moment’s thought ought to tell you that you shouldn’t put yourself right into another person’s hands. And what for, anyway? Nobody asked you to, so why do it?”

“I’ve always been a generous man, Holz,” I replied. “I’ve always had a passion for giving.”

I must say that the old lawyer was very far from happy about drawing up these two documents for me. Not that he didn’t agree with their content, quite the contrary.

“It’s always a good thing when a man puts his house in order, Herr Sommer,” he said, “and your wife is of course your nearest relative. You are facing an uncertain future. Have you already selected an advocate for your hearing, or would you like me to defend you?”

“Thank you, thank you,” I said lightly. “I intend to defend myself. In any case the whole affair is just a trifle which my dear fellow townsmen have blown up far too much.”

The lawyer was shocked at my “frivolity” as he called it.

“It’s never a trifle,” cried the old man indignantly, “when a respectable citizen has to go to prison, not just for his own sake, but particularly for the bad example it affords! Let me take on your defence, Herr Sommer, perhaps, almost certainly, I can get you bound over. Then you will avoid the dishonour of going to prison.”

“My honour is my own affair,” I said proudly. “Other people can’t take it from me.”

Smiling sadly, the old man shook his head.

“In any case this is a matter of crime passionel, and the consequences of such an offence are never dishonourable.”

Again the old man sadly shook his head. “That kind of talk,” he said, “I have heard quite frequently within such walls as these, but I would have preferred not to hear it from you. How is the district psychiatrist’s report proceeding? Do you know anything about it?”

I assured him that it was all most favourable, and that the medical officer did not consider it necessary to keep me in the asylum.

“I do hope so, I hope so with all my heart,” cried Herr Holsten. “Well, Herr Sommer, I must go now. And if, despite your present intentions, you need me after all, you can call me at any time. For all my years, I’m not afraid of the long journey from town to this asylum, if only I can help you.”

Rather touched, I thanked him, but I was convinced that I would never require his advice, and that if I were in real need I would undoubtedly go to a younger and cleverer lawyer than he.

55

So the next few weeks passed in relative peace and quiet, a different peace from that which I had felt before the doctor’s interview, a more active peace, full of hopes and plans. I did not sleep well again, but that failed to affect my good mood: I was only a guest in this death-house. Daily I expected the indictment and the date of the hearing, and when it did not arrive, I hoped it would come the next day. In mankind, hope is indestructible, I believe the last thing that runs through the brain of a dying man is hope. The doctor never sent for me any more, I did not see him again after that interview, a sign that he had finished his report and forwarded it to the Public Prosecutor. My comrades tried in vain to make me uneasy.

“What, trust that dirty dog? He says one thing to your face and another thing on paper.”

I gave a superior smile. The doctor might do something of the sort with the likes of them, but to me he had expressed himself so positively that there was no doubt whatever about a favourable result. In any case, the man was judged quite wrongly—I too had misjudged him at first. That was the fault of his overbearing and sarcastic manner, which rather repelled one. But he was a man of knowledge and insight, where he could give anyone a chance. Of course, where it was quite impossible.…

Just one thing had a disturbing effect about this time. The consequences of malnutrition made themselves apparent on me too, I also broke out in distressing boils. So long as these boils—usually they were blind boils, under the skin—appeared only on the arms and legs, it was not too bad, but when they appeared on the nape of my neck and my back, I suffered considerably. Particularly as I now had to lie on my stomach of a night-time, a position in which I have never been able to sleep. Now I joined the long file which lined up each morning outside the medical room and was salved and lanced and finally bandaged by the head-nurse. But even these pestilential “pig-boils” could hardly damp my present high spirits.

“Once I’m out of here …” was the thought that occurred to me a hundred times a day. I now began to pay more attention to my appearance, since I was to be released in such a short time. I began to take care of my hands again, especially my nails, which had suffered from my work. I had my hair cut and washed my feet two or three times a week. I was particularly concerned about my face. The bandages had come off some time ago and my nose had healed. I had always been afraid to look at my face, and it had been made easy for me not to, since there was no official mirror in the asylum and shaving was done by Lexer with the clippers. But now it was different. I knew that Herbst, the orderly, possessed a little mirror which he constantly used when parting his hair. Now I borrowed it from him sometimes.

Of course he sneered: “What do you want a mirror for? Want to look at your conk? Leave it alone, it’s handsome enough without looking at it!”

He had hit on the right reason, quite by chance, but he didn’t have to know that. I murmured something about my boils.

When I saw my nose in the mirror, I got a shock. It was completely deformed by that bite, just before the tip there was a deep hollow, out of which the tip rose crookedly, marked with a flaming red scar. It looked really horrible, I was completely disfigured. (“That damned Lobedanz. He’s the real cause of all my misfortune!”)

Neither did a further examination of my face make me any happier. The consequences of starvation had marked it deeply. It was almost ash-coloured, the eyes sunken deep in their sockets. A five-day’s growth of stubble covered the lower part of my face. The mirror only betrayed that in this sense too I was enrolled in the death-house: I really looked no better than its poorest ghost! No better? Worse, perhaps! and I used to be a tolerably good-looking man, accustomed to wearing a good suit from our best tailor, with style. “What have they made of you?” I said sadly to my image.

With a deep sigh I handed the mirror back to Herbst.

“What, not good-looking enough?” he asked with feigned astonishment.

“These damned boils,” I complained. “If only we got something decent to eat! The carrots we had for lunch today were just plain water again! Nobody can keep healthy on that!”

With that, I had brought him round to the inexhaustible topic of this place: food, and nothing more was said of my personal appearance. Subsequently I often borrowed the orderly’s mirror, but always in his absence and without asking him. At the third or fourth time, I found I had judged my appearance too unfavourably. After I had inspected myself in the mirror a few times, I found that I really looked quite tolerable. In any case, one would quickly get used to this slight disfigurement. I had got used to it, Magda would get used to it, so would my fellow townsmen, so would everybody. There were people who had been much worse disfigured in the World War, and still had married pretty women, and lived happily with them. I was absolutely convinced that this scarred nose would not interfere with my happiness with Magda.

56

I was soon to have the opportunity of putting this to the test. One afternoon the head-warder Fritsch entered my cell and said briefly: “Come on!”

Fritsch, a fleshy man with a rubicund face, was one of those officials to whom a man might put a question. He did not look on us merely as criminals.

“What’s the matter,” I asked. “Is it the doctor?”

“No,” he replied. “Visit. Your wife. The medical officer’s given permission for you to put civilian clothes on. Get a move on, Sommer, your wife’s waiting, and I haven’t much time.”

He conducted me to the clothing store, where my suitcase lay on a shelf, rather lonely. Most of the patients were put in here for life and never needed civilian clothes again. Sitting on a table, the head-warder watched me as I first undressed, then dressed again. All the time he was urging me to hurry. But I couldn’t go so fast. My hands trembled so much, my heart was thumping. A visit from Magda in this death-house, life had come to visit me, soon I would be with her again.… And a deep emotion, a boundless love for my wife filled my breast. She had come to me at last, the long time of trial was over. Love had come back to me again, and I firmly determined, at this very first meeting, to show her how deeply I loved her, that the time of our estrangement was over, and that I put myself entirely into her hands, unreservedly and with complete confidence. Suddenly something dreadful occurred to me! It was Friday and we didn’t get shaved till Saturday: my stubble was in the worst possible condition!

“Sir,” I cried imploringly. “Could I shave myself quickly? My shaving things are in the suitcase here. I really would be very quick. Please let me.”

“Out of the question, Sommer,” said Fritsch coldly. “How much time do you think I’ve got? Besides, you can’t keep your wife waiting that long.”

“But it’s so important for me to make a fairly decent impression at this first meeting! Whatever will my wife think of me?”

“As far as that goes, Sommer,” said Fritsch, “I don’t think shaving would improve your beauty much. If your wife can put up with your nose, she should be able to stand a few bristles.”

“But she’s never seen my nose yet!” I cried, still more desperately. “That only happened in remand prison!”

But it was no use, Fritsch remained implacable, and I had to go with him, the saddest figure in the world, even the civilian clothes the doctor graciously allowed me, could not help much. Besides, they were completely crumpled through being in the suitcase so long.

With the warder, I enter the administration building. The corridor before me is long, gloomy and dark, my knees are shaking and I would like to lean against the wall for a minute, to rest and compose myself. But the head-warder’s voice sounds peremptorily behind me: “Come on, come on, Sommer! Third door on the right!”

If only he wouldn’t shout so loud and in such military fashion, Magda can hear him by now!

A hand on the knob, and the door opens! Useless to hesitate, in this life you are driven forward pitilessly.

There is no rest, no remission.

I see Magda. She has been sitting by the window, now she gets up and looks towards me. Momentarily I notice the expression of puzzled astonishment in her face. But already I hurry over to her, my arms wide open, I cry, “Magda, Magda, so you’ve come! I’m so thankful.…”

I fold her in my arms, I try to kiss her on the mouth, as in the old days, the old days that are going to come again—and I notice an expression of shuddering resistance in her face.

“Please don’t,” she whispers, still in my arms, suddenly almost breathless. “Not here, please!”

I have let her go, all my joy is extinguished, a cold ominous silence overtakes me. She looks at me, the expression of confused astonishment still in her face.

“I hardly recognised you,” she whispers, still breathless, “what’s happened to you? What’s the matter with your—” she dare not say the word.… “What has changed you so much?”

Head-warder Fritsch is sitting on a chair behind us, and now he loudly clears his throat. I know that it is not permissible for us to stand here whispering by the window. With a pretence at light-heartedness, I say “Shan’t we sit at the table here, Magda?”

We do so. Then: “You find I’ve changed? You don’t like my looks? Well, to tell you the truth, I didn’t like them either, when I saw myself quite recently in the mirror for the first time again.” (I shouldn’t have said that. Head-warder Fritsch may ask me later where I got the mirror from, and then I’ll have got Herbst into trouble. Mirrors are forbidden in the wards. You can’t be careful enough in this place!) I quickly laugh: “But one gets used to it, Magda, I don’t look so bad as you think; I’ve got better rather than worse.…” At these last words, into which I put deep meaning, I have noticeably lowered my voice. But Magda takes no notice.

“What’s the matter with your—nose?”

At last she manages to utter the word, even if only after a brief hesitation.

“It looks really bad, Erwin.”

“A fellow-prisoner tried to bite it off, while we were still in the remand prison,” I explain. “It was that Lobedanz who stole your silverware, you know, Magda.”

She only looks at me, with a slight twitch of the mouth. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that, either; perhaps Magda thinks it was I who stole her silverware in the first place. But no, she can’t think anything so stupid and unjust, the silver was bought out of my own money, so it was my silver, one can’t speak of theft in such a case.

“I tried to get it back for you, but unfortunately without success. You haven’t heard any more about it, Magda?”

She shakes her head as if it were all quite unimportant.

“You’re changed in other ways, Erwin,” she maintains. “Your voice sounds quite different, much louder.…”

“There’s fifty-six of us in one block, Magda,” I explain. “Over thirty men eat in the one room with me, so you have to strain your voice a bit if you want to make yourself understood.”

“I see.”

She smiles weakly, defensively.

“You lead a very changed life, don’t you, considering you were always so much for keeping to yourself.”

But again, with irritating obstinacy, she returns to my appearance, she can’t get over it.

“But you really look bad, Erwin. Is anything the matter?”

“Nothing,” I say deliberately. “Practically nothing. A few boils, look, I’ve got some on my neck here, and on my back … but one gets used to them, everyone in this place has them …” (Head-warder Fritsch clears his throat warningly. Perhaps this is unseemly criticism of the institution. But I would not dream of taking any notice of that.)

I continue, “And if I look thin and rather grey, well, Magda, we don’t get roast goose and red cabbage here every day. Generally we’re fed on good hot water.…”

Now my rage has run away with me, rage over the rejection of my love, over Magda’s horror of me: I speak with a voice trembling with scorn, I want to wound her to the heart, since I cannot move it. Head-warder Fritsch says threateningly: “One more remark like that, Sommer, and I’ll break this visit up and report you.”

Magda turns to him: “Oh, please don’t be cross with him! You can’t imagine how changed he is. He must have been having a terrible time!”

Her voice trembles, I listen to this weakening feminine voice with greedy delight.

“A little while ago he was a fine good-looking man—and now I wouldn’t have known him in the street!”

A few tears well up from the depths of her eyes and run slowly down her cheeks. I note them with delight. No, they do not move me. Nothing can soften my heart now, she has offended me too deeply! But I enjoy seeing her suffer too: she ought to be made to feel, and at last she does feel, what she has done to me, how seriously she has harmed me with her spying and her talk, what a fate she has brought down on my head. Magda continues, in almost feverish agitation, half turned to the head-warder, half to me: “But I can send you what you need, Erwin! If only I had known! May I send him a parcel of things to eat, Herr—?”

“That’s quite in order, Frau Sommer,” says Fritsch graciously. “Tobacco is allowed too. A great many things are allowed here—But,” he continues and looks at Magda, blinking out of his fat face, “you must remember many of these patients really don’t know when they’ve had enough. They eat and eat—a whole parcel, two loaves in one day! And then they’re ill and we have trouble with them. You mustn’t believe everything the patients tell you.”

And I have to sit quiet and listen to this common liar. The fat Fritsch is my superior, I dare not contradict him. I think of the figures of starvation back there, who eat potato peelings and lick off the table every drop of spilt gravy, and my rage rises within me again. But I control myself, I quickly say with a smile: “Thank you very much for your good intentions, Magda, but I really don’t need anything. Head-warder Fritsch is quite right: the patients don’t know when to stop. But thank the Lord I don’t belong among them. Please God I’ll soon be out of here.…”

Magda looks at me in confusion.

“But you yourself just spoke about getting water, Erwin …” she said.

“I spoke about roast goose,” I laughed, “and I only mentioned water as a contrast. No, no, Magda, think no more of it, we get quite sufficient to eat, as Herr Fritsch has explained. After all, I’m not doing any heavy work, I make brushes, Magda, I’ve become a real brush-maker. Can you imagine that, Magda? You’re sitting in my chair in the office, and your husband is making brushes in the meantime. Isn’t there a song about the happy brush-maker? Oh, no, it’s a happy soapboiler. But I’m happy and cheerful, brush-making in my cell. I whistle and sing all day, well, no, I don’t really, of course, because in this place where such a great many things are allowed, that is forbidden. But inwardly I whistle and sing.…”

I have been speaking faster and more sarcastically all the time, I am carried away with anger, but I manage to control myself. Outwardly, everything looks calm and peaceful. I notice the growing perplexity in Magda’s face; during my words she has occasionally used her handkerchief and wiped her eyes. Fritsch has been leaning back in his chair, with a bored expression, counting the flies on the ceiling. He is much too coarse-witted to detect the ironical undertone in my words. Incidentally, Magda is wearing a costume which I do not recognise: a very smart dark-grey costume with a light pinstripe. I reflect bitterly how my very own wife, while I am suffering beyond measure, has time and leisure to think of a new costume, to go to the dressmaker, to have fittings.… So unjustly is fortune shared out, so thoughtless are even the best of wives! By the way, Magda is looking very well, during the period of our separation she has considerably improved, she looks decidedly pretty. While I, during this time.…

57

After my swift ironical words, a deep silence ensues. I am in no hurry to break it. Magda fidgets rather uneasily in her chair, I am waiting for what she will say next. But when she begins to speak it is only to thank me for the power of attorney.

“I don’t really need it. Neither the post office nor the bank have made the slightest trouble about my signature. But I understand what you meant, Erwin, and I want to thank you for your good opinion of me.” She reaches her hand to me across the table, and I take it coolly and cautiously, being careful not to press it warmly. The hand returns somewhat disappointed to its owner.

“And how’s business?” I ask, just for something to say.

But Magda livens up.

“I’m happy to be able to tell you, Erwin, that business is going well. Yes, remarkably well. The harvest turned out quite satisfactorily, and we did well out of it. Particularly with peas and beans, I had unbelievable luck. I bought just before the price suddenly went up.…”

For a while we go on quietly talking about the business. Really, quite incontestably, an efficient woman. How her eyes light up, how lively her voice becomes, as she speaks of it! Her eyes did not light up before, when it concerned her husband. But it was always like that with her: the business, the garden, the house, everything was more important than her husband. I might have been jealous of these inanimate things, had it not been somewhat ridiculous. But perhaps not so ridiculous as this efficiency which the doctor found so praiseworthy, too. If only she could think a bit more rationally, she wouldn’t go to all that trouble, she would lease the business for a small income and live comfortably on our property. But of course such a thing wouldn’t occur to a woman of her kind.

So my thoughts ran on, while I listened absent-mindedly to Magda’s eager chatter, which awakened memories of old clients, of drives through off-the-track villages, of lucky deals.… But suddenly I prick my ears up, for Magda has mentioned our rival, the young beginner who had set up in my native town in defiance of myself, and had already given me some trouble on two or three occasions. Am I mistaken, or does a special undertone creep into Magda’s voice, something warmer than hitherto? I listen very attentively to what Magda is saying.

“Yes, just think, Erwin, I’ve got to know Herr Heinze personally. One day I got so angry about our constantly undercutting each other just for the sake of snatching a few customers, and we were both losing by it. So I simply went to his office and said: ‘Herr Heinze, I’m Frau Sommer, can’t we try to come to some sensible arrangement? There’s a living for both our firms in this town, but if we go on undercutting each other, we’ll both end up bankrupt!’ That’s what I told him.”

Magda looks at me triumphantly.

“And what did he say?” I ask eagerly.

“Well,” she says, and again I detect the warm undertone in her voice, “Herr Heinze is not only an educated man, he is intelligent as well. In five minutes we had come to an understanding. Every morning, midday and evening, we inform each other of the prices we’re paying, neither offers a groschen more or less, and poaching customers is completely abolished!”

“Oh, you innocent!” I cry, “he’ll land you properly in the cart. That Heinze is just a cunning double-dyed rogue. Naturally he’d say nothing to your face, but behind your back he’s pinching your customers one after the other. Eventually he’ll have the whole business in his hands, and you’ll be left with nothing!”

“Poor Erwin,” says Magda, “still so full of suspicions. No, I’ve got to know Herr Heinze really well. I meet him socially sometimes.…”

I wondered what lay behind that “socially sometimes” but Magda did not blush. She continued: “I know enough about human nature to be able to say: Herr Heinze is a thoroughly upright, decent man, whom I would trust blindly. And if you think me too trusting, Erwin, perhaps our books would be sufficient proof. We’ve increased our turnover by half as much again this autumn. That would hardly be the case if Herr Heinze had been snapping up our customers!”

She looked at me triumphantly, her eyes shining with joy. I said icily, “The figures on their own prove nothing. You say the harvest was good and the weather particularly favourable for early crops, so the turnover might well improve for a short time and you could still be losing customers.… By the way I can’t remember, wasn’t this Heinze married?”

“Certainly,” Magda nodded. “But he was divorced a year ago.”

“Is that so?” I answered, as indifferently as possible. “Divorced—of course, she divorced him?”

“How can you say such a thing,” cried Magda, almost furiously. “I told you just now he’s a highly respectable man. Of course the blame was on the other side!”

“Of course …” I repeated, rather sarcastically. “Pardon me, but you seem quite thrilled about this fellow, Magda!”

For a moment she hesitated, then she answered in a firm voice: “Yes, I am, Erwin!”

We looked at each other for a long time in silence. Many unsaid things were in the air. Even head-warder Fritsch had noticed something, he had leaned forward on his chair, his elbows propped on his knees, and watched us both expectantly. Incidentally, the usual visiting-time was over long ago.

58

“Have you already started divorce proceedings?” I finally asked, in a low voice.

“Yes,” she answered just as softly.

Again a deep silence fell between us. Suddenly we both looked round at head-warder Fritsch, who got up from his chair with a jerk and rattled his keys.

“Well,” he said, almost embarrassed, “visiting-time is up by rights, but as far as I’m concerned, you can have ten minutes more.” And he went over to the window where he ostentatiously turned his back on us.

“Erwin,” whispered Magda hastily, “I had a long struggle with myself, it seemed so wrong to leave you in such a position; but then when I heard from the medical officer that your case was going all right, and that you would probably be let out in a short time.…”

She looked at me imploringly, but I was silent. I did not help her with a single word. I was possessed by a wild and furious rage.

“We can arrange everything as you like, Erwin,” Magda continued still more hastily. “If you want to take over the business, all right. We’re ready to move away from here, too. Heinrich, I mean Heinze, will make over his business to you, too. Don’t look at me like that, Erwin, it won’t help! Inside ourselves we’ve been quite estranged for a long time, think of that horrible time when we were always quarrelling! It’s better if we part.…”

I was still silent; so that was the reason for the new costume, the fresh colours, the warm trembling undertone in her voice. A new man—and already the amorous little pigeon starts to coo. The husband is clapped into gaol, and along comes the other one, the upright one, the highly respectable one, whom she blindly trusts. I looked intently at her white neck, already becoming a little fat. Her throat moved, touched by her own words, the good woman swallowed her tears, as they say. I would so much have liked to span that throat with my two hands, and I swear I would not have let go again, for all the Fritsches! But I kept a tight hold of myself, only a few days separated me from freedom. It wasn’t only her I meant to get, there was the other one, the highly respectable one, who had the effrontery to steal the wife of a sick man! She still went on looking at me, and now when she began to speak, the tone of her voice had grown colder, she was no longer imploring. A line of determination, of hardness even, was about her mouth.

“You’re looking at me all the time and not saying a word,” she resumed. “I can see a threat of something dreadful in your eyes. But that won’t deter me, nothing can deter me. For once in my life I want to know happiness. I’ve sacrificed so many years for you, for your meanness, your obstinacy, your stupid conceit and misanthropy, and above all what you call your love. A funny kind of love, that I only get to feel when you have demands to make—but I never dare to make any! No, I’ve had enough of it.…”

She would probably have gone on talking but I had had enough of it too, of her tirade, I mean. After failing to lure me with sweetness, she was going to crush me with hatred. I leaned far over the table and spat right into her face.

“Adultress!” I cried.

At this loud exclamation, head-warder Fritsch turned from the window and stared in utter amazement for a moment at the scene confronting him: I, leaning across the table gazing at Magda contemptuously, threateningly, and my former wife, who made no move to wipe away the spittle that ran down her deadly pale cheek, returning my gaze steadfastly from the very depths of her brown eyes. And as we stared at each other in this way, it seemed to me as if I penetrated deeply into this woman with my gaze, sank right into her for a fraction of a second, and encountered a being I had never known.…

Then it was all over, for head-warder Fritsch had seized me by the shoulder and began to shake me furiously.

“You insolent swine!” he shouted. “What do you think you’re doing? I’ll report you to the medical officer! That’s a respectable woman, d’you understand?”

And he shook me again with all his strength, so that my head rolled loosely from side to side.

“Let the man go, warder,” said Magda, in a deep, utterly exhausted voice. “He’s perfectly right: I am an adultress.”

She paused for a moment as if in thought, then she turned to me, her eyes lit up again, her voice was ringing once more.

“And I’m glad I did it!” she said in my face.

Then she went slowly out of the visiting room wiping her face at last, though only mechanically.

59

How I got through the night after that dreadful meeting, I cannot say. I did not sleep for a minute, of that I am sure. That night I was utterly crushed and would have put an end to all my misery, had not the thought of revenge sustained me. And I intended to have my revenge down to the smallest detail, not merely after my release but immediately, by tomorrow I would set my plans in motion. I would engage a smart young lawyer and I would cross-petition in the divorce case, Sommer versus Sommer, and I would name Magda as the guilty party. Hadn’t I a witness, head-warder Fritsch, before whom she herself had admitted her adultery? Oh, I would give Magda every reason to regret that rash confession, and I had good grounds for hoping that that highly respectable and successful business-man Herr Heinrich Heinze would not be sparing of his reproaches about it either. Furthermore, I would lodge an application that the divorce court judge should forbid the two adulterous parties ever to marry each other. Oh, she would get to know the sort of happiness she longed for, under my whip. I would sell up the business and follow on their heels all the time, a constant avenging angel. I would never weary of it. If I was a bad partner in love, as Magda had suddenly discovered, I’d be so much the worse in hatred. And I pictured to myself how, on my travels, I would sleep in the next hotel room to theirs, and disturb their sleep with furtive knocking. I saw myself, unrecognisably disguised, getting into the same railway compartment, and watching everything they did from behind my dark glasses; I was driving a car immediately behind them, and only put my brakes on at the very last moment so as to gloat over their fear of death, and, the most beautiful of all my images of revenge, I saw her dying, murdered by me, but undetectably, and he was kneeling at her side, abandoned to utter despair, and I stood behind him and whispered in his ear what I had done, but of course it was undetectable—I raved, the images chased each other through my brain, I was feverish. My companions had long since fallen asleep and I still stood at the cell-window, spinning the web of my revenge ever tighter and more tangled, in the cold glitter of the stars.

Morning came, and found me empty and almost completely apathetic. I must have eaten my breakfast with the others, but I remember nothing of it. Before the working-parties fell in, I availed myself of an unguarded moment to slip over into my work-cell. The sight of my fellow-sufferers disgusted me. I seized a few bristles between two fingers and tried to insert them into the hole, but I had taken too many, as I had when I was first beginning. I let them fall carelessly to the ground and went over to the cupboard. By now I had writing-paper and envelopes in it, I ought to write the letter to the lawyer. But however urgent it had appeared to me in the night, I could not bring myself to it now. I stared at the paper for a while, then went to the window. Outside autumn was drawing on already—swaths of grey mist drifted across the countryside, I saw the first early potato-pickers among the rows. “Autumn is coming,” I said to myself. “That’s bad.” I did not know myself what I meant. I only knew that I was in a bad way, very bad. Two lines from a poem I once read, ran through my head: “This is the autumn, it will break your heart.”

Obstinately, they returned, they kept returning with a desperate obstinacy.

“This is the autumn, it will break your heart.” Two words tacked themselves on: “Fly away! Fly away!”

Yes, to be able to fly away from this soiled world, from this unclean “I”! And again and again: “This is the autumn, it will break your heart,” and again the echoing warning: “Fly away! Fly away!”

I looked across at the stout knife with which I levelled-off the bristles. It would be such an easy matter to cut my arm so that I bled to death. But I knew I would never have the courage to do it. For I was cowardly, at this moment I confessed to myself without reserve, that I was a coward; when Magda was enumerating my faults, she had forgotten that one.

“Fly away!” And still too cowardly.…

So the head-nurse found me. He had missed me from among those who came to be bandaged. He spoke sharply to me: my boils would never get better unless I took care to have them dressed regularly! Completely indifferent, I followed him to the medical room. The stream of patients had gone away, I was the last. The head-nurse tore off my dressings, applied ointment and iodine, and lanced a boil which seemed to him to be ripe. Sensitive as I usually am to pain, this morning I took no notice at all. I was completely dulled. Then the telephone rang in the glass box. The head-nurse went away, leaving the door wide open. For a moment I stood motionless, then my gaze sought the medicine-chest, whose door stood open also. I took a quick step towards it. There lay many hours of oblivion, release from the unbearable torture in which I was living now, the means to good peace-giving sleep for days on end. My hand was grasping a small glass tube, when my glance fell on a row of bottles that stood on the lowest shelf. Right in front stood a half-filled bottle with the label: Alcohol 95%. I had made no decision, I acted quite mechanically. I did not bother at all about the open door, or the head-nurse who was bound to return at any moment. I took the bottle and went to the wash-basin that was let into the wall. I took a tumbler and poured out two-thirds of a glass of alcohol, then very carefully I filled it up with water. My hand did not shake. I put the potent mixture to my mouth and drank it down in three or four gulps. For a moment I stood as if stunned, an immense brightness spread rapidly within me. I smiled, ah, that happiness, again that wonderful boundless happiness. My Elinor, my reine d’alcool! How I love you! How—I—love—you! Senseless, I fell forward to the floor, flat on my disfigured face.

60

My case was never heard. The proceedings against me were suspended under Paragraph 51 and my permanent detention in an asylum was ordered. The divorce case was heard, however, but it was not necessary for me to be present, for by now I was certified. One of the chief secretaries, over in the asylum administration, has been made my guardian. Incidentally, both Magda and I were decreed guilty, but Magda was allowed to marry her Heinrich Heinze, my petition never came up for consideration. I am only a lunatic. I saw the announcement of their wedding in the newspaper. They have two children now, a boy and a girl; they have merged the two businesses—but what has that to do with me? What has the outside world to do with me? I don’t care about anything. I’m just an ageing, repulsive-looking brush-maker, of moderate proficiency, insane. The initial period of raging desperation is over. I gave up long ago the notion of putting my arm under the knife and trying whether I might, just for one minute of my life, be courageous. I know that every single second of my life I have been a coward, I am a coward, I shall go on being a coward. Useless to expect anything else.

I enjoy a certain degree of trust in this place, I cause no trouble, I make no work, I keep myself apart from the others. I can move about the place fairly freely. Only I am never allowed to enter the medical room unless the head-nurse is there, under pain of eight weeks in the punishment cells. I would often like to, I could do so occasionally, but I dare not. I am just a coward.

I am quite comfortably off, I always have enough to smoke and never suffer from hunger. Twice a week my guardian does my shopping, out of the money which my former wife regularly pays in on my behalf. He buys me whatever I want that is permissible. I can never use up all the money that is paid in, I shall die a wealthy man. I have no idea to whom the money will go, and I am not interested. The will I had previously drawn up was made invalid by the divorce, and I cannot make a new one, I am insane of course. But I am not so insane, and have not grown so apathetic, that I haven’t still a plan and a little hope. Of course, I have had to give up all thoughts of the knife, but I can endure, I am able to bear whatever may befall me. I am, if I may say so without presumption, a great sufferer.

I have not previously mentioned the fact that on the ground floor of the annexe we have five or six tubercular patients, who are isolated from us. They get rather better and richer food and need do no more work until they die. These patients have little flasks in which to expectorate, and their isolation is not so strict that I, who am allowed to move about the place quite freely, cannot sometimes get hold of these flasks. I just drink them. I have already drunk three of these little flasks, and I shall drink more of them.

No, I do not intend to grow very old in this place and slowly rot away, I want to die a kind of death which anyone outside might die—a death of my own choosing.

I am certain that I already have tuberculosis. I have constant stabbing pains in my chest, and I cough a great deal, but I do not report this to the doctor, I conceal my illness; I want to become so ill first, that I cannot be saved in any circumstances. And then, once I am lying in the annexe and my last hour is near, I will have the doctor come to me and I will say to him, “Doctor, I have caused you much pain and anger, and you have never been able to forgive me, that on my account the report you had prepared was annulled, by reason of which your reputation as a psychiatrist suffered in the eyes of the court. But now that my end is near, forgive me, and do me one last favour,” and he will make his peace with me, because I am a dying man and one does not refuse anything to a dying man, and he will ask what that favour is.

And I shall say to him: “Doctor, go to the medical room and mix me with your own hands a drink of alcohol and water, just a tumblerful. Not of a kind which will make me unconscious immediately so that I have no benefit from it, as before, but one that will make me really happy again.”

And he will accede to my wish and return to my bedside with the glass, and I will drink, at last after so many years of privation I will drink, gulp by gulp, at long intervals, savouring my endless happiness to the full. And I will become young again, and I will see the world blossoming, all the springtimes and the roses and the young girls from time past. But one will approach me and lean her pale face over me, who have fallen on my knees before her, and she will enshroud me with her dark hair. Her perfume will be about me and her lips laid on mine and I will no longer be old and disfigured, but young and beautiful, and my reine d’alcool will draw me up to her and we will soar into intoxication and forgetfulness from which there is never any awakening!

And if it happens thus in the hour of my death, I shall bless my life, and I shall not have suffered in vain.

STRELITZ,

6.9.44—21.9.44.

AFTERWORD

IN ‘The Goose Girl’, subject of one of George Cruikshank’s most charming illustrations, the brothers Grimm tell the story of a lovely young princess riding with her personal maid to the city where she is to marry a royal prince. The maid threatens to kill her, usurps her clothes and her horse ‘Falada’, and successfully impersonates her in the royal apartments; the princess is sent off with the boy Curdken to mind the royal geese. Frightened that the horse may tell what has happened, the imposter has it beheaded. But ‘when the true princess heard of it she wept’,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 tonothing 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 thatI 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 country-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?

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?, whofirst 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. Already 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 wordsBut 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, thatin 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 author 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.

If there is an English analogy here it is with Evelyn Waugh, whose opinions and actions are by no means progressive or universally admired, yet who wrote a handful of books that share much the same conflicting qualities as Fallada’s. Thus whatever the nature of Waugh’s professed view of English society and of the issues for which it was fighting in the nineteen forties, it did not stop him from producing the extraordinarily revealing trilogy about the Second World War for which he will long be read. And similarly, in Wolf Among Wolves and Jeder stirbt für sich allein the awkward misfit Fallada achieved something that an admirable, humane, intelligent, constructively-disposed, much less anguished-looking ‘inner emigrant’ like Erich Kästner never, so far as is known, even attempted: a large-scale critique of the reality around him. But the obvious comparison to be made with Waugh relates to that author’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, the critically observed, largely satirical account of a middle-aged man’s fantasies which reads as a brilliant work of the imagination. Like The Drinker it is not quite that, for, as Francis Donaldson showed us in her Portrait of a Country Neighbour, it closely reflects a very strange period in Waugh’s life when he was haunted simultaneously by the ‘black box’ of fringe medicine and by a team of BBC interviewers, and began drugging himself with soporifics. Pinfold in other words was rooted in a peculiar kind of reality outside normal experience, just as Fallada’s hallucinatory novel is rooted in his breakdown of 1944. Both books can be read without any knowledge of their background in the real world of their authors’ lives, both are set down objectively without a preconceived display of moral, religious or political prejudices and principles; if anything they are likely to extend, if not actually conflict with the reader’s prior ideas about the writer in question. For both imply a lot about their country, and both are relevant to the remainder of their author’s writing. Is it then illuminating to know the true biographical and psychological setting? Is it a help to the reader? Does it matter?

Despite what Tucholsky and others said about Fallada’s failure to write an ‘artistic masterpiece’, one of the main lessons of Neue Sachlichkeit is that there is nothing inartistic about authenticity; the artistry lies not in the style but in the way that authenticity is structured and handled. Moreover there is not much—at least in Western societies—that does more damage to our contemporary arts than the assumption that a work cannot be serious if it is clearly, even simply expressed, reflects reality and holds the attention of its audience. What distinguishes the writings of artists like Waugh and Fallada, then, from those trivial entertainers whom, in sales terms, they may be thought to rival is their ability to select, however unconsciously, from the real world round them and treat their material imaginatively but honestly, without distortion. The shape, the play of continuity and contrast, the element of timing involved in exciting narrative or masterly poetry, these are what needs to be brought to bear on the writer’s experience if it is to appeal to the reader’s imagination, and not just to his or her appetite for random facts.

The artist who can bring this off is worth study, for the secret of his success has to be looked for in some particular relationship between his gifts, the breadth of his experience and his individual development as a person. Admirable as they are, niceness and morality are not what determines this; we are struck in the first place by the artistic success, which we may sense quite naively, then feel that its deeper reasons must need exploring, and go on to find a new sympathy with the actual personality together with all its weaknesses and faults. Indeed we may even think we hate or despise a writer, yet wish very much to know them better because we see that beyond this superficial reaction there is a unity between the individual and his or her achievement that demands to be understood. Nowhere is this more the case than when an extraordinary work is created out of extraordinary suffering, particularly when the means seem so ordinary and direct as those which Fallada uses. We are back to the goose girl of German popular tradition. The writer is beheaded, the writer reports. Bleeding reality becomes material for the imagination. There are not two heads for the passer-by to look at but one.

JOHN WILLETT

ABOUT HANS FALLADA

HANS FALLADA was the pseudonym of Rudolph Ditzen, who was born in 1893 in Berlin, the son of a superior court judge. Prior to WWII, his novels were international bestsellers. But when Jewish producers in Hollywood made his 1932 novel, Little Man, What Now? into a major motion picture, the rising Nazis began to take note of him. His struggles increased after he refused to join the Party and was denounced by neighbors for “anti-Nazi” sympathies. Unlike many other prominent artists, however, Fallada decided not to flee Germany. By the end of World War II he’d suffered an alcohol-fueled nervous breakdown and was in a Nazi insane asylum, where he nonetheless managed to write—in code—the brilliant subversive novel, The Drinker. After the war, Fallada went on to write Every Man Dies Alone, based on an actual Gestapo file, but he died in 1947 of a morphine overdose, just before it was published.

Other books by Hans Fallada available

Every Man Dies Alone

“Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone is one of the most extraordinary and compelling novels ever written about World War II. Ever. Fallada lived through the Nazi hell, so every word rings true—this is who they really were: the Gestapo monsters, the petty informers, the few who dared to resist. Please, do not miss this.”

—Alan Furst, author of Spies of Warsaw

“The greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis.”

—Primo Levi

“An unrivalled and vivid portrait of life in wartime Berlin.”

—Philip Kerr, author of the Berlin Noir series

Little Man, What Now?

“Painfully true to life … I have read nothing so engaging as Little Man, What Now for a long time.”

—Thomas Mann

“There are chapters which pluck the nerves … there are chapters which raise the spirits like a fine day in the country. The truth and variety of the characterization is superb … it recognizes that the world is not to be altered with moral fables …”

—Graham Greene

“An inspired work of a great writer hitherto neglected in the English-speaking world. Fallada is a genius at bringing his wide range of colorful characters to life. The ‘Little Man’ is Mr. Everybody.”

—Beryl Bainbridge