Wolf Among Wolves

Afterword

Among German novelists of the first half of the twentieth century, Hans Fallada stands out as the chronicler of the proverbial little man and his fight for happiness and dignity in times of severe hardship. In Wolf Among Wolves, first published in 1937, Fallada presents us with an inspiring tale of perseverance in an era of political, social and economic upheaval. Set in 1923 amidst the rampant inflation that gripped Germany following World War I, Wolf Among Wolves has been referred to by literary critics as “a masterpiece of critical realism” and “one of the major novels published in fascist Germany.” It is now regarded as the author’s most ambitious literary achievement.

With Wolf Among Wolves, Fallada returned, after a foray into children’s literature, to the gritty and ethically infused realism that had established him as one of the few bestselling German authors of the 1920s and 1930s. For all its unrestrained epic power, the novel is a compelling example of his concern with the intricacies of composition. What is striking from the beginning is the symphonic quality of the text. In Part One of the novel, covering only twenty-four hours, the omniscient narrator weaves a web of interrelated characters and stories. “A girl and a man were sleeping on a narrow iron bed. […] The dollar stands for the moment at 414,000 marks.” From the very first sentences, Fallada’s epic throws the reader into the middle of things: a dingy Berlin boarding house, on a hot day in July 1923, at six o’clock in the morning. From here, the reader is taken on a journey to varied locales that are linked in one way or another to the story that is about to unfold: apartments and avenues, police stations and prison cells, roulette parlors and hotel cafés, and, eventually, the countryside. With its swift fluctuation between places and characters, the novel reads almost like a movie script. Throughout, Wolf Among Wolves is long on action, short on reflection, and one of Falladas greatest strength’s as a writer is his ability to gradually build up narrative tension. Providing the reader with glimpses into the lives of his main characters, he successfully appropriates the montage style that was highly popular in Weimar cinema.

The protagonist is Wolfgang Pagel, the man on the “narrow iron bed,” a young former soldier who inhabits a corrupt world, in which the miseries of inflation have created an atmosphere of cynical self-advancement. Immature and selfish at the outset of the story, Pagel undergoes a fundamental transformation that allows him to embark upon the humanist mission of the novel, which is to find “something on earth which was still worth [the] effort.” As one character says about the resilient Pagel: “You want to go through all this misery? Such an appetite for life, young man, could give one indigestion!” Pagel spends four months on the Neulohe estate east of the Elbe because, in the words of his pregnant girlfriend Petra Ledig, he “must become a man before he can be a father.” Pagel meets this challenge, and by the end of the novel he is working toward a medical degree at Berlin’s Humboldt University. His development from a drifting gambler, who sees in roulette “the prospect of something big,” to a medical student eager to devote his life to helping others is unparalleled in Fallada’s work. The narrator comments emphatically, “Once he had been merely lovable—then he became worthy of love.”

As the action proceeds, the novel becomes more relentless in its depiction of people “who from day to day increasingly lost all feeling of self-respect and propriety.” The loss of moral rectitude parallels currency devaluation, the dispiriting effect of which is evoked in an early passage:

A feeling of impotent hatred overcame Rittmeister Joachim von Prackwitz. Somewhere in this town there was a machine—naturally a machine, for men would never submit to be prostituted for such a purpose—which vomited paper day and night over the city and the people. “Money” they called it; they printed figures on it, beautiful neat figures with many noughts, which became increasingly rounder. And when you had worked and sweated to put by a little for your old age, it all became worthless paper, paper muck.

The Berlin of the inflation years as depicted in Wolf Among Wolves is one of moral depravity—a place known for “heroin and cocaine, ‘snow,’ nude dances, French champagne and American cigarettes, influenza, hunger, despair, fornication and crime.” In one of the most powerful passages in the novel, the narrator describes the city as a veritable “Oriental bazaar”: “Dealers, beggars, strumpets: almost shoulder to shoulder they stood on both sides of the pavement.” As Joachim von Prackwitz, the farmer from the Neulohe estate, promenades through Friedrichstraße, then and now one of Berlin’s bustling avenues, he is appalled by “the misery, the indecency, the demoralization which manifest[s] itself in Berlin in broad daylight.” Judging from their suggestive glances, even the young salesgirls are already trapped in this urban netherworld: “Why save oneself up for tomorrow? Who knows where the dollar will stand, who knows whether we shall be still alive tomorrow?” Forcing his way through the crowd, Prackwitz arrives at the arcade passing from Unter den Linden to Friedrichstraße and enters, sensing that “he might have come from purgatory into hell”:

The shops paraded huge pot-boiler pictures of naked women, repulsively naked, with revoltingly sweet pink breasts. Chains of indecent picture-postcards hung everywhere. […] But the young boys were by far the worst of all. In their sailor suits, with smooth bare chests, cigarettes impudently sticking in their lips, they glided about everywhere; they did not speak, but they looked at you and touched you.

Overcome with “shuddering nausea,” Prackwitz, who throughout the novel is characterized by his childlike naïveté, finally comes to think of Neulohe “as an untouched island of purity,” a provincial refuge from Berlin, that “morass of infamy.”

Fallada’s Berlin is not the right place for Wolfgang Pagel to mature and develop into a responsible, compassionate man. It is in the country, at the estate in East Prussia, that Pagel learns the benefits of hard work. As the narrator puts it in one of the hundreds of passages that was left out in the 1938 translation: “… these were not the times to rely on God in Heaven. These were times to work yourself until you drop.” By the end of the novel, Pagel, whom we first meet gambling in the Berlin night clubs, is in charge of the estate’s accounts. He is the last man standing, desperately trying to manage a farm that has been ruined by the incompetence, indifference, and greed of almost everybody around him.

Reviewing Wolf Among Wolves in The New Yorker in 1938, Clifton Fadiman criticized the novel for its “somewhat unconvincing notion that the countryside possesses magical curative values for those rotted by the vices of the city.” However, there is nothing in Wolf Among Wolves that indicates a simplistic economy of geographical disparities. In fact, Pagel is quick to realize that the country is no less corrupt than the city and that the idyllic vision of a “peace of the fields,” which Studmann had conjured upon their arrival in Neulohe, is a mere delusion. Both metropolis and countryside are places of extreme disillusionment, of social, economic and political uncertainty. A few years prior to Wolf Among Wolves, Fallada had argued that the way of life of farmers had yet to be convincingly captured by German artists. Working on farms in northern and eastern Germany during the immediate postwar years, he witnessed both the plight of the laborers and the economic forces affecting farmers. Wolf Among Wolves illustrates that, as H.J. Schueler sums up in his seminal study on Fallada’s fiction, “the times were just as terribly out of joint on the land as in the cities.”

Fallada depicts a society in which each individual pursues his or her own self-interest—a pack of lone and hungry wolves, as the title suggests. As Schueler puts it, “The quest for survival proves to be the paramount concern of all the parties involved in the bitter battle of all against all.” Wolfgang Pagel lives among these wolves, but he will not become one of them. Rising above the feverish roulette rooms, he overcomes the temptation to succumb to society’s demoralizing influence. In spite of his surroundings, Pagel forges ahead, managing to find values worth holding onto, and proving that he is more than just a “leaf on life’s stream.” In Fallada’s view, the individual is not determined by society, but rather has the chance to shape his own fate. It is up to him how he responds to social and moral ills. And yet, some are too weak to meet the challenges, as the example of the Rittmeister Joachim von Prackwitz, the Neulohe farmer, illustrates. Amidst the chaos of the inflation year, with the estate in desperate need of responsible management, his wife realizes how incompetent he is: “a weakling, spineless, without self-control, at the mercy of every influence, a babbler.” The uniform and the firm world-view that came with it had provided him with security, but now it becomes clear that there is “nothing in him, nothing, no core, no faith, no ambition, not one thing to give him the power to resist.” The Prackwitz family is at the center of the descent into moral turpitude, and the kidnapping of their daughter by one of their servants is the painful culmination of the family’s disintegration.

While the Rittmeister is shattered by the challenges of the times, “lost, in a lost age,” Wolfgang Pagel emerges morally invigorated from his stay in the country. Unlike Prackwitz, he will learn how to assume responsibility for his own actions. As the former soldier matures, he comes to rethink his definition of courage:

I used to think that courage meant standing up straight when a shell exploded and taking your share of the shrapnel. Now I know that’s mere stupidity and bravado; courage means keeping going when something becomes completely unbearable.

The end of the novel mirrors the beginning. One year has passed, it is once more summer in the city, and Wolfgang and Petra are lying in bed. And yet, the narrator informs us, “everything has become very different.” Most importantly, they have both repudiated their previous behavior. Petra, the girl from the streets, has spent the intervening time working in a rag-and-bone business, determined not to see Wolfgang again until he grew up: “Is my child to have such a spoiled darling for its father,” she had asked herself, “one for whom I have no proper respect?” Wolfgang has struggled to prove himself worthy of Petra’s respect, realizing that assuming the role of husband and father requires him to accept responsibility for his own actions. Fallada was no doubt a “dedicated humanist,” as Schueler writes, and it is through sincere commitment to others that Wolfgang can redeem himself. This central lesson is spelled out in a passage that was omitted in the 1938 translation:

Wolfgang Pagel reflected that, not long ago, he had thought with pride: “I’m not tied to anything; I can do what I want; I’m free …” Yes, Wolfgang Pagel—now you understand: you were free, unfettered like a wild animal. But humanity is not about doing what you want, but rather about doing what you must.

* * *

Hans Fallada wrote Wolf unter Wölfen in a frenzy. Convinced that the book would end up “in the drawer” anyway, Fallada worked with unchecked ingenuity, temporarily relieved from the depressive illness that had already resulted in several stays in sanatoriums, an illness that can be detected in personal letters such as the one he wrote to fellow writer Hermann Broch: “I must write, narrate, tell stories, but basically it is a sad business; it won’t make you happier, and it has no meaning.” Fallada began Wolf Among Wolves on July 27, 1936, without having a clear idea of the scope of what he had undertaken. Since he was inventing the plot and characters as he moved along, the introduction—intended as the novel’s rather brief opening chapter—eventually grew into the entire first book. Getting up at four o’clock in the morning, he managed, at the pinnacle of his creative powers, to produce 123 handwritten pages a week: a personal record, “which I do pride myself on,” as he acknowledged in a letter to his publisher Ernst Rowohlt on May 9, 1937. Two days later, Fallada finished the manuscript, which by now comprised 1,400 pages. With the first print-run of 10,000 copies selling out by mid-November, Wolf Among Wolves proved an instant, if surprising, success for Rowohlt.

Wolf Among Wolves is a Zeitroman—a historical novel, providing an elaborate account of a particular moment in time and of how a diverse group of characters, taken from all walks of life, cope with that time. Unlike more theoretical writers, whose fiction is shaped by a coherent worldview, Fallada is not concerned with exploring the political and economic context of the inflation years. His focus is on action, and his love for storytelling is everywhere apparent in his work. Wolf Among Wolves occupies an exceptional position within Fallada’s oeuvre, as the author successfully combines the two strands that run throughout his prose: reportage and narration. The objective and disaffected voice of the chronicler mixes with the emphatic and deeply involved voice of the storyteller. Stylistically, Fallada chose to throw all modernist pretenses overboard. His language is rooted in the everyday, and as with his other novels, the strength of Wolf Among Wolves lies in the close-up characterization. There is nothing artificial, nothing academic about his characters; they are presented “with such closeness to life,” as Hermann Hesse once put it, that the reader cannot but feel invested in their fictional fate.

In Wolf Among Wolves, we witness the culmination of a theme that was at the heart of the two novels Little Man, What Now? and The World Outside. As the German weekly Der Spiegel put it in 1947, these works depicted “the individual’s helpless entanglement in the prevailing circumstances of his times.” It is his profound understanding of the varied problems that arise out of economic misery that accounts for Fallada’s ongoing relevance up to the present day. He has been compared to predecessors such as Dickens, Flaubert and the German realist writers Wilhelm Raabe and Theodor Fontane—authors he read when he was still in his teenage years. But none of these writers, who are now credited with heralding the start of literary modernism, ever wrote fiction that could be called strictly realist in the sense of being a photographic, non-ambivalent representation of the world outside.

The same holds true of Hans Fallada. While Fallada’s famed novels of the 1930s are often classified as prime examples of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), his work transcends straightforward realism limited to the depiction of real-life events in a real-life world. It is in brief hallucinatory statements and other deviations from our shared reality that the complex undercurrents of his fiction manifest themselves. The present edition is the first-ever unexpurgated English translation of Wolf unter Wölfen. Numerous passages that were omitted in the 1938 edition, published by Putnam’s in London and New York, have been newly translated, and it is astonishing to observe how one’s overall impression of the novel is altered once the “lost” passages are restored to the text.

What, then, are the politics of translation that account for the numerous cuts in the first English edition? The omitted passages share certain features. To begin with, the 1938 edition dispenses on several occasions with paragraphs that, while not advancing the plot, elaborate on the characters’ feelings or behavior. Take this omitted passage, for example, in which the narrator provides us with an important comment on one of the main characters’ attitude to Frau von Prackwitz:

She’d paralyzed his ability to think, to analyse, and to explain himself. Herr von Studmann was over thirty-five and hadn’t believed that he would experience this any more, with such spontaneity, such power. In fact, he didn’t really know he was experiencing it. He sat there innocently, his eyes betraying nothing. His words remained thoughtful and moderate. Yet it had happened!

Recently, critics have pointed out how fairy-tales and myths provide important subtexts for Fallada’s fiction. It is often those passages that contradict the claim to naturalistic representation that were cut from the 1938 translation. Take for instance the following paragraph, which exhibits an almost surreal mode of perception:

Occasionally, in the midst of some work or worry, she would glance from the narrow prison of herself at one such picture on the wall as if seeing it for the first time. Then something seemed to want to lightly touch her, as if something asleep were waking.… Stop! Oh, please stop! Everything was very bright. A tree, for instance, in the sun, in the air, against a clear summer sky. But the tree seemed to rise up, the wind to blow gently. The tree moved. Was it flying? Yes, the whole earth was flying, the sun, the play of light and air—everything was light, swift, soft. Oh, stop, you relentless, bright world!

In short, the fully reconstructed text, with its enhanced inconsistency, provides the reader with insight into a literary aesthetics that is unique among the novels of German modernism: Fallada combines realist prose and ethical concerns with a narrative technique that renders ambiguous what is supposedly a semi-documentary representation, shaped by his very own experiences in the country.

The last chapter of the novel is called “The Miracle of the Rentenmark,” and while the title refers to the introduction of a stable currency and the return to rationality, it also refers to the miraculous outcome of a novel shaped by an atmosphere of impending doom. But the couple’s “tranquil happiness” in the novel’s final scene, embodied in the soft breathing of their child, is complicated by traumatic memory and its purchase on the present. Strikingly, the short passage that fleshes out this adverse undercurrent was omitted in the 1938 translation:

The woman examines this familiar face, but it is undisturbed by worry, and untroubled by cares. Sometimes in the night he starts to speak. He’s frightened, he cries out … Then she wakes him and says: ‘You’re thinking about it again.’

It is in this passage that the narrative comes full circle. While at the beginning of the novel Pagel had been tortured by nightmares about gambling, his sleep is now perturbed by the memory of Neulohe.

Reviewing the novel in 1938, some American critics complained about the sentimental, love-conquers-all ending. As the culmination of Pagel’s personal development, reviewers found this outcome unconvincing. Interestingly enough, Fallada himself shared these concerns. In a letter to Hermann Broch, he conceded it might have been better to let his hero founder. This statement is complicated, however, by several other private comments that suggest Fallada’s ambivalence about his work. Writing to his mother in May and August 1937, he repeatedly called Wolf Among Wolves “an absolutely positive” book, maintaining that “the brave manage to keep afloat, whereas the unfit fail.” This contrasts with Fallada’s remarks about the book being “very pessimistic” and full of “dark undertones.” The German people, especially Wolfgang Pagel and Petra Ledig, may have awoken “from a confused torturing dream,” as the narrator suggests in the last chapter, but this dream will continue to haunt them. On a larger historical scale, the fact that the stabilization of the economy was rather short-lived markedly undermines the narrator’s firm declaration that “once more there was a meaning in work and life.” But the “fresher wind,” which stirs the curtains in the novel’s final section and thus contrasts with the stifling heat and the “dull vapor” of the first chapter, was soon to be contaminated by the advance of Hitler and the NSDAP. The same reservations about the book’s supposedly hopeful ending hold true with regard to its protagonist: Wolfgang Pagel’s ethics of responsibility are called into question by his financial reliance on his mother. It is therefore important to note, as Geoff Wilkes reminds us, “how the novel’s optimism about personal relationships and personal morality was undermined by the very existence of the oppressive Nazi regime.”

Perhaps the finest aspect of Wolf Among Wolves is the character of Etzel von Studmann, and it is Fallada’s portrayal of this “eternal nursemaid” that further corroborates Der Spiegel’s 1947 verdict that this book could, in fact, be seen as “hopelessly depressing.” Though Studmann, who is “always ready to help,” embodies the humanist core of the novel, he finally withdraws from society, taking up a position as resident administrator in a sanatorium where he might as well spend the rest of his life:

The thought has nothing terrifying for him. He has no wish to be outside again in the world of the healthy. He has discovered that he cannot accommodate himself to life. He had his standards, wished life to adapt itself to them. Life didn’t do this, and Herr von Studmann foundered. In great and in little things.

By the time he started work on Wolf Among Wolves, Fallada had already experienced the full impact of Nazi cultural propaganda, having received several particularly vicious reviews from right wing critics for his previous book. This is the context of the peculiar “Word to the Reader” which precedes the novel. Fallada here justifies his decision to render the protagonist of that previous novel, Once We Had a Child, “such a brute.” Eager to subvert similar complaints about his new book, Fallada warns his readers “that Wolf Among Wolves deals with sinful, weak, sensual, erring unstable men, the children of an age disjointed, mad and sick.” A slap at Weimar, to placate the Nazis? The foreword was deleted from the novel after 1945. And yet, Fallada scholars such as Geoff Wilkes consider the preface to be ambiguous. As Wilkes has noted, “All this could be taken as referring to the economic and political turmoil of 1923 specifically, rather than to the Republic as such, and therefore not as placating the Nazis.”

Ultimately, one must consider whether Fallada’s note accurately reflects the attitude of the book, which it clearly does not. If anything, the note, as Wilkes suggests, is “an authentic expression of how Fallada had to walk a political tightrope in 1936–37.” And while he was not like his character Studmann—who, as it says in the book, “could make no concessions”—Fallada did walk the line with bravery. The note’s celebration of the rescue from the perils of inflation, a “both recent and yet entirely eclipsed” time, encapsulates his position in Nazi Germany rather succinctly: while at times writing warily with the official ideology in mind, he also asserted his own humane values. Utterly convinced that he had taken “a formidable risk,” Fallada himself regarded the novel as the uncompromising product of his newly awakened will to write, “regardless of the consequences” his words might have: “I was once again gripped by the old familiar passion; I wrote without looking up, nor did I look round either—neither to the left, nor to the right.”

THORSTEN CARSTENSEN,

New York University