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’.