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.