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?