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
