More than 60 years after his death, German author Hans Fallada last year made a literary splash in the U.S. with the publication of the English translation of his Every Man Dies Alone. The novel (my favorite of the year) was based on the true story of a working class couple in Berlin who mounted their own modest campaign of resistance against the Nazi regime by dropping postcards containing anti-Nazi and anti-Hitler messages throughout the city.
Melville House is back with another Fallada novel, the first unabridged English translation of Wolf Among Wolves. While Every Man Dies Alone examines personal integrity for average Germans under the Nazis, Wolf Among Wolves takes an even closer look at integrity in the aftereffects of World War I that contributed to Hitler's rise to power.
Although first published in 1937 (with an abridged translation published in the U.S. the following year), the book is emblematic of the Neue Sachlichkeit ("New Objectivity") movement that arose in 1920s Germany. It was a school of artistic expression that "vividly depicted and excoriated the corruption, frantic pleasure seeking and general demoralization of Germany following its defeat in the war and the ineffectual Weimar Republic which governed until the arrival in power of the Nazi Party in 1933."
Fallada — the pen name of Rudolf Ditzen — does this through the eyes of characters who served in the war or come from a variety of social classes, all struggling with finding or holding on to a place in a collapsing economy in 1923. Akin to a tolling bell, from the first page Wolf Among Wolves periodically details the value of the German mark in the rampant hyperinflation of the times. (In the roughly five months covered by the book, the number of marks it took to equal a U.S. dollar increased from 414,000 to 4.2 trillion.)
The copious detail with which Fallada creates his characters and explores the dismay and decadence of German society is established at the outset. Just under half the nearly 800-page book is devoted solely to July 26, 1923. The day is not notable in German history. It evidently is one Fallada picked to portray an average day of life at the time. He builds Wolf Among Wolves around Wolfgang Pagel, a former army second lieutenant and current inveterate gambler, his live-in girlfriend Petra, and his former military comrades, Rittmeister (Captain) Joachim von Prackwitz and Oberleutnant (Senior Lieutenant) Etzel von Studmann. Numerous other characters appear, several of whom occasionally disappear for large portions of the book before returning, most of them family members or individuals who work at the large farming estate von Prackwitz leases from his in-laws. This portion of the book portrays the decadence and decay of German society in its most vivid detail.
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