The Drinker (26 page)

60

My case was never heard. The proceedings against me were suspended under Paragraph 51 and my permanent detention in an asylum was ordered. The divorce case was heard, however, but it was not necessary for me to be present, for by now I was certified. One of the chief secretaries, over in the asylum administration, has been made my guardian. Incidentally, both Magda and I were decreed guilty, but Magda was allowed to marry her Heinrich Heinze, my petition never came up for consideration. I am only a lunatic. I saw the announcement of their wedding in the newspaper. They have two children now, a boy and a girl; they have merged the two businesses—but what has that to do with me? What has the outside world to do with me? I don’t care about anything. I’m just an ageing, repulsive-looking brush-maker, of moderate proficiency, insane. The initial period of raging desperation is over. I gave up long ago the notion of putting my arm under the knife and trying whether I might, just for one minute of my life, be courageous. I know that every single second of my life I have been a coward, I am a coward, I shall go on being a coward. Useless to expect anything else.

I enjoy a certain degree of trust in this place, I cause no trouble, I make no work, I keep myself apart from the others. I can move about the place fairly freely. Only I am never allowed to enter the medical room unless the head-nurse is there, under pain of eight weeks in the punishment cells. I would often like to, I could do so occasionally, but I dare not. I am just a coward.

I am quite comfortably off, I always have enough to smoke and never suffer from hunger. Twice a week my guardian does my shopping, out of the money which my former wife regularly pays in on my behalf. He buys me whatever I want that is permissible. I can never use up all the money that is paid in, I shall die a wealthy man. I have no idea to whom the money will go, and I am not interested. The will I had previously drawn up was made invalid by the divorce, and I cannot make a new one, I am insane of course. But I am not so insane, and have not grown so apathetic, that I haven’t still a plan and a little hope. Of course, I have had to give up all thoughts of the knife, but I can endure, I am able to bear whatever may befall me. I am, if I may say so without presumption, a great sufferer.

I have not previously mentioned the fact that on the ground floor of the annexe we have five or six tubercular patients, who are isolated from us. They get rather better and richer food and need do no more work until they die. These patients have little flasks in which to expectorate, and their isolation is not so strict that I, who am allowed to move about the place quite freely, cannot sometimes get hold of these flasks. I just drink them. I have already drunk three of these little flasks, and I shall drink more of them.

No, I do not intend to grow very old in this place and slowly rot away, I want to die a kind of death which anyone outside might die—a death of my own choosing.

I am certain that I already have tuberculosis. I have constant stabbing pains in my chest, and I cough a great deal, but I do not report this to the doctor, I conceal my illness; I want to become so ill first, that I cannot be saved in any circumstances. And then, once I am lying in the annexe and my last hour is near, I will have the doctor come to me and I will say to him, “Doctor, I have caused you much pain and anger, and you have never been able to forgive me, that on my account the report you had prepared was annulled, by reason of which your reputation as a psychiatrist suffered in the eyes of the court. But now that my end is near, forgive me, and do me one last favour,” and he will make his peace with me, because I am a dying man and one does not refuse anything to a dying man, and he will ask what that favour is.

And I shall say to him: “Doctor, go to the medical room and mix me with your own hands a drink of alcohol and water, just a tumblerful. Not of a kind which will make me unconscious immediately so that I have no benefit from it, as before, but one that will make me really happy again.”

And he will accede to my wish and return to my bedside with the glass, and I will drink, at last after so many years of privation I will drink, gulp by gulp, at long intervals, savouring my endless happiness to the full. And I will become young again, and I will see the world blossoming, all the springtimes and the roses and the young girls from time past. But one will approach me and lean her pale face over me, who have fallen on my knees before her, and she will enshroud me with her dark hair. Her perfume will be about me and her lips laid on mine and I will no longer be old and disfigured, but young and beautiful, and my
reine d’alcool
will draw me up to her and we will soar into intoxication and forgetfulness from which there is never any awakening!

And if it happens thus in the hour of my death, I shall bless my life, and I shall not have suffered in vain.

S
TRELITZ
,
6.9.44—21.9.44.

AFTERWORD

I
N
‘The Goose Girl’, subject of one of George Cruikshank’s most charming illustrations, the brothers Grimm tell the story of a lovely young princess riding with her personal maid to the city where she is to marry a royal prince. The maid threatens to kill her, usurps her clothes and her horse ‘Falada’, and successfully impersonates her in the royal apartments; the princess is sent off with the boy Curdken to mind the royal geese. Frightened that the horse may tell what has happened, the imposter has it beheaded. But ‘when the true princess heard of it she wept’,

and begged the man to nail up Falada’s head against a large dark gate in the city through which she had to pass every morning and evening, that she might still see him sometimes. Then the slaughterer said he would do as she wished, cut off the head, and nailed it fast under the dark gate.

Each time she goes through the gate, the princess holds brief but significant conversations with the truncated head. These come to the ears of the old king, who arranges a banquet at which both girls are present and the maid is trapped into condemning herself to

nothing better than that she should be thrown into a cask stuck round with sharp nails, and that two white horses should be put to it, and should drag it from street to street till she is dead.

This, the reader infers, is arranged and a satisfactory royal wedding then takes place, after which the happy couple rule ‘in peace and happiness all their lives’.

It was from this characteristically bloody and imaginative ‘German Popular Story’ that the author of
The Drinker
took his lifelong pseudonym, marking it as his own by inserting a second ‘l’ and wryly adopting the forename of that other Grimm unfortunate, the simpleton who is swindled again and again and convinces himself each time that he is ‘Hans in Luck’. But the name Fallada also recalls a poem by a slightly younger writer from the opposite end of Germany, Bertolt Brecht. For he too made use of it just after the First World War for his description of a dying carthorse whose still live body is carved up by hungry Berliners, naming his powerful poem ‘Falada, Falada, there thou art hanging’. Twelve years later, at another moment of desperate crisis in Germany, when the Weimar Republic was about to fall into the lap of Adolf Hitler, Brecht turned the same poem into a revue sketch with a reporter interviewing the horse under the heading ‘A H
ORSE
A
CCUSES’
. This is not to say that there was any tangible link between the great political poet and the outwardly unpolitical novelist Rudolf Ditzen who took the name Fallada. We do not even know if they knew one another’s works. But Hans Fallada was at once the probing reporter and the bleeding, accusing dying horse.

Psychologically disturbed from an early age, he had felt the need to cloak his own identity after writing his first, Expressionist-style novel of a disturbed and self-destructive adolescence, whose publication in 1920 not only shocked and hurt but might also, he feared, disgrace the name of his father, a strict and upright north German judge. Yet he developed slowly, and it was not until the publication of
The Drinker
that his rare combination of objective curiosity and extreme personal despair became plain for all to read.

All my life long I have fed on people. I have stored them in my mind along with their ways of moving, speaking, feeling, and now I have them there, ready for instant use. Nothing has ever interested me so much as the realization why people behave as they do. My otherwise hopeless memory is excellent for each detail, the most trivial facts that I learn about the habits of my fellow men.

By then he had shed the egocentric mannerisms of his two earliest books, emerging at the end of the nineteen twenties as a compelling story-teller, a writer without frills whose interest in the lower levels of society made him one of the most successful authors of the coolly critical movement known as ‘new matter-of-factness’ or ‘Die Neue Sachlichkeit’. Of the sixteen books which he published from 1931 to 1943, his most productive years, seven were more or less instantly translated into English; their German sales by now run into millions. Yet they remain very remote from what German criticism slightingly terms ‘Trivialliteratur’, and with the writing of
The Drinker
at the end of that time Fallada showed the deeply pessimistic basis of his readability. Indeed he can be seen as a paradigm of his country’s moods between the establishment of the Weimar Republic and the end of Hitler’s Third Reich: its moments of rational, systematic illumination and its terrifying plunges into the dark. How, we may wonder, could a writer come to unify such extremes?

Just twenty-one when the Great War broke out in August 1914, Fallada was already determined on a literary career. His father, the future Supreme Court judge, would have liked him to grow up with the same strict concepts of duty, justice and precision as he himself tried to exemplify; his much younger mother, daughter of a protestant pastor, seems always to have been a subordinate figure. Their son however was incorrigibly awkward and accident-prone, and although the family circle was apparently a close-knit, cultivated one, he did badly at school, was more than once dangerously ill, suffered from masturbation guilt, and had a penchant for self-destructive adventures which led his despairing parents to seek medical help before he was eighteen. All this culminated in an unprovoked and irrational duel with one of his few friends, which ended with him killing the friend under still obscure circumstances and then trying to shoot himself. At the same time he had become an obsessive reader, starting with that great adventure story of solitude,
Robinson Crusoe
, but soon turning to those more adult books which he had secretly discovered in his father’s library: the works of Flaubert, Daudet and Zola (before he was twelve, he later claimed), Dickens, Dostoevsky and other great nineteenth-century writers. These were not at all the sort of literature that Judge Ditzen wished him to read, yet on the other hand he was formally denied the synthetic Westerns of Karl May so beloved of his more frivolous contemporaries. It was indeed a belated act of revolt when Fallada celebrated his eventual success as a writer by buying the whole set of May’s works and reading all sixty-five of them, in some cases more than once.

His own literary ambitions seem to have been encouraged in the first place by his aunt Adelaide Ditzen, a gifted spinster then living in Rome as a medical secretary, who came to the rescue after the tragic duel and offered to look after him in the Leipzig criminal lunatic asylum to which he was consigned. She started teaching him English, French and Italian, and introduced him to the work of Romain Rolland, to whom he then wrote offering his services as a translator. Though it seems that Rolland knew the aunt (who had an interesting circle of literary acquaintances that included Nietzsche and Malwida von Meysenbug), the only result at first was a series of rejections from leading German publishers. Then, on his release from the asylum, less than a year before the war, he was sent, once again at the aunt’s suggestion, to learn farming and estate management with a neighbouring landowner in the hope that the country life would further his recovery. This did not proceed entirely smoothly, partly because the story of the duel caught up with him, and partly because on his volunteering for the army in August 1914 he was rapidly discharged as mentally unfit. But it did determine his primary profession for the next fifteen years, and undoubtedly it also served the further purpose suggested to him by his aunt: providing him with a wide range of human and social material to observe and note.

What she had not foreseen was the vicissitudes through which his experiences of German (and very largely Prussian) rural economy would take him. First came his work as a specialist in the potato business, which brought him to Berlin in the crucial war years 1916–17, where he was introduced to fashionable Expressionist circles and the use of morphine; this was when he wrote
Der junge Goedeschal
, the work for which he changed his name, an unsuccessful and (for him) untypical ego-novel about his school miseries and fiascos. Then came short spells on various estates, interrupted by periods of treatment in clinics. Then, with the apparent abandonment—or at least postponement—of his writing ambitions, his addictions led him to start fiddling his employers’ accounts, with the result that he was twice sent to prison, the first time for two months in the north German university town of Greifswald, where he had been born; the second for a term of two and a half years in the big prison at Neumünster near Kiel. Morphine, alcohol and cigarettes (between 120 and 200 a day, according to his biographer Tom Crepon) had together come to provide what he called his ‘little death’, that combination of oblivion and elevation which would seduce him off and on throughout the rest of his life.

At first it looked as if his second term of imprisonment might have cured him of this, and he wrote hoping to renew his links with Ernst Rowohlt, the publisher of
Goedeschal
, who had by now rejected Expressionism and become a leading promoter of Die Neue Sachlichkeit. There was no answer. Meanwhile he started trying to make a living addressing envelopes in Hamburg, where he came into contact with the socialist movement through the Issels, a working-class family whose storekeeper daughter became his wife and principal moral support right up to the events outlined in
The Drinker
. Late in 1928, even before the engagement had been announced, his parents helped him to buy himself into local journalism back in Neumünster, and, after a difficult time spent canvassing for advertisements, he got rid of his publisher/employer by denouncing him to the local Socialist mayor for misuse of election funds. As the new editor of the Neumünster ‘Advertiser’ Fallada was a close observer of the prolonged dispute between the Schleswig-Holstein farmers and the Socialist-led administration, one of the key conflicts of that critical time, and in the summer of 1929 he and his wife went to the North Sea island of Sylt on a facility trip which accidentally brought them face to face in the dunes with Ernst Rowohlt.

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.