Iron Hans (Page 2)

Born Rudolf Ditzen in 1893 in Greifswald, in northern Germany, Fallada was almost 40 when he composed Little Man. As Jenny Williams makes clear in her indispensable biography, More Lives Than One, Fallada had by that time been humbled by events and was clinging to the normalcy that his wife afforded him. During his youth, in the years preceding World War I, Fallada fit the profile of the bourgeois Wilhelmine rebel: discouraged by arbitrary philological rigor in school, hampered by puritanical attitudes toward sex, intimidated by the militarism of his society. He vented his feelings by turning to fin de siècle writers like Oscar Wilde. For a time he went by the name Harry, after Dorian Gray's aristocratic corruptor, and he composed a poem titled "The Great Weariness" while still a teenager.

Fallada typified the extremes of this era when he and his friend Hanns Dietrich von Necker made a pact--each would submit a poem to a third party for judgment, and the author of the work judged inferior would be shot. Their poems were never submitted, understandably. But Fallada's desperate obsession with a girl led to a second, more serious pact with Necker. Hoping to disguise their suicides as a duel, the two precipitous youths climbed to a famous lookout, paced off and fired. Having missed their targets, the two young men were forced to reload--with Necker tending to Fallada's rifle for him, as Fallada didn't know how to service it. In the next round, Necker missed, but Fallada hit his man. At Necker's request, Fallada took his friend's pistol and finished him off. Then he turned it on himself. The bullet skipped past his heart and punctured a lung. He was found and rescued.

Fallada's father, who served on the Imperial Supreme Court at Leipzig, was in a position to ensure that his son was deemed disturbed, saving him from a criminal sentence. But Fallada's fall from grace, though not adjudged criminal, saw him committed to a sanitarium, knocking the 19-year-old off course for his university entrance exams. Suddenly second-class, the would-be writer stood cut off from education in the large German sense of Bildung. Fallada was sent to work as a steward on private estates and was eventually based in Berlin, working for a "seed potato company" set up in 1916 to improve agricultural production during wartime. He claimed, shortly before he died, that he had learned to identify 1,200 varieties of the tuber.

Fallada's time in the wilderness was punctuated by episodes of debauchery in Berlin and other cities. He once sold his 3,000-volume library to buy morphine, but more often he subsidized his binges with funds stolen from his employers; and he ended up serving two jail sentences for theft and embezzlement. Reporting for his first prison sentence, in June 1924, Fallada traveled north through the provinces. In a notebook entry dated August 2, he recorded the desire to write a novel about an ex-convict's struggle to make his way in the world "with the help of a simple young woman." On the next day he followed up, "I really ought to find out more about ordinary people.... But I know nothing about it." He seems to have been generally unhappy during this period; he later disowned the two Expressionist novels he published in the early 1920s, Young Goedeschal and Anton and Gerda, claiming that they did not come from his true self. (They were the first books he wrote under his pen name, which he took in order not to embarrass his father.) Though Young Goedeschal is autobiographical, about the angst-ridden son of a judge, Fallada's artistic fingerprint is faint: the adolescent hero thinks out loud while pacing his room, looking in the mirror, leaning his forehead against a windowpane, snubbing out a cigarette and burying his face in his hands. The eventfulness of Fallada's later work, by contrast, seems designed to prevent such narcissism. Goedeschal was subtitled "A Novel of Puberty"--not the traditional Bildungsroman but a Pubertätsroman.

By the time he sat down to write Little Man, What Now?, Fallada had reformed himself significantly. He saw his vocation as stemming not from desperate teenage vigils but from his years as a farm steward, walking rows of beets, monitoring the gossips who were weeding them, chatting with suppliers and standing for hours after work as his boss lectured him on the business of the farm. Fallada's mature stylistic modesty, if you looked it up in manuals of German literature, would come under the Neue Sachlichkeit, the "new objectivity" or "new sobriety," a wash of cold water that overtook the inflation-ridden, decadent Berlin of the '20s. The Expressionist publishers of the 1910s--including Fallada's legendary house, Rowohlt--began to do translations of Balzac and Zola, and the youngest poets, including immigrants like W.H. Auden, studied the bone-dry verse of Bertolt Brecht. Fallada's evolution from Expressionist to fluent storyteller certainly fits the "new sobriety" label. He became a craftsman who respected money and always tried to turn his books in ahead of schedule. Fallada achieved this transformation not by drifting into a chilly objectivity but through a much more personal influence--marriage.

After his second stint in prison, 1926-28, Fallada took a job with a newspaper and joined a temperance society called the Good Templar Order, where he met a working-class woman named Anna "Suse" Margarethe Issel. Fallada married her in 1929. George Grosz once sketched Suse: she has a round face with level cheekbones, a ski-slope nose and small teeth. Her expression is alert and almost apprehensive, the soul of responsibility.

She was just what Fallada had been looking for. He was marrying down, from his parents' perspective, confirming but simultaneously redeeming the fall from grace that had begun with his suicide attempt and his failure to finish high school. Suse became a kind of savior for Fallada; his enthusiasm, as recorded in this letter of 1930, might seem fake, were it not borne out in his work:

If I have ever loved another human being on God's earth, then Suse is the one.... I have a wonderful wife. She is goodness, tranquility, gentleness, calmness in person. There can be no better, more loyal, more courageous partner in the world.

She was his muse, a muse of good common sense and sound home economics. Few change so much, between their juvenilia and their maturity, as Fallada did. Once the careening romantic son of a Supreme Court judge, he had his little wife, his temperance society and his new leaf, which he kept turning over and over, pondering the magic of his own reform.

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