Iron Hans (Page 3)

"Perhaps I did once--at the very beginning--I really cannot remember now--want to write a novel about unemployment," Fallada recalled with a characteristic show of carelessness a few months after the publication of Little Man, What Now?, "but gradually and imperceptibly this book became a tribute to a woman." He had started the book only one year earlier, in October 1931, when he outlined a political novel with a weak man at its center, a man whose brother-in-law was a Communist and whose co-workers were intense Fascists. Writing to keep his publisher and his young family afloat, he finished the manuscript in only four months.

A tribute to Suse emerged from the very mechanics of Little Man's plot. The young man, Pinneberg, nicknames his girlfriend Lammchen--which alludes to Fallada's pet name for Suse, Schäfchen (little sheep). Pinneberg gets Lammchen pregnant, frets and decides to marry her while standing in the stairwell of her building. As a married woman, Lammchen is expected not to work, and the Pinnebergs suddenly have one income rather than two. Lammchen can't cook, but she does keep a ruthless budget. Pinneberg loses his job with a food wholesaler and takes Lammchen to Berlin. Living for a month with his disreputable mother, he cadges a job selling menswear at one of Berlin's famous department stores. Holding that job amid the rising tide of unemployment, taking care of an infant son ("the Shrimp") in an illegal two-room apartment accessible only by ladder, Pinneberg and Lammchen become true partners in their marriage. In the end, Pinneberg loses his job, and then his sense of decency and worth--which only Lammchen can restore to him. Fallada sent Pinneberg back home with bad news again and again, and then propped him up each time with Lammchen's love and support.

Mock-heroic chapter headings gently suggest the tentative pride of the newlyweds. Fallada is never quite a satirist. In "Kessler Reveals Himself. How Pinneberg Stays on Top and Heilbutt Saves the Day," Fallada sketches the dynamics of floor sales and grants Pinneberg a memorable colleague, the reserved and slightly wizardly Heilbutt, who in "On the Three Types of Salesman and Which Type Is Preferred by Under-Manager Jänecke. Invitation to a Snack" rebuffs Jänecke, the overpaid consultant whose job it is to cut costs. "Pinneberg Receives His Wages, Behaves Badly to a Salesman and Becomes the Owner of a Dressing-Table" narrates the bourgeois impulses that lead Pinneberg to purchase a hulking piece of furniture, and "Lammchen Has a Visitor and Looks at Herself in the Mirror. No One Mentions Money All Evening" takes up the ensuing awkwardness.

Pinneberg's misfortunes have little to do with the wild vicissitudes of Fallada's previous life; indeed, they unfold with an incremental dailiness that had more to do with Fallada's new life and its strong domestic rhythms. Fallada was writing for money, perhaps, but he was so proud to win money for his young wife that his workaday novel became imbued with authentic feeling. Posing as a man of taste, sweating buckets to sell his quota of cummerbunds, Pinneberg was a type--the salaried workers of the Weimar era who, lacking the strong unions of the proletariat or the wealth of the bourgeoisie, took unemployment and inflation on the chin, and turned to Hitler sooner and in greater numbers than any other class. (Fallada had read Siegfried Kracauer's groundbreaking study The Salaried Masses, published in 1930, which took this group as a demographic novelty.) Pinneberg and Fallada had one thing in common: they brought order to chaos by starting a little family.

After Little Man, Fallada wrote most of his novels in a frenzy of self-discipline. Indeed, like a writer of thrillers, he was praised primarily for his narrative--it was fleet, an engine of short strokes. His preferred form, from Little Man on, was the mini-chapter. Not episodic in the parti-colored, wandering, quixotic sense, these were tiny similar narrative units that ran like a course of dominoes, quickly falling, quickly clicking. Fallada even had a law that he could never on any day write less than on the previous day, and his minimum would inevitably creep up as the weeks passed. Conditions may have demanded it, but speed became his style. His publisher saluted him in letters: "Lieber Meister Ditzen," using the word "Meister," for a master craftsman. Fallada's professionalism was a form of modesty--he made a hard-to-translate distinction between literature and mere writing, disclaiming the title "Dichter." Disdaining the Faustian aspirations of his youth, however, he forfeited some of the stature traditionally afforded serious German writers, and with it his right to take himself seriously.

Fallada's first major experience of Fascist rule came in 1933, when he was briefly imprisoned by brownshirts on suspicion of conspiracy against Hitler. Two years later, he was declared an "undesirable author," but this designation was rescinded after three months. Little Man was a novel that basically kept to itself. Fallada was too content with his own stint as a little man--with his marriage and his new sobriety--to really get angry about unemployment. But he would spend the mid-1930s producing novels that skirted politics completely. Writing in The New Republic, Lionel Trilling called one of these, Once We Had a Child (1934), a tale of a remote island farm, a "retreat": "though Fallada has lost nothing of his sound minor talent, he has lost immeasurably in dignity and relevance."

In 1938 another of these books, Wolf Among Wolves, about inflation in the 1920s, inadvertently earned the approval of Goebbels. Fallada hated the strutting arrogance of the Third Reich and never joined the Nazi Party, but Goebbels was determined to make use of him. Fallada was soon offered a contract with Tobis Film Company to write a novel for adaptation: Iron Gustav was the result. (The movie was to star Emil Jannings, but it was never made.) Meanwhile, Fallada's position deteriorated. On July 1, 1938, Rowohlt was banned for publishing the work of a Jew under a pseudonym. Fallada and the rest of Rowohlt's authors were relegated to Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, a risk-averse publisher based in Stuttgart; and when Goebbels asked for changes to Iron Gustav, Fallada may have felt he had no other protector. He later claimed that fear of concentration camps forced him to take Goebbels's revisions but that "nevertheless the guilt of every line I wrote then still weighs on me today." In 1939 the Stuttgart Hitler Youth offered Fallada a commission for a children's story, and he fulfilled it: "Sweetmilk Speaks: An Adventure of Murr and Maxe" is the tale of a boy who saves his father's factory from a revolutionary Communist. In the fall of 1939, a few weeks after Germany declared war on France and Britain, Fallada accepted a commission from Carl Fröhlich, president of the Reich Film Chamber, to write a Zarah Leander vehicle about a German girl who has been in America and returns to learn about the "New Germany." Fallada wrote the script, This Heart Which Belongs to You, in seventeen days and was paid 25,000 marks.

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