Iron Hans (Page 4)

As the war dragged on, Fallada's life fell apart. As a major in the Reichsarbeitsdienst (the Reich Labor Service), he took three official trips to the front in 1943. He grew apart from Suse, drank heavily and resumed his morphine habit, and by 1944, they were divorced. During an argument with Suse soon after their break, he fired a gun. For this he was sent to a psychiatric prison.

Written in prison, in secret and at a moment of great exasperation, Fallada's darkest book has little to say about the year it was written. The Drinker, for Fallada a rare first-person novel, is told by Erwin Sommer, a middle-aged wholesaler whose lassitude about his business and his marriage relaxes him to the extent that he decides to try schnapps for the first time. Fallada rushes him into alcoholism and then lets him spin--Erwin pretends that his failure is merely a personal choice and accuses his wife, Magda, of being too "efficient" when she tries to help him. This cycle of marital misprision runs exactly counter to that of Little Man, in which the two partners are learning what Erwin and Magda unlearn. The writing is less comic, and Erwin's inebriated narration involves deft psychological writing closer to our conventional notions of literary excellence than anything in Little Man. But Little Man has more character and éclat.

The end of the war found Fallada making overtures to the Soviets, who regarded him as a famous man whose record was sufficiently ambiguous. Fallada gave a speech in the small town of Feldberg, proclaiming, "The Russians come as your friends." Johannes Becher, director of the Cultural Association for the Democratic Renewal of Germany, provided Fallada with a Gestapo file that would make interesting material for an anti-Fascist novel. Fallada found the material thin but took a second look when a film company sweetened the deal. He wrote the novel in a monthlong spree.

At heart a cops-and-robbers story, Every Man Dies Alone begins with the couple described in the file--the Hampels, whose details Fallada alters slightly. The Quangels, as he calls them, are two working-class Berliners who decide to foment something like a word-of-mouth campaign against the Third Reich. By dropping handwritten notecards that question the Führer's judgment in stairwells and hallways around the city, they hope to remind like-minded citizens that dissent is possible and perhaps even inspire others to launch copycat projects: "We will inundate Berlin with postcards, we will slow the machines, we will depose the Führer, end the war." After two years of painstaking work, lettering the cards on Sundays and dropping them on Mondays, Otto Quangel finally drops a card on the floor of his own factory and is caught. Dogged Inspector Escherich can't wait to tell his culprit "what panic, ruin, and hardship he has brought to so many people." The inspector's map of Berlin, crammed with pins denoting drop-off points, shocks Otto. Out of 285 cards, 267 were voluntarily turned in to the authorities by terrified citizens. Nothing comes of the campaign but the couple's arrest and execution.

This scenario could have come alive in Fallada's hands. The Quangels are a marital team blundering through with dignity intact, badly calibrated to the forces around them, just like Pinneberg and Lammchen in Little Man. To work their story up into a novel, however, Fallada had to resort to "all the tricks, old and new," as he boasts in "How I Became a Writer." He surrounds Inspector Escherich with ne'er-do-wells--lovable, wheedling drunks; miserable, conniving drunks; sadistic SS men; and criminal children--padding the novel with their cat-and-mouse games. Meanwhile, the marital crisis reflected in The Drinker--a book that falters, perhaps, because Erwin loses touch with his wife after she has him institutionalized--continues, subterraneously, here. If there is one deep and ever fruitful tendency in Fallada's fiction, it is his obsession with marriage. But the Quangels barely talk, and Otto ignores his wife's qualms about the scope of their campaign: "Isn't this thing that you're wanting to do, isn't it a bit small, Otto?"

The question can also be asked of Fallada. His complacency and work ethic survived the war, and he accepted the commission from the Soviets as he had accepted those from the Nazis. Though Every Man Dies Alone is much better than some of his Nazi-era books, and reflects the benefits of postwar freedom, it is more concerned with the art of storytelling--with generating clever subplots and minor characters--than with an examination of evil. When the film company approached Fallada about writing a Resistance novel based on the Hampels, he had been about to start a very different book, one about a young refugee trying to make a life amid the rubble of Berlin. There's no evidence that Fallada regretted Every Man once he wrote it--he thought it was one of his greatest books. But the story about the kid living in the rubble sounds so much better suited to Fallada's interests and talents--not resistance but a little hustling, a struggle to put together a life. It's a pity he had to hustle so much to live his own.

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