The Drinker

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.

STRELITZ,

6.9.44—21.9.44.

AFTERWORD

IN ‘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 tonothing 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 HORSE ACCUSES’. 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,