Wolf Among Wolves

foundered. In great and in little things. He could make no concessions. “Eh, what!” the old doctor says, “you’re simply an old maid in trousers.”

Herr von Studmann merely chuckled. He made no answer. He’s reached the point when he didn’t try to teach those who are unteachable.

He couldn’t swim. That was it. For the rest Herr von Studmann will prove an excellent uncle for the Pagel children. He intends to spend his leave with them.

Only the thought of the woman still unknown to him disturbed him. Women are so … incomprehensible! No, there was nothing of women about him. The medical orderly had talked nonsense. Women, whether married or single, were completely alien to him. But that doesn’t stop you being an uncle—without submitting to such difficult relationships. Perhaps he would be able to travel with the Pagels—without knowing how to swim!

VIII

A fresher wind stirs the white curtains. The woman has waked up, she has lit the small night lamp, she looks over to the other bed.

The man is asleep. He lies on his side, doubled up a little, his face peaceful. The somewhat curly blond hair gives him a boyish appearance; the lower lip is pushed out.

The woman examines this familiar face, but it is undisturbed by worry, and untroubled by cares. Sometimes in the night he starts to speak. He’s frightened, he cries out.… then she wakes him and says only, “You’re thinking about it again.” There was a time when great burdens were loaded on him, but he endured. Endured only? No, he was made strong, he discovered something in himself which gave him a foothold, something indestructible—a will. Once he had been merely lovable—then he became worthy of love.

The young wife smiles—at life, at her husband, at happiness.… It is not a happiness dependent on external things; it rests in herself as the kernel in the nut. A woman who loves and knows herself to be loved feels the happiness which is always with her as a blessed whispering in her ear—drowning the noise of the day—the tranquil happiness which has nothing more to desire.

She hears the man’s breathing; then, softer and faster, that of the child. Gently the white curtains stir.

Everything has quite changed.

She puts out the light.

Good, good night!

Afterword

Among German novelists of the first half of the twentieth century, Hans Fallada stands out as the chronicler of the proverbial little man and his fight for happiness and dignity in times of severe hardship. In Wolf Among Wolves, first published in 1937, Fallada presents us with an inspiring tale of perseverance in an era of political, social and economic upheaval. Set in 1923 amidst the rampant inflation that gripped Germany following World War I, Wolf Among Wolves has been referred to by literary critics as “a masterpiece of critical realism” and “one of the major novels published in fascist Germany.” It is now regarded as the author’s most ambitious literary achievement.

With Wolf Among Wolves, Fallada returned, after a foray into children’s literature, to the gritty and ethically infused realism that had established him as one of the few bestselling German authors of the 1920s and 1930s. For all its unrestrained epic power, the novel is a compelling example of his concern with the intricacies of composition. What is striking from the beginning is the symphonic quality of the text. In Part One of the novel, covering only twenty-four hours, the omniscient narrator weaves a web of interrelated characters and stories. “A girl and a man were sleeping on a narrow iron bed. […] The dollar stands for the moment at 414,000 marks.” From the very first sentences, Fallada’s epic throws the reader into the middle of things: a dingy Berlin boarding house, on a hot day in July 1923, at six o’clock in the morning. From here, the reader is taken on a journey to varied locales that are linked in one way or another to the story that is about to unfold: apartments and avenues, police stations and prison cells, roulette parlors and hotel cafes, and, eventually, the countryside. With its swift fluctuation between places and characters, the novel reads almost like a movie script. Throughout, Wolf Among Wolves is long on action, short on reflection, and one of Falladas greatest strength’s as a writer is his ability to gradually build up narrative tension. Providing the reader with glimpses into the lives of his main characters, he successfully appropriates the montage style that was highly popular in Weimar cinema.

The protagonist is Wolfgang Pagel, the man on the “narrow iron bed,” a young former soldier who inhabits a corrupt world, in which the miseries of inflation have created an atmosphere of cynical self-advancement. Immature and selfish at the outset of the story, Pagel undergoes a fundamental transformation that allows him to embark upon the humanist mission of the novel, which is to find “something on earth which was still worth [the] effort.” As one character says about the resilient Pagel: “You want to go through all this misery? Such an appetite for life, young man, could give one indigestion!” Pagel spends four months on the Neulohe estate east of the Elbe because, in the words of his pregnant girlfriend Petra Ledig, he “must become a man before he can be a father.” Pagel meets this challenge, and by the end of the novel he is working toward a medical degree at Berlin’s Humboldt University. His development from a drifting gambler, who sees in roulette “the prospect of something big,” to a medical student eager to devote his life to helping others is unparalleled in Fallada’s work. The narrator comments emphatically, “Once he had been merely lovable—then he became worthy of love.”

As the action proceeds, the novel becomes more relentless in its depiction of people “who from day to day increasingly lost all feeling of self-respect and propriety.” The loss of moral rectitude parallels currency devaluation, the dispiriting effect of which is evoked in an early passage:

A feeling of impotent hatred overcame Rittmeister Joachim von Prackwitz. Somewhere in this town there was a machine—naturally a machine, for men would never submit to be prostituted for such a purpose—which vomited paper day and night over the city and the people. “Money” they called it; they printed figures on it, beautiful neat figures with many noughts, which became increasingly rounder. And when you had worked and sweated to put by a little for your old age, it all became worthless paper, paper muck.

The Berlin of the inflation years as depicted in Wolf Among Wolves is one of moral depravity—a place known for “heroin and cocaine, ‘snow,’ nude dances, French champagne and American cigarettes, influenza, hunger, despair, fornication and crime.” In one of the most powerful passages in the novel, the narrator describes the city as a veritable “Oriental bazaar”: “Dealers, beggars, strumpets: almost shoulder to shoulder they stood on both sides of the pavement.” As Joachim von Prackwitz, the farmer from the Neulohe estate, promenades through Friedrichstra?e, then and now one of Berlin’s bustling avenues, he is appalled by “the misery, the indecency, the demoralization which manifest[s] itself in Berlin in broad daylight.” Judging from their suggestive glances, even the young salesgirls are already trapped in this urban netherworld: “Why save oneself up for tomorrow? Who knows where the dollar will stand, who knows whether we shall be still alive tomorrow?” Forcing his way through the crowd, Prackwitz arrives at the arcade passing from Unter den Linden to Friedrichstra?e and enters, sensing that “he might have come from purgatory into hell”:

The shops paraded huge pot-boiler pictures of naked women, repulsively naked, with revoltingly sweet pink breasts. Chains of indecent picture-postcards hung everywhere. […] But the young boys were by far the worst of all. In their sailor suits, with smooth bare chests, cigarettes impudently sticking in their lips, they glided about everywhere; they did not speak, but they looked at you and touched you.

Overcome with “shuddering nausea,” Prackwitz, who throughout the novel is characterized by his childlike naivete, finally comes to think of Neulohe “as an untouched island of purity,” a provincial refuge from Berlin, that “morass of infamy.”

Fallada’s Berlin is not the right place for Wolfgang Pagel to mature and develop into a responsible, compassionate man. It is in the country, at the estate in East Prussia, that Pagel learns the benefits of hard work. As the narrator puts it in one of the hundreds of passages that was left out in the 1938 translation: “…  these were not the times to rely on God in Heaven. These were times to work yourself until you drop.” By the end of the novel, Pagel, whom we first meet gambling in the Berlin night clubs, is in charge of the estate’s accounts. He is the last