Wolf Among Wolves

man standing, desperately trying to manage a farm that has been ruined by the incompetence, indifference, and greed of almost everybody around him.

Reviewing Wolf Among Wolves in The New Yorker in 1938, Clifton Fadiman criticized the novel for its “somewhat unconvincing notion that the countryside possesses magical curative values for those rotted by the vices of the city.” However, there is nothing in Wolf Among Wolves that indicates a simplistic economy of geographical disparities. In fact, Pagel is quick to realize that the country is no less corrupt than the city and that the idyllic vision of a “peace of the fields,” which Studmann had conjured upon their arrival in Neulohe, is a mere delusion. Both metropolis and countryside are places of extreme disillusionment, of social, economic and political uncertainty. A few years prior to Wolf Among Wolves, Fallada had argued that the way of life of farmers had yet to be convincingly captured by German artists. Working on farms in northern and eastern Germany during the immediate postwar years, he witnessed both the plight of the laborers and the economic forces affecting farmers. Wolf Among Wolves illustrates that, as H.J. Schueler sums up in his seminal study on Fallada’s fiction, “the times were just as terribly out of joint on the land as in the cities.”

Fallada depicts a society in which each individual pursues his or her own self-interest—a pack of lone and hungry wolves, as the title suggests. As Schueler puts it, “The quest for survival proves to be the paramount concern of all the parties involved in the bitter battle of all against all.” Wolfgang Pagel lives among these wolves, but he will not become one of them. Rising above the feverish roulette rooms, he overcomes the temptation to succumb to society’s demoralizing influence. In spite of his surroundings, Pagel forges ahead, managing to find values worth holding onto, and proving that he is more than just a “leaf on life’s stream.” In Fallada’s view, the individual is not determined by society, but rather has the chance to shape his own fate. It is up to him how he responds to social and moral ills. And yet, some are too weak to meet the challenges, as the example of the Rittmeister Joachim von Prackwitz, the Neulohe farmer, illustrates. Amidst the chaos of the inflation year, with the estate in desperate need of responsible management, his wife realizes how incompetent he is: “a weakling, spineless, without self-control, at the mercy of every influence, a babbler.” The uniform and the firm world-view that came with it had provided him with security, but now it becomes clear that there is “nothing in him, nothing, no core, no faith, no ambition, not one thing to give him the power to resist.” The Prackwitz family is at the center of the descent into moral turpitude, and the kidnapping of their daughter by one of their servants is the painful culmination of the family’s disintegration.

While the Rittmeister is shattered by the challenges of the times, “lost, in a lost age,” Wolfgang Pagel emerges morally invigorated from his stay in the country. Unlike Prackwitz, he will learn how to assume responsibility for his own actions. As the former soldier matures, he comes to rethink his definition of courage:

I used to think that courage meant standing up straight when a shell exploded and taking your share of the shrapnel. Now I know that’s mere stupidity and bravado; courage means keeping going when something becomes completely unbearable.

The end of the novel mirrors the beginning. One year has passed, it is once more summer in the city, and Wolfgang and Petra are lying in bed. And yet, the narrator informs us, “everything has become very different.” Most importantly, they have both repudiated their previous behavior. Petra, the girl from the streets, has spent the intervening time working in a rag-and-bone business, determined not to see Wolfgang again until he grew up: “Is my child to have such a spoiled darling for its father,” she had asked herself, “one for whom I have no proper respect?” Wolfgang has struggled to prove himself worthy of Petra’s respect, realizing that assuming the role of husband and father requires him to accept responsibility for his own actions. Fallada was no doubt a “dedicated humanist,” as Schueler writes, and it is through sincere commitment to others that Wolfgang can redeem himself. This central lesson is spelled out in a passage that was omitted in the 1938 translation:

Wolfgang Pagel reflected that, not long ago, he had thought with pride: “I’m not tied to anything; I can do what I want; I’m free …” Yes, Wolfgang Pagel—now you understand: you were free, unfettered like a wild animal. But humanity is not about doing what you want, but rather about doing what you must.

*   *   *

Hans Fallada wrote Wolf unter Wolfen in a frenzy. Convinced that the book would end up “in the drawer” anyway, Fallada worked with unchecked ingenuity, temporarily relieved from the depressive illness that had already resulted in several stays in sanatoriums, an illness that can be detected in personal letters such as the one he wrote to fellow writer Hermann Broch: “I must write, narrate, tell stories, but basically it is a sad business; it won’t make you happier, and it has no meaning.” Fallada began Wolf Among Wolves on July 27, 1936, without having a clear idea of the scope of what he had undertaken. Since he was inventing the plot and characters as he moved along, the introduction—intended as the novel’s rather brief opening chapter—eventually grew into the entire first book. Getting up at four o’clock in the morning, he managed, at the pinnacle of his creative powers, to produce 123 handwritten pages a week: a personal record, “which I do pride myself on,” as he acknowledged in a letter to his publisher Ernst Rowohlt on May 9, 1937. Two days later, Fallada finished the manuscript, which by now comprised 1,400 pages. With the first print-run of 10,000 copies selling out by mid-November, Wolf Among Wolves proved an instant, if surprising, success for Rowohlt.

Wolf Among Wolves is a Zeitroman—a historical novel, providing an elaborate account of a particular moment in time and of how a diverse group of characters, taken from all walks of life, cope with that time. Unlike more theoretical writers, whose fiction is shaped by a coherent worldview, Fallada is not concerned with exploring the political and economic context of the inflation years. His focus is on action, and his love for storytelling is everywhere apparent in his work. Wolf Among Wolves occupies an exceptional position within Fallada’s oeuvre, as the author successfully combines the two strands that run throughout his prose: reportage and narration. The objective and disaffected voice of the chronicler mixes with the emphatic and deeply involved voice of the storyteller. Stylistically, Fallada chose to throw all modernist pretenses overboard. His language is rooted in the everyday, and as with his other novels, the strength of Wolf Among Wolves lies in the close-up characterization. There is nothing artificial, nothing academic about his characters; they are presented “with such closeness to life,” as Hermann Hesse once put it, that the reader cannot but feel invested in their fictional fate.

In Wolf Among Wolves, we witness the culmination of a theme that was at the heart of the two novels Little Man, What Now? and The World Outside. As the German weekly Der Spiegel put it in 1947, these works depicted “the individual’s helpless entanglement in the prevailing circumstances of his times.” It is his profound understanding of the varied problems that arise out of economic misery that accounts for Fallada’s ongoing relevance up to the present day. He has been compared to predecessors such as Dickens, Flaubert and the German realist writers Wilhelm Raabe and Theodor Fontane—authors he read when he was still in his teenage years. But none of these writers, who are now credited with heralding the start of literary modernism, ever wrote fiction that could be called strictly realist in the sense of being a photographic, non-ambivalent representation of the world outside.

The same holds true of Hans Fallada. While Fallada’s famed novels of the 1930s are often classified as prime examples of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), his work transcends straightforward realism limited to the depiction of real-life events in a real-life world. It is in brief hallucinatory statements and other deviations from our shared reality that the complex undercurrents of his fiction manifest themselves. The present edition is the first- ever unexpurgated English translation of Wolf unter Wolfen. Numerous passages that were omitted in the 1938 edition, published by Putnam’s in London and New York, have been newly translated, and it is astonishing to observe how one’s overall impression of the novel is altered once the “lost” passages are restored to the text.

What, then, are the politics of translation that account for the numerous cuts in the first English edition? The omitted passages share certain features. To begin with, the 1938 edition dispenses on several occasions with paragraphs that, while not advancing the plot, elaborate on the characters’ feelings or behavior. Take this omitted passage, for example, in which the narrator provides us with an important comment on one of the main characters’ attitude to Frau von Prackwitz:

She’d paralyzed his ability to think, to analyse, and to explain himself. Herr von Studmann was over thirty-five and hadn’t believed that he would experience this any more, with such spontaneity, such power. In fact, he didn’t