The Drinker [Import] [Hardcover]

Hans Fallada (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 282 pages
• Publisher: Putnam; First Edition edition (1952)
• ASIN: B0000CI6OQ
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,775,307 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Before WWII, German writer Hans Fallada's novels were international bestsellers, on a par with those of his countrymen Thoman Mann and Herman Hesse. In America, Hollywood even turned his first big novel, Little Man, What Now? into a major motion picture

Learning the movie was made by a Jewish producer, however, the Nazis blocked Fallada's work from foreign rights sales, and began to pay him closer attention. When he refused to join the Nazi party he was arrested by the Gestapo--who eventually released him, but thereafter regularly summoned him for "discussions" of his work.

However, unlike Mann, Hesse, and others, Fallada refused to flee to safety, even when his British publisher, George Putnam, sent a private boat to rescue him. The pressure took its toll on Fallada, and he resorted increasingly to drugs and alcohol for relief. Not long after Goebbels ordered him to write an anti-Semitic novel he snapped and found himself imprisoned in an asylum for the "criminally insane"--considered a death sentence under Nazi rule. To forestall the inevitable, he pretended to write the assignment for Goebbels, while actually composing three encrypted books--including his tour de force novel The Drinker--in such dense code that they were not deciphered until long after his death.

Fallada outlasted the Reich and was freed at war's end. But he was a shattered man. To help him recover by putting him to work, Fallada's publisher gave him the Gestapo file of a simple, working-class couple who had resisted the Nazis. Inspired, Fallada completed Every Man Dies Alone in just twenty-four days.

He died in February 1947, just weeks before the book's publication.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Infatuation with the Queen of Alcohol, April 12, 2000

By 

Jonathan Laird - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Drinker (Paperback)

I first read Hans Fallada's 'The Drinker' eight years ago and my second reading of it confirms all its macabre power to haunt its readers. Written in just two weeks in a German lunatic asylum in 1944, this hypnotic, compelling story of a respectable businessman's alcohol-induced descent into squalor and psychic collapse will sober its merriest reader. Based on events in Fallada's own life, the novel takes us into the progressively warped worldview of one Erwin Sommer - well off, middle class, insecure; a man who will soon discover all the charm and malignant power of a flight into self-destructice alcoholism. Estrangement, Paranoia and Victimisation are Sommer's travelling companions on this journey with only the passing comfort of the bottle for solace. Despite 'The Drinker' lacking any reference to the events of Germany,1944, the reader will soon find himself wondering to what extent Erwin Sommer's experiences are analogous to the descent of Germany in the years of the Hitler period. 'The Drinker' is not for those seeking a comforting or moral conclusion. For the reader who is fascinated by the extremes of human psychology and experience, this book book will stay etched in your mind.

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hans Fallada's Devastating Allegory, May 4, 2009

By 

W. Stewart (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Drinker (Paperback)

Hans Fallada penned "The Drinker" as a man fully aware of the evil that was Hitler's Third Reich: he wrote it while a prisoner in a Nazi insane asylum. While I thoroughly enjoyed the literary history of Fallada's tour de force, "Every Man Dies Alone," I found "The Drinker" to be supremely interesting because it so deftly interweaves symbolism with literature.

On its face, it is a tale of alcohol-driven self-destruction. Life for Erwin, the protagonist, progressively becomes worse and worse as he looks to drinking as a cure-all. And the inevitable and inescapable Catch-22 comes to define Erwin: he drinks because he's unhappy, and he's unhappy because he drinks.

And yet, as you progress further into Fallada's tale, wishing to learn more about Erwin's cyclical decline, a wave of horrified understanding moves over you. You realize that "The Drinker" isn't a lone German alcoholic. "The Drinker" is Germany, and "the drink" is Nazism. Erwin's emotions and symptoms--despair, scapegoating, loneliness, escape, and a lack of self-awareness--were shared in spades by depression-era Germany. And so, just as Erwin turns a blind eye toward his problems and welcomes his life-wrecking addiction with open arms, economically-savaged Germany turned to Hitler's Third Reich for answers and continued to worship at the feet of the Nazi Party under the illusion of a thousand years of purity and prosperity.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rapture of the Depths, September 16, 2009

By 

Giordano Bruno - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Drinker (Paperback)

The "Drinker", Erwin Sommer, experiences drunkenness as euphoria, a deceptive hallucinatory epiphany, a rush of release from reality and responsibility. I've seen such drunkenness in friends and strangers, but I've never felt it, never completely acknowledged its power until reading this book. That, if nothing more, would make `The Drinker' a book profoundly worth reading. Author Hans Fallada, with his insidiously prosaic prose, drags me vicariously into his drunken rapture even more convincingly than such authentic drunkard novelists as Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski.

And his prose is truly prosaic, both in the original German and in English translation. He was prominent in the between-wars German literary movement called the Neue Sachlichkeit - the New Matter-of-Factness - which devalued literary `effects', but no one who relishes poetic sentences should seek them in The Drinker. Fallada has been described as writing in frantic outbursts. He might best be compared to three other writers who had similar psycho-social weakness, including trouble with alcohol: Jack Kerouac, who wrote in similar manic frenzies and who drank himself to death; Joseph Roth, who wrote with journalistic urgency and who drank himself to death; and Robert Walser, who had no chance to drink himself to death because he committed himself to a mental asylum in which he spent the latter share of his life. Fallada was a better writer than Kerouac simply because his material was better. Roth wrote with equally deceptive simplicity but had a much finer poet's ear for language, a brilliant way of turning decription into metaphor. Walser, a generation older than Fallada, is perhaps the closest match-up; both writers knew what `madness' really felt like, and both spent time in asylums and prisons. But Walser was a lyricist of the psyche, a writer of whimsy as well as pangs. Both Walser and Fallada were pathological outsiders to their repressed and repressive society, but Fallada's commonplace sorrows were truer to the lives of most people then or now.

Only the first half of The Drinker portrays Herr Sommer's precipitous transformation from a respectable middling merchant to a violent, self-destructive drunkard. The second half depicts his miseries in penal custody, first in an ordinary jail, then in a jail-like asylum, a `house of the dead' as he calls it. Most readers, I'm sure, will think immediately of Dostoevsky's House of the Dead and/or Solzhenitsyn's Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. The comparison is valid; that's the shelf on which this semi-fiction belongs.

My psychologist wife and I lay down at bedtime to read Der Trinker/The Drinker side by side, ich auf Deutsch, she in English. That way I could sneak a peek at the translation if a passage eluded me. But my wife laid the book aside after a few chapters. "I'm sorry," she muttered, "but I gave at the clinic." Her diagnosis of Erwin Summer, and by implication of Hans Fallada, was `severe depression, self-medicated with alcohol' -- unquestionably correct. She declared that she could "fix" such a patient with a steady dose of Celexa or Prozac. Who am I to challenge the professional, but somehow I'm skeptical. Fallada's distress ran deeper, I think, than insufficient serotonin; it was coupled like quantum attraction to the psychosis of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. More recent critics of The Drinker have professed to see an almost allegorical depiction in it of the catastrophe of authoritarian efficiency for the ordinary individual. But in any case, as I tell my wife, it would have been a tragedy to cure poor Hans Fallada with a handful of pills, at the cost of his gifts to literature.