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Drinker, the

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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.

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.

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.

This book was difficult for me to read. As a former "drinker" myself, Fallada's story dredged up so many painful memories and emotions that I actually shuddered on several occasions. The story of Erwin Sommer, the small businessman who quickly descends into alcoholic chaos is described only as someone who has lived that life could do it. The euphoria, the despair, the shame, the rage, the twisted rationalization and illogical thinking and the complete degradation and demoralization of Herr Sommer is dead on accurate in my opinion. I've met hundreds of Erwin Sommers, some of whom were fortunate enough to escape the throes of alcoholism, some of whom were not. Even as someone who has had similar experiences, I found myself alternately pitying and scorning our drunken protagonist. And while Sommer was a truly pathetic character, one is also struck by the heartlessness of a system (1930s-1940s Germany) which seems contented to simply lock him up and throw away the key. Sommer is clearly a sick man and not a criminal per se. Some say that this story is some sort of metaphor for the Nazi system that Fallada wrote this in. Personally, I did not sense this, but I cannot say for sure. Either way, this is a devastating look into the world of alcoholism and the bizarre psychology of the human race.

This book gets off to a marvellous start. Without dawdling over background information or scene-setting, the first-person narrator explains the difficulties both his marriage and his business are sinking into, and the habitual drinking which is overtaking him in parallel. As often with alcoholics, Erwin Sommer cannot tell if he has begun drinking because of his troubles, or if his troubles began because of his drinking.

The writing in the first few chapters is compellingly strong. Sommer has already begun to sink into powerlessless: he notices 'the mute dislike of myself that I encountered at every twist and turn'; and the fact that he is becoming more and more mean-spirited towards his apparently kindly wife. After a while, however, the hurt he causes her no longer upsets him, and he concludes that man 'gets used quickest of all to living in a state of degradation.' From this point, one misfortune sockets into the next with an appalling ineluctability and we are forced to watch as Sommer loses his business, his comfortable home life and is incarcerated firstly in jail, then in an asylum. The usual cast of low and self-serving characters found in a Fallada novel pock-mark the narrative; the aforementioned degradation becomes more and more pronounced as the narrator fails to see a way out of his plight.

It's a shame that the rest of the book doesn't live up to such a strong opening, however. Once Sommer is removed from society, the narrative becomes a (perhaps understandably) monotonous tapestry of squalor. Hans Fallada is a very straight-up, no-frills kind of writer: however, his brutal honesty does not serve him as well here as it did in other novels. In my view, the book seems to suffer from the sheer speed with which it was written (17 days, longhand, in a notebook while in an asylum). The kind of psychological insight and humanity which so endears the reader at the beginning of the story soon falls away completely, and both the tone and pace of the book flatten out. Even when it becomes plain that none of this will end well for the once-respectable Herr Sommer, little tension is wrung from the approaching denouement.

Nevertheless the work is significant, and not merely as an autobiographical curiosity. Sommer does not appear to have any kind of hamartia which drove him to drink. Thus the story is a salutary lesson in how, beyond a certain point, the ratchet of drink-induced passivity can become viciously self-tightening. Trouble (and troublemakers) seem to envelop the narrator like locusts as he loses more and more control over his life. Since the man is neither obviously flawed nor significantly different from the rest of us, this story of alcoholic self-abasement is perhaps an Everyman tale, and thus a warning.

If you've ever wondered what an alcoholic feels like and want a glimpse into the work, struggle and shame that consumes a person this is the book for you. Often a taboo subject, it is the story that is real. The telling of a man with whom the drink has taken over his life and he will do anything to keep getting more. Being a recovered alcoholic myself I found the book as true to fact in today's world as it was in his some 60+ years ago. The man that was and the person he became were likely hard to believe. But believe me it is so dangerously spot on I found myself recalling all of the horrid memories of pleeding for one more drink. The character believes he is beyond amazing when he is drunk and comes up with numerous grand 'plans' to do when he sobers up. Only to find that he is instead looking again for the drink at any cost. The only issue I had was the semi violent acts that he commits in order to get his next fix. You must remember this is in the 1940's, there are no visa cards and with no cash you are forced to take alternate measures to fulfill what your body must intake so you will not be insanely sick from withdrawl. An amazing read and a frank look at what can become of you from your highest to lowest points in a short amount of time.

This book started off well. The protagonist, Sommer, begins his decline and eventual crash into alcoholism and the pre-war German penal system. I found that part to be intense, insightful and informative. But the second half of the book was mostly a prison novel, not nearly as interesting as the earlier pages. Which is not to say that this is a bad book. It's a good one and I'm glad I read it. Some reviewers suggest the book is symbolic of the seduction of Germany by the Nazis. If so, I missed that. In any case, I would highly recommend this book, even with its weaknesses, for its early intensity, its pathological intrigue and its no-nonsense writing style.

Riveting and devastating, "The Drinker" chronicles one man's rapid descent from the heights--or at least the comfortable ledges--of middle-class respectability, down to the depths of alcoholic degradation.

To most normal people, the story will perhaps seem baffling and incomprehensible, even in spite of Fallada's excellent, spare prose; most rational minds will have a hard time comprehending how one man can sink so low, so fast. But alcoholism, alas, is not a rational disease, and anyone who has ever seen the inside of an AA meeting or spent the night in a drunk tank will likely find this novel--particularly its early chapters and its final ones--impossible to put down, or to forget.

Fallada's narrator, Herr Sommer, starts as a somewhat well-to-do businessman in Nazi-era Germany, but pretty much skips the social drinking phase of alcoholism and entangles himself in a rapidly worsening cycle of marital strife and monetary struggle, exacerbated by bad schnapps and worse decisions. "Jails, institutions, or death" are frequently cited as the three likely destinations of any alcoholic who chooses to keep drinking; Sommer almost manages to hit for the cycle. For those familiar with the literature of alcoholism, it will probably feel like an extended version of one of those first-person accounts if 1930s-era inebriated insanity that pepper the front of AA's "Big Book." Only for Sommer, there was no opportunity for a feel-good happy ending; rather than Dr Bob and the Good Old-Timers, his deliverance came from doctors and judges who shunted him off to a Nazi insane asylum.

This book is reportedly somewhat autobiographical, for Fallada wrote it while confined in such an institution. Remarkably, though, it is relatively free from the twin perilous pillars of alcoholic authordom: self-pity and self-aggrandizement. Instead, it is full of honest writing, lean and spare, full of power and truth. Relatively early on, the narrator--unable or unwilling to maintain the effort needed to keep living the high life, or even the mid-life--tells his wife that people "can feel joy and sorrow down below, Magda, it's just like being up above, it's all the same whether you live up or down. Perhaps the most beautiful thing is to let yourself fall, to shut your eyes and plunge into nothingness, deeper and deeper into nothingness."

This is, perhaps, a stretch, for what follows is as ugly, and as compelling, as a car accident. Still, it feels true, in that the alcoholic often secretly longs to simply stop living, without expending the effort or mental energy required for suicide. Those that keep drinking do so because the warm numbing fuzz of inebriation remains infinitely preferable to the bright sharp edges of reality; ultimately, however, their only salvation is oblivion.

An unusual, personal, an utterly real account of one man's addiction, and incarceration in a psychiatric facility during Nazi Germany. A smooth, rythmic read, a powerful portrayal. If you're interested in themes of the individual vs. society, this book will grab you.

An extraordinary book, and extraordinarily painful to read. There are those who make the case that this book is a metaphor for Hitler's Germany. I don't know about that. My experience with Al-Anon tells me that the pitifully self-destructive behavior that poor Hans Fallada documents here is pure, unadulterated alcoholism.

This is thinly veiled autobiography, and it's absolutely wrenching to read of his self-delusions, his descent into madness, his heartbreaking willingness to abandon the advice of loved ones for the soothing lies of evil men. Later in the book, once he is institutionalized, it is equally wrenching to read of the loss of his freedom, his self-respect, his health and his hope. Today, he would have been treated compassionately, by top experts in the field. But Hans Fallada had the vast misfortune to be living in Hitler's Germany, a country that was all too happy to condemn its mentally challenged citizens to death.

A difficult, desolating book, but a fascinating, clear-sighted view into the world of the addict.