Wolf Among Wolves [Paperback]

Hans Fallada (Author), Philip Owens (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 25, 2010

This sweeping saga of love in dangerous times – the 1923 collapse of the German economy, when food and money shortages led to rioting in the streets and unemployed soldiers marauding through the countryside – is deemed by many to be Hans Fallada’s greatest work. Yet its 1938 publication made his publisher so fearful of Nazi retribution that he told Fallada, “If this book destroys us, then at least we’ll be destroyed for something that’s worth it.”

It appears here in its first unabridged translation into English, based on a contemporaneous translation by Philip Owens that has been revised and restored in full by Thorsten Carstensen and Nicholas Jacobs. Carstensen also provides an afterword discussing why the original version of the book was so heavily edited … and why Fallada’s publisher thought a love story might get them killed.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The ideal summer read."
—Katherine Powers, The Boston Globe 
 
"An unmissably brilliant portrait of Berlin before the Nazis."
—The Times of London

“Outstanding… his novels, whatever their ultimate position in the literary rankings, are simply much more entertaining than the tomes produced by the usual German suspects, Mann, Hesse, Grass, Böll….if you fancy a book to take you right through your holidays and any possible delays at the airport, you couldn’t do better than Wolf Among Wolves.”
—Tibor Fischer, Telegraph (UK)
 
"His most ambitious novel... deeply moving... he has evoked more than one can bear, but not more than it is necessary to learn, to keep and to understand."
—Alfred Kazin, The New York Times (1938) 
 
"Fallada handles [the characters] not morbidly but with a Hogarthian exuberance and a tough humor, infusing into even those dying spirits the life of his copious imagination... Fallada's best book."
—The New Yorker (1938)

“What other living German novelist shares with Fallada the power to grip the reader on the first page and hold him unremittingly through 1100 more?"
—Bayard Q. Morgan, World Literature Today (1938) 

"Out of the multitude of episodes and a large cast of characters, the picture of post-War Germany during the terror of the inflation period, comes into reality, as in almost no other book we have had... A human document--and a moving picture of a Germany gone mad."
—Kirkus Reviews
 
Praise for Hans Fallada
"Fallada can be seen as a hero, a writer-hero who survived just long enough to strike back at his oppressors."
—Alan Furst
 
"Fallada deserves high praise for having reported realistically, so truthfully, with such closeness to life." 
—Herman Hesse

About the Author

Prior to WWII, the novels of German writer Hans Fallada (born Rudolf Ditzen) were international bestsellers. But when Jewish producers in Hollywood made his 1932 novel, Little Man, What Now? into a major motion picture, the rising Nazis began to take note of him. His struggles increased after he refused to join the Party and was denounced by neighbors for “anti-Nazi” sympathies. Unlike many other prominent artists, however, Fallada decided not to flee Germany. By the end of World War II he’d suffered an alcohol-fueled nervous breakdown and was in a Nazi insane asylum, where he nonetheless managed to write—in code—the brilliant subversive novel, The Drinker. After the war, Fallada went on to write Every Man Dies Alone, based on an actual Gestapo file, but he died in 1947 of a morphine overdose, just before it was published.

Product Details

• Paperback: 816 pages
• Publisher: Melville House; Unabridged edition (May 25, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933633921
• ISBN-13: 978-1933633923
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.4 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #287,418 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

37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Magnificent Masterpiece of Narrative Tension, June 1, 2010

By 

Ron E. Kendricks "Ron Kendricks" (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wolf Among Wolves (Paperback)

This brilliantly rendered historical novel is a masterpiece matched perhaps only by Charles Dickens. Hans Fallada is a talented genius of the narrative composition. His characters come to life as if in a movie. No book that I am aware of has ever held such suspenseful intrigue for 793 pages as this one. It even surpasses "War and Peace."

This book, written in 1936-1937 still resonants with relevancy to our contemporary 2lst Century. It is an inspiring tale of perservance during political, social, and economic upheaval. This beautiful novel is a masterpiece of critical realism. It represents a clarion call to humanism and compassion amidst economic devastation. It depicts a depraved world ruined by incompetence, indifference, and greed. The protagonist Wolf Pagel, lives among wolves, but refuses to become one of them. This wonderful book, a hundred years before its time, declares that the individual can rise above the social and moral ills of his time.One of the most moving passages asserts what courage is:

"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."

Fallada's love for storytelling is marvelous! You come to know, respect and understand his characters. Like Robert Musil's "The Man With No Qualities," "Wolf Among Wolves," is a brilliant study of the psychology of individuals in everyday life, entangled in the circumstances of his time.

The novel also gives us direct insight of how economical devastation and social depravity leads to fear and insecurity and which can then result in Fascism.

The novel itself, in spite of the brutality of life, manages to be optimistic in its view of humankind. Fallada celebrates the idea "that the brave manage to keep afloat, whereas the unfit fail." It is a marvelous depiction of how love endures, and that faith in mankind can be redeemed.

Above all books that I have read, Hans Fallada's "Wolf Among Wolves" deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature, Posthumously.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Weimar Vanity Fair, October 7, 2010

By 

Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wolf Among Wolves (Paperback)

The "Talking Horse" had a lot to say, and he said a great deal of it in his 1937 novel "Wolf unter Wölfen". Some readers appear to think he said more than he needed to -- this English translation is over 700 pages of dense type -- and at least one prior reviewer has asserted that he didn't say enough about the nastiness of Nazis by and large. I'm reminded of the incident when the Kaiser reprimanded W.A. Mozart for having "too many notes" in a piece of music. Mozart cheekily replied, "No, Your Majesty, not one not too many!" That expresses my response to "Wolf Among Wolves" -- not one scene or character too many.

But it is a sprawling novel, on the scale of War and Peace, Buddenbrooks, or Thackery's "Vanity Fair". The last comparison is the most apt; Fallada's "Wolf Among Wolves" is a scorching portrayal of the vanities and follies od a whole society, that of post-WW1 Germany in 1923 and thereafter. The Wolf of the title is Wolfgang Pagel, the only scion of a wealthy family, who has become estranged from his widowed mother by 'hooking up' with Petra, a former prostitute. Wolf is introduced at his nadir, a compulsive gambler who's lost his last stakes. But Wolf is surrounded by wolves, by a huge cast of other fools and knaves: landladies, street lowlives, upper-echelon former officers of the Wehrmacht, rural landowners, cynical servants, poachers and foresters, and in particular a sinister 'activist' on behalf of the Cause, in other words an early agitator for Nazism. The scale of the novel merely reflects the scale of the societal catastrophe in Germany in the era of hyper-inflation. "Wolf Among Wolves" matches "Vanity Fair" in its brilliantly unfunny humor, its relentless satire of wealth and pride, and in its core values of sympathy for "the little man".

I chose to read it in this English translation for two reasons. First, I can read English at least three times as fast as German, and with a novel of 700 pages that's an important consideration. Second, it was unclear to me whether the German edition available was the edited/censored text published in 1937 or the more complete text based on the author's manuscript. This English edition is the latter, an updated and fully re-restored translation. Fallada's "English" is spare and forthright -- a good deal more proletarian than Thackery's -- and closely matches the style of his German in other books of his that I've read. Bluntly, I think it's a solid translation, eminently readable.

"Hans Fallada" was the pen-name of Rudolf Ditzen. "Fallada" was the name of a talking horse-head that exposed a villainy in one of the grimmest of Grimm's Fairy Tales. The author Hans Fallada was as shocking a witness of and denouncer of the rise of Nazism from the rubble of German history as any bloody severed head truth-speaking in the Marktplatz. No, Wolf Among Wolves is NOT a portrayal of anyman's battle against the minions of evil. It's a tilling of the subsoil of evil, of 'anyman' and 'anywoman' enmeshed in rampaging nationalism and ravaging capitalism.

Read it as you would any monumental classic -- slowly, thoughtfully, with relish for its panoramic narrative -- because it IS a monumental 'classic' of 20th C literature. I remain puzzled about the lack of attention, among anglophone readers, to the powerful novelists of the German language in the decades before WW2. Only Thomas Mann seems to have 'cracked' the English market, and that's odd because he was scarcely the most energetic critic of Nazism. Along with Hans Fallada, for readers interested in the social conditions that supported the rise of Hitler, I strongly recommend the works of Alfred Doeblin, Joseph Roth, and Irmgard Keun.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Redemption, July 19, 2010

By 

Keith A. Comess - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wolf Among Wolves (Paperback)

Hans Fallada was resurrected from the literary dead by Melville House publishers with the first English publication of "Every Man Dies Alone" about a year ago. Since that time, several other of his books have been re-issued, including, "Wolf Among Wolves", his apparent magnum opus. When "Wolf" originally appeared, it was evidently highly edited. This is the first unexpurgated version and it extends for nearly 800 unevenly written pages.

"Wolf" is set in post-WW I Germany, an "interesting" time. Following the unexpected collapse of the Imperial German Army and the draconian provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, competing extremist groups of both the far Left and the far Right battled both literally and figuratively for political ascendency while the political "middle" collapsed. Further roiling the waters was the untimely demise of the world-wide economy, now known as the Great Depression. In Germany (and in other countries, as well), rampant inflation occurred which, when coupled with high unemployment, a sense of national humiliation and grievance, German default on reparations in 1923 (culminating in the subsequent French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr Valley industrial area), created times that were difficult, indeed. While various international measures were enacted (such as the 1924 Dawes Plan) by the Allied Reparations Committee in an attempt to help Germany stave off total implosion, extreme nationalist tendencies prevailed, riding on the back of such face-saving myths as the Dolchstoßlegende ("stab in the back" legend). There were various coups directed against the Weimar Republic (Spartacist Insurrection of 1918-19 on the far Left, the Wilhemshaven Naval mutiny also in 1918 indicating military instability, the Kapp-Luttwitz putsch on the far Right in 1920, being prominent amongst them). Rightists of various stripes aggregated in militias (Freikorps) which engaged in frequent and violent street battles with Communists. The ultra-right Nazi Party gained ascendency and assumed power in 1933: WW-II followed directly from the Party ideology, fed by domestic discontent. The troubled history of Germany did not really "end" until unification in 1989-1990.

Against this background, is the protagonist of Fallada's epic story, Wolfgang Pagel, a dissolute and disaffected young man from a relatively well off family. He lives in a self-inflicted state of dire gambling-induced poverty with "Peter" (actually Petra), who was forced into prostitution by economic circumstances. This couple and their personal milieu were lifted right out of Dostoyevsky. Entering the mix are Wolf's mother (a sour and self-absorbed woman), a former captain of cavalry ("the Rittmeister"), another companion officer (reduced to service in a hotel but redeemed by an unrelentingly pragmatic and empirical approach to life and business affairs), a mysterious rightest insurrectionary ("the Lieutenant"), the Rittmeister's inlaws (a nasty father-in-law, a silly religious maniac mother-in-law), a daffy, overly romantic daughter, a sympathetic, insightful and resourceful wife and various Tolstoyan peasant types. In other words, Fallada creates a clever and interesting character mix.

The plot itself is simple: Wolf's "fall from grace" in an urban setting and his eventual redemption through rural labor. This is standard early 20th Century romantic fare, in stark contrast to "Every Man Dies Alone", which used a starkly realist framework, demonstrating Fallada's range of novelistic skills or perhaps his stylistic evolution. "Wolf" is unevenly written: it has an awkward beginning, a tautly written and well-dramatized middle "core" and a fumbling and somewhat muddled concluding section. Stated otherwise, the book needed editing, despite the relatively sensationalist claims to the contrary proffered in the "Afterward". It would be interesting to contrast the unedited version with the older, edited one. The cover blurb (by Alan Furst) is particularly baffling, since Fallada evidences absolutely no elements of "revenge" against his Nazi oppressors anywhere in this book. In fact, by creating a sympathetic context, one might infer that extreme reaction was a necessary means of dealing with otherwise intractable economic and social problems. Of Fallada's books, "Every Man Dies Alone" is at the apex. "Little Man, Now What?" probably occupies the nadir and "Wolf" is somewhere in between. It has historical interest and literally appeal, as well. It is a good book, but it is not an excellent one.