Hans Fallada's magisterial 1947 novel Alone in Berlin was published to near-universal acclaim in 2009 by Penguin Classics on one side of the Atlantic, after it had been published, under the more faithfully rendered title Every Man Dies Alone, by Melville House on the other side. Penguin's successive Fallada novels – A Small Circus and Once a Jailbird – though warmly welcomed, did not recreate the success of that original rediscovered classic. Melville House fared better by getting the real cream of the crop, releasing in recent years The Drinker, Little Man, What Now? and what is arguably Fallada's finest novel, Wolf Among Wolves.
Now, with the publication of Iron Gustav [Amazon.co.uk], Penguin has made a significant attempt to redress the balance. This powerful novel was published in Germany in 1938 (after several back-and-forth creative differences with Joseph Goebbels) and then in a drastically shorter form in Britain in 1940. That a British publisher would take on a book by a writer with whose country it was at war attests to Fallada's bankability and popularity. This new version is something of a publishing coup as it is the first time we have the novel in its entirety in English.
As with the rest of Fallada's oeuvre, Iron Gustav acutely highlights the chequered fortunes of the ordinary "little man" against the larger picture of Germany's moral and economic breakdown either between the wars or during them. It opens in 1914 with war a mere rumour and concludes prior to Hitler's takeover. Subtitled A Berlin Family Chronicle, Fallada's novel charts not only the rise and fall of one Gustav Hackendahl but also the beleaguered lives of his offspring as they are first browbeaten by their domineering father and then buffeted by the course of history. It all adds up to a saga with the same reach and depth as Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks.
Fallada’s lead is a fearsome patriarch and ex-military man who has earned the nickname “Iron Gustav” after the tough, inflexible way he manages his family and runs his Berlin carriage-hire business. An old-guard stickler of the core Prussian values of duty, obedience and punctuality and a no-nonsense enforcer of “discipline, criticism, the sternest justice”, he hates these “namby-pamby times of peace” and longs for a “thoroughgoing war” to sort out the country’s slack, pleasure-seeking youth. His wife defers to him but his three sons and two daughters have strong wills of their own and start to resist his tyranny. War breaks out, the family disintegrates and Fallada spends the rest of the book flitting from one character and their separate travails to another.
Eldest son Otto is brave enough to go off to battle but lacks the courage to tell his father that he is in love and has a secret child. In contrast, Erich goes from favourite son to bad egg when he leaves home, embraces the socialist cause and then indulges in a life of conflicting ideals. Youngest son Heinz, “a cross to bear” for Gustav, has problems in love but more pressing concerns once mass unemployment takes hold.
One daughter, Sophie, finds independence as a nurse; Eva, more comprehensively sketched, is raped, beaten and blackmailed by the evil Eugen Bast, then plunged into penury and prostitution, but though brutally damaged and perpetually afraid, remains all the time slavishly loyal to her tormentor.
Then there is Iron Gustav himself. When his horses are requisitioned as part of the war effort he begins the slow but steady slide from riches to rags. The once proud entrepreneur is left to scour the streets for fares on his remaining malnourished nag. Fallada reflects Gustav’s “reduced circumstances” by abrading his speech: stiff, starchy, officious patter is incrementally roughed up into a mangled cockney vernacular. As Gustav’s language changes, so too does his character. While there is no total Scrooge-like conversion, the “iron” of his name comes to represent not unyielding dominance but stoic, even heroic, endurance.
Fallada's Berlin Family Chronicle is also a chronicle of Berlin in those turbulent early decades of the 20th century. Key events appear like milestones: war, Versailles, lawless street-fighting, hyperinflation, Weimar hedonism and the first dark shoots of Nazism. We view dying soldiers in the trenches and shell-shocked beggars on the home front, meet city slickers and black-market racketeers, and pass through prisons, brothels, the Reichstag and sumptuous villas. This is social history writ large and mercifully free of sanctimonious preaching or soft-focus distortions.
The only downside is the absence of a glossary (a strange omission for a marketed classic) to decode the sprinkling of untranslated German titles, sayings and cultural references. Otherwise Fallada’s voice is as beguilingly lucid as ever, his images clear to the point of stark, his blighted and resilient Berliners ringing resoundingly true.
Malcolm Forbes is a freelance essayist and reviewer.
Correction: this piece originally said that Penguin in the UK rediscovered Fallada’s work, whereas in fact Melville House first revived his work in English translation.
