As the action proceeds, the novel becomes more relentless in its depiction of people “who from day to day increasingly lost all feeling of self-respect and propriety.” The loss of moral rectitude parallels currency devaluation, the dispiriting effect of which is evoked in an early passage:
A feeling of impotent hatred overcame Rittmeister Joachim von Prackwitz. Somewhere in this town there was a machine—naturally a machine, for men would never submit to be prostituted for such a purpose—which vomited paper day and night over the city and the people. “Money” they called it; they printed figures on it, beautiful neat figures with many noughts, which became increasingly rounder. And when you had worked and sweated to put by a little for your old age, it all became worthless paper, paper muck.
The Berlin of the inflation years as depicted in Wolf Among Wolves is one of moral depravity—a place known for “heroin and cocaine, ‘snow,’ nude dances, French champagne and American cigarettes, influenza, hunger, despair, fornication and crime.” In one of the most powerful passages in the novel, the narrator describes the city as a veritable “Oriental bazaar”: “Dealers, beggars, strumpets: almost shoulder to shoulder they stood on both sides of the pavement.” As Joachim von Prackwitz, the farmer from the Neulohe estate, promenades through Friedrichstraße, then and now one of Berlin’s bustling avenues, he is appalled by “the misery, the indecency, the demoralization which manifest[s] itself in Berlin in broad daylight.” Judging from their suggestive glances, even the young salesgirls are already trapped in this urban netherworld: “Why save oneself up for tomorrow? Who knows where the dollar will stand, who knows whether we shall be still alive tomorrow?” Forcing his way through the crowd, Prackwitz arrives at the arcade passing from Unter den Linden to Friedrichstraße and enters, sensing that “he might have come from purgatory into hell”:
The shops paraded huge pot-boiler pictures of naked women, repulsively naked, with revoltingly sweet pink breasts. Chains of indecent picture-postcards hung everywhere. […] But the young boys were by far the worst of all. In their sailor suits, with smooth bare chests, cigarettes impudently sticking in their lips, they glided about everywhere; they did not speak, but they looked at you and touched you.
Overcome with “shuddering nausea,” Prackwitz, who throughout the novel is characterized by his childlike naïveté, finally comes to think of Neulohe “as an untouched island of purity,” a provincial refuge from Berlin, that “morass of infamy.”
Fallada’s Berlin is not the right place for Wolfgang Pagel to mature and develop into a responsible, compassionate man. It is in the country, at the estate in East Prussia, that Pagel learns the benefits of hard work. As the narrator puts it in one of the hundreds of passages that was left out in the 1938 translation: “… these were not the times to rely on God in Heaven. These were times to work yourself until you drop.” By the end of the novel, Pagel, whom we first meet gambling in the Berlin night clubs, is in charge of the estate’s accounts. He is the last 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: