Perhaps the finest aspect of Wolf Among Wolves is the character of Etzel von Studmann, and it is Fallada’s portrayal of this “eternal nursemaid” that further corroborates Der Spiegel’s 1947 verdict that this book could, in fact, be seen as “hopelessly depressing.” Though Studmann, who is “always ready to help,” embodies the humanist core of the novel, he finally withdraws from society, taking up a position as resident administrator in a sanatorium where he might as well spend the rest of his life:
The thought has nothing terrifying for him. He has no wish to be outside again in the world of the healthy. He has discovered that he cannot accommodate himself to life. He had his standards, wished life to adapt itself to them. Life didn’t do this, and Herr von Studmann foundered. In great and in little things.
By the time he started work on Wolf Among Wolves, Fallada had already experienced the full impact of Nazi cultural propaganda, having received several particularly vicious reviews from right wing critics for his previous book. This is the context of the peculiar “Word to the Reader” which precedes the novel. Fallada here justifies his decision to render the protagonist of that previous novel, Once We Had a Child, “such a brute.” Eager to subvert similar complaints about his new book, Fallada warns his readers “that Wolf Among Wolves deals with sinful, weak, sensual, erring unstable men, the children of an age disjointed, mad and sick.” A slap at Weimar, to placate the Nazis? The foreword was deleted from the novel after 1945. And yet, Fallada scholars such as Geoff Wilkes consider the preface to be ambiguous. As Wilkes has noted, “All this could be taken as referring to the economic and political turmoil of 1923 specifically, rather than to the Republic as such, and therefore not as placating the Nazis.”
Ultimately, one must consider whether Fallada’s note accurately reflects the attitude of the book, which it clearly does not. If anything, the note, as Wilkes suggests, is “an authentic expression of how Fallada had to walk a political tightrope in 1936–37.” And while he was not like his character Studmann—who, as it says in the book, “could make no concessions”—Fallada did walk the line with bravery. The note’s celebration of the rescue from the perils of inflation, a “both recent and yet entirely eclipsed” time, encapsulates his position in Nazi Germany rather succinctly: while at times writing warily with the official ideology in mind, he also asserted his own humane values. Utterly convinced that he had taken “a formidable risk,” Fallada himself regarded the novel as the uncompromising product of his newly awakened will to write, “regardless of the consequences” his words might have: “I was once again gripped by the old familiar passion; I wrote without looking up, nor did I look round either—neither to the left, nor to the right.”
THORSTEN CARSTENSEN,
New York University
