Book Review: Iron Gustav (1938) by Hans Fallada

The eponymous anti-hero of this novel is Gustav Hackendahl, the owner of a large fleet of horse-drawn cabs in pre-World War One Berlin. As his nickname implies, Gustav is hard, unyielding, and largely devoid of any emotions, excepting rage when his will is thwarted. Not a person you'd pick for father of the year, and that's the tragedy at the heart of the story. Gustav has a wife and five children, and this sprawling novel charts the decline and fall of Gustav and his family (and Germany) from 1914 to the early '30s. Gustav has no love or even affection for his children. The only reason he seems to have had a family is so that he'd have people to honour and obey him.

The war begins the ruin, financial and otherwise, of the Hackendahl family. Gustav's horses are requisitioned, his eldest son joins the army, and the other children make life decisions that will take them far away from their father. One daughter, Eve, becomes a prostitute, the middle son a corrupt politician and speculator, the eldest daughter a nurse, and the youngest son drifts from school to long-term unemployment as Germany staggers through the post-war era of economic chaos and political upheaval. Sounds like fun, right? The genius of Fallada is that even though he's describing a cascading series of calamities, defeats and crises afflicting the Hackendahls and Germany, his writing never swerves into mawkishness or sentimentality. The tone throughout the novel is bitter amusement at the ways people can willfully and enthusiastically fuck up their lives and their nation. Fallada points out the political and social reasons that help push the Hackendahls over the edge, but he doesn't let the individual characters off the hook for some terrible personal choices. Fallada also allows for sheer, dumb, bad luck to enter into the story as it does in the real world.

As in his masterpiece, Alone in Berlin (my review), Fallada shows an uncanny gift for describing life on the edge. The physical and psychological pains of being unemployed and/or destitute are something he had first-hand knowledge of, and he writes about the subject with a kind of morbid joy, like someone attentively picking at a large and clingy scab. Fallada is telling the story of an entire epoch in German history and he does it through the prism of Gustav. The qualities that Gustav most prizes--stubbornness, pride, self-sacrifice, patriotism, obedience to authority--are the very ones that send his children off on orbits that mostly end in death and disaster. Gustav's prized qualities are also shared by the pre-war state, which makes his eventual decline all the more inevitable in the context of the post-war Weimar Republic.

Iron Gustav was originally conceived of as a film project, and there is a cinematic quality to certain parts of the novel that helps make it one of the most readable and, dare I say it, enjoyable tales of calamity I've ever read. It's hard to describe this novel without making it sound like a sure cure for happiness, but writing this incisive and energetic, even on a dismal subject, is always a pleasure.

Book Review: Alone in Berlin (1947) by Hans Fallada

Well, the contest is officially over. George Orwell's 1984 and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon have been relegated to my personal second division of searing novels about life in a brutal, totalitarian state. It wasn't even close. The prime reason for Alone in Berlin taking home the cup is that Hans Fallada knew whereof he spoke. In 1911, at the age of eighteen, Fallada killed his best friend as part of a mutual suicide pact and then bungled his own attempt to kill himself. Life was telling Fallada something. He was then banged up in a psychiatric hospital, and for the rest of his life (he died shortly after finishing this novel) Fallada was in and out of prisons, hospitals and psych wards. He battled addictions to drugs and booze, worked as a farmer and journalist, and eventually became one of the more successful and well-known German writers of the 1930s. One of his novels, What Now, Little Man?, was even made into a successful Hollywood movie in 1934. Under the Nazis he alternately resisted and knuckled under (Goebbels put a menacing word in his ear) to their insistence that his writings take a pro-Nazi stance. Fallada had intimate knowledge of resistance and collaboration, and those are the twin poles around which his last novel revolves.

Alone in Berlin is based on a true story and follows Otto and Anna Quangel, a working-class couple whose only child, a son, is killed in action in 1940. They're devastated, but unlike millions of other Germans, the couple decide to clandestinely protest the war. They start writing anti-war, anti-Hitler statements on postcards and drop them in public places. The Gestapo is soon on the case, although the impact of their protest is clearly negligible. The Quangels manage to evade capture for several years, but, inevitably, luck turns against them and they're caught, and the last quarter of the novel covers their interrogation, trial and imprisonment.

The Quangels are at the centre of the story, but there are at least a dozen other characters who orbit around them, including co-workers, neighbours, relatives, cops, Gestapo officers, and criminals. These supporting characters include (to name a few) ardent and avaricious Nazis; working-class Berliners trying to keep their heads down and endure the war; petty criminals who are both evading and profiting from the war; and naive, hopeless resisters to the Nazis. Fallada knew what life was like in the lower reaches of German society, and presents it with a brutal, even enthusiastic, harshness. His characters are terrified of the Nazis and the war, and the horror of the regime seems to bleed into personal relationships, many of which are violent and toxic. Fallada is brilliant at describing the petty, degrading horrors of life under Nazidom and the way people will demean themselves to stay out of trouble or curry favour with the authorities. The prison sections of the story are the best of their kind I've ever read. Fallada had many and varied experiences of being detained by the state, and every morsel of that experience and knowledge makes it into the novel.

Grim would be a good, catchall description of Alone in Berlin, but it's also ferociously tense and spiked with a terrifically black sense of humour. It makes for an odd but exhilarating reading experience. There are no happy endings for anyone, but Fallada writes with such energy and descriptive richness that reading about the horrors of life under the Nazis becomes perversely pleasurable. What's even more remarkable about this novel is that Fallada wrote it in under a month, and you can sense that he was in a rush to capture in prose all the rage, bitter sarcasm, and cynical humour that had been bottled up inside him since the Nazis came to power. Alone in Berlin isn't just a great novel about totalitarianism, I'd also put it forward as perhaps the best novel to come out of World War Two.