Recurring Nightmare: Hans Fallada’s Lost Work

Nightmare in Berlin, the lost work of Hans Fallada – addict, womanizer, jailbird and thief – is finally published in English. Its translator Allan Blunden helps shed some light on an extraordinary author, chronicling ordinary people during remarkable times

In More Lives Than One, Jenny Williams' biography of the great author Hans Fallada, she notes that this work is devoted to "the life of a remarkable man – among other things an alcoholic, drug addict, womanizer, jailbird and thief." While the recent gutter journalism which ‘outed’ the identity of the anonymous Italian writer Elena Ferrante raises questions over whether the author owes the reader anything beyond the book itself, Fallada’s life beyond the page is of historical significance.

Stranger than fiction, it provides a deeper understanding of his latter work, with first-hand insights into the fears and anxieties of living through the totalitarian Nazi regime, then the moral vacuum of its aftermath. Meanwhile Fallada's forgotten penultimate work, Nightmare in Berlin, has only just been rediscovered and translated into English – his much-tarnished and debated reputation is re-polished in light of it.

Nightmare is in many ways a companion to his 1947 novel Alone in Berlin, which instantly fell into the classic bracket after its first English translation in 2009 (and it's about to be released as a major new film starring Emma Thomson and Brendan Gleeson).

 While Alone reveals life in Berlin during WW2, Nightmare is set in this same city, post-conflict. Its protagonists, Dr Doll and his young wife, anaesthnatise themselves from the psychological aftershock of war through chronic morphine addiction.

The truth of Fallada’s own life is important here, quite simply because Doll is him. The highly autobiographic work holds a mirror to one of many controversial periods of his life; one where, after an unwelcome courtship by the Nazis during their rule, he was in turn wooed by their opponents as the war’s embers cooled – becoming the Soviet-sanctioned mayor for his local village. Nightmare offers Fallada the opportunity to vent his anger and to wallow in, then absolve himself, of guilt.

An exercise in self-examination

In conversation with The Skinny, Nightmare’s English translator Allan Blunden, who also worked on Fallada’s A Stranger in My Own Country: The 1944 Prison Diary (the author bounced in and out of jails and sanatoriums numerous times, for various crimes and ailments) explains why he feels the confessional nature of this work was so important to the author.

“Like Prison Diary, it is clearly an exercise in self-examination,” he says. “Paradoxically perhaps, the adoption of a fictional persona allows Fallada to be harder on himself, more rigorous and searching in his assessment of his moral stance than he is in the diary, where he feels free – and gloriously so – to take the Nazis apart with a knife and fork.”

This point, that he had the direct experience to document a largely unchronicled era, is the very reason Fallada was disregarded by the German literary establishment, many of whom had decamped to LA to escape persecution during the 30s. “Thomas Mann famously dismissed as worthless the work of German writers – such as Fallada – who chose not to emigrate under the Nazis,” says Blunden.

“Personally I warm to Fallada’s tart rebuttal of the Mann view – that he wasn’t about to take lessons from writers who had left Germany and were now judging him and his like from the safety of some foreign land.” Indeed, Fallada's own words at the height of the war were: "I am a German and I prefer to go under with this accursed and blessed nation than enjoy an illusionary happiness in a foreign country.”

But the truth, as always, is complex. While Fallada may eviscerate the Nazi leadership in both Berlin books (Alone, possibly the greater work, is the tale of an elderly couple who chip away at the Nazi monolith by leaving anonymous and provocative notes around Berlin, in a minute but effective act of resistance), it must be remembered that he provided propaganda work for the Reich, admittedly under duress – concession rather than full blown collaboration. Goebbels himsef was originally a fan after misinterpreting an earlier work as having right wing sympathies.

Yet a criminal with severe mental health issues, who in 1911 (still then known as Rudolf Ditzen – Fallada was his pen name) killed his best friend in a suicide pact disguised as a duel, obviously had little place in the master race. His position in many ways provided a unique viewpoint, as Blunden explains: “That he was compromised by continuing to live in Nazi Germany is not the point: the point is that he was sufficiently self-aware and self-critical to know that he was compromised, and that this, precisely, is the condition he was perfectly placed to write about, because he understood it from the inside.”

Addiction and post-war Germany

The post-war period that Nightmare describes was one of national self-reflection and, in many instances, loathing. Of living in literal and moral debt to the world. Where Fallada, full of shame – ‘the malady of the age, a mixture of bottomless despair and apathy’ – found it easier to escape into addiction than to contribute to the task of rebuilding the crumbling structures lining pockmarked streets.

Fallada, the much forgotten genius, pulled from this pit a social realist masterpiece with a fevered narcotic edge – morphine is merely the main course, supplemented by lashings of sedatives and barbituates. It is a novel hip in prose and dark in nature. A fast-moving personal tale of war and madness, sitting above vast and timeless human themes. In many ways a groundbreaking work, featuring dope-shooting protagonists, cocooning themselves against troubled and shifting times, long before Nelson Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm or Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting.

Fallada's interest was not in the ruling politicians or generals but instead the experience of the common man. And as the German avant-garde author Johannes R Becher stated, "a writer who gives us real insight into the hearts and minds of human beings, especially those considered ordinary and uninteresting, deserves the highest praise." Surely Fallada then is due this praise, long after his death in 1947, aged 53, before he could see either of his Berlin books' impact upon the world.

“Nightmare… does capture the sense of depression and anti-climax during those twilight months after the German defeat – a period that, to my knowledge, is not much written about,” Blunden concludes. “We tend to overlook that time, as if it was an empty space between otherwise tangible and describable historical events, or a silence between blocks of dialogue in a drama.  But the Germans were living through it, of course, and it is their experience that Fallada retrieves from oblivion in this novel.”