Tales from the Underworld Read online

  Hans Fallada

  TALES FROM THE UNDERWORLD

  Selected Shorter Fiction

  Edited and Translated by MICHAEL HOFMANN

  Foreword by JENNY WILLIAMS

  Contents

  Foreword

  The Wedding Ring

  Passion

  Tales from the Underworld

  Farmers in the Revenue Office

  Kubsch and His Allotment

  Mother Lives on Her Pension

  A Burglar’s Dreams Are of His Cell

  Why Do You Wear a Cheap Watch?

  On the Lam

  I Get a Job

  A Bad Night

  The Open Door

  War Monument or Urinal?

  Happiness and Woe

  With Measuring Tape and Watering Can

  The Lucky Beggar

  Just Like Thirty Years Ago

  Fifty Marks and a Merry Christmas

  The Good Pasture on the Right

  The Missing Greenfinches

  Food and Grub

  The Good Meadow

  Calendar Stories

  The Returning Soldier

  The Old Flame

  Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism

  Three Years of Life

  Svenda, a Dream Fragment; or, My Worries

  Looking for My Father

  Note on Sources

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  TALES FROM THE UNDERWORLD

  Hans Fallada was born Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen in 1893 in Greifswald, north-east Germany, and took his pen-name from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. He spent a number of years in prison and in psychiatric care, yet produced some of the most significant German novels of the twentieth century, including Little Man, What Now?, Iron Gustav, Once a Jailbird, A Small Circus, The Drinker and Alone in Berlin, the last of which was only published in English for the first time in 2009, to near-universal acclaim. He also wrote many remarkable short stories, the best of which are collected in Tales from the Underworld. Fallada died in Berlin in 1947.

  Iron Gustav, Once a Jailbird, A Small Circus and Alone in Berlin are all published in Penguin Modern Classics.

  Michael Hofmann is the author of several books of poems and the translator of many modern and contemporary German authors. Penguin publishes his translations of Fallada’s Alone in Berlin and A Small Circus, Kafka’s Amerika and Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel, Irmgard Keun’s Child of All Nations and Jakob Wassermann’s My First Wife.

  Jenny Williams is Professor Emeritus at Dublin City University and is the author of More Lives than One: A Biography of Hans Fallada, which is published by Penguin.

  Foreword

  Hans Fallada wrote some ninety short stories during his lifetime. This anthology opens with the first story Fallada published, ‘The Wedding Ring’, which appeared in August 1925. It also includes one of his last stories, ‘The Old Flame’, which was published in November 1946, three months before his death.

  Looking back on his career as a writer, Fallada declared in a radio broadcast in 1946 that ‘everything in my life ends up in my books’. This statement applies not only to his novels but also to his shorter fiction, for the themes of the stories in this volume are drawn to a large extent from the turbulent life of Rudolf Ditzen (1893–1947), the man behind the pen-name Hans Fallada.

  Ditzen’s experience of working on the estates of the landed gentry in central and eastern Germany during the years 1913 to 1925 forms the basis of stories such as ‘The Open Door’ and ‘Food and Grub’. It was his addiction to morphine and experimentation with cocaine during and immediately after the First World War that lends such an air of authenticity to the account of drug addiction in ‘A Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism’. Unable to sustain such an expensive habit on the modest income of a steward, Ditzen was twice imprisoned for embezzlement in the 1920s. In prison he became acquainted with the lives of petty criminals and this encounter provided the material for ‘Tales from the Underworld’ and ‘Three Years of Life’, as well as ‘Looking for My Father’.

  Ditzen’s struggle to find work after leaving prison in 1928 is reflected in ‘I Get a Job’. He eventually found employment as a journalist in Neumünster in Schleswig–Holstein. ‘War Monument or Urinal?’ is based on his experience of the politics of a small town in Germany at the end of the 1920s, and ‘Fifty Marks and a Merry Christmas’ contains echoes of his first Christmas as a married man in 1929.

  January 1930 saw Ditzen in Berlin, where the publisher of his first two novels, Ernst Rowohlt, had offered him a job in his reviews department. It was here that he witnessed the effects of the Great Depression on the lives of ordinary people in the city, such as the woman in ‘Mother Lives on Her Pension’ and the salesmen in the two stories ‘With Measuring Tape and Watering Can’ and ‘The Lucky Beggar’.

  In the autumn of 1933, Ditzen and his family moved to the remote village of Carwitz in the Mecklenburg Lake District, some eighty miles north of Berlin, in an attempt to escape the political and social turmoil that attended the Nazis’ rise to power in the capital. ‘The Good Pasture on the Right’, which Fallada regarded as one of his best short stories, is set close to Carwitz and reflects the author’s observation of the problems facing small farmers in the area.

  ‘Svenda, a Dream Fragment’ was composed in a Nazi psychiatric prison in the autumn of 1944. It forms part of the Prison Diary that Ditzen wrote in an almost indecipherable hand and managed to smuggle out under his shirt. The entry for 1 October opens with this story and it is clearly based on the previous night’s dream. Its subtitle, ‘My Worries’, reflects the crisis in which he found himself. His first marriage had ended in divorce in the summer of 1944. Alcoholism and depression had taken a heavy toll on his health, and he had been incarcerated for observation and with no date for release in a Nazi institution that practised sterilization and euthanasia. The mysterious figure of Svenda bears some resemblance to his second wife, Ulla, whom he had met earlier that year. The description of the ruins of Berlin is based on his first-hand experience of walking through the city in February 1944, when he was undergoing treatment for depression.

  ‘The Returning Soldier’ deals with a common problem in the aftermath of war and also refers to the Democratic Land Reform, which expropriated the large estates of the former landowners and redistributed the land among small farmers. This proved to be a very popular measure in the Soviet Zone of Occupation in 1946. Kurt Karwe in ‘The Good Meadow’ benefits directly from this policy and feels that ‘life was just beginning for him’ as a result.

  Fallada’s shorter fiction often relates in fascinating ways to the author’s longer prose works. There are stories in this volume that are partially or completely recycled in later novels. The closing scene in ‘A Burglar’s Dreams Are of His Cell’ (1931) anticipates Kufalt’s return to prison in Once a Jailbird (1934), and chapter six of the novel contains an echo of the ‘funny money’ scene in ‘A Visit to Jemmy-Max’s’ (1928). ‘The Open Door’ (1932) appears in a shortened form in Once We Had a Child (1934), where it is the newly wed Elise Gäntschow who suffers from her tyrannical husband’s obsession with closing doors. Fallada incorporates the material of ‘A Bad Night’ (1931) into Wolf Among Wolves (1937).

  In one case a story offers a glimpse of an early work that has not survived. ‘Passion’ is based on Ria. A Short Novel, which Rowohlt’s editor Franz Hessel rejected in 1923. Two years later Fallada reworked the material into the short story ‘Passion’ and sent it to a rival publisher, who seems to have rejected this version, too, for it was not published until some twenty years after the author’s death.

>   ‘Happiness and Woe’ provides an insight into the creative process that produced the bestselling Little Man – What Now? (1932). The story represents an earlier and radically different version of an episode towards the end of the novel when the unemployed protagonist and his family are living illegally in an allotment on the outskirts of Berlin. A comparison of the two versions shows that Fallada chose a more conventional ending for the novel, a choice that was to contribute significantly to its success.

  Although Fallada frequently insisted that he preferred the scope offered by a novel to the constraints of shorter prose works, he nevertheless continued to write shorter fiction. Following the publication of his first two novels, Young Goedeschal (1920) and Anton and Gerda (1923), his early short stories were part of a strategy to establish himself as a writer. After the success of A Small Circus (1931) and, particularly, Little Man – What Now?, he was inundated by requests for stories from a range of newspapers, magazines and literary journals.

  However, as the Nazi Party began to tighten its grip on cultural life in Germany, the outlets for Fallada’s short stories gradually disappeared. In the meantime, Rudolf Ditzen had discovered, like Kurt Karwe in ‘The Good Meadow’, that ‘children are the only real riches in this life’. The stories that he invented to entertain his children gave him the idea for his first volume of children’s stories. Published in 1936, this consisted of seven stories, including ‘The Missing Greenfinches’. A second volume of children’s stories followed in 1938. During the war years Fallada published two short works of young adult fiction, and while in prison in 1944 he wrote a story about Fridolin the badger for his eleven-year-old daughter, Lore. Children’s stories allowed the author to create a world in which justice reigns and good generally triumphs over evil. In ‘The Missing Greenfinches’, young Thomas is brought up to respect all living creatures and to reject the cynical doctrine of ‘might is right’. In the fictional world of children’s literature, Fallada was able to make the kind of plea for humanity that could no longer be made in the public arena in Germany.

  In the immediate post-war period, Ditzen and his second wife found themselves in the Soviet sector of Berlin. Here they received support from the cultural authorities that in 1945 were keen to enlist all non-Nazi writers and artists in the construction of a new Germany. Ditzen had not survived the war unscathed, for both he and especially his wife were heavily addicted to morphine. He spent the last seventeen months of his life in poor health, moving between clinics, hospitals and home among the rubble and chaos of post-war Berlin. The daily newspapers in the Soviet sector paid extremely well and provided a most welcome source of income. This no doubt accounts for the fact that Fallada published twelve short stories as well as other short prose works, in addition to the two novels The Nightmare (1946) and Alone in Berlin (1947), between December 1945 and his death in February 1947. Given the speed at which the later stories were written, it is not surprising that some are of little literary merit, the rehashing of the Ria story in ‘The Old Flame’ being a prime example.

  The fables and morality tales of the ‘Calendar Stories’ (1946) marked a new departure for Fallada. Here he draws on a tradition that originated in the religious stories incorporated in the folk calendars of sixteenth-century Germany. This type of edifying tale gradually developed into a short story sub-genre in its own right, as illustrated by Johann Peter Hebel’s The Treasure Chest of 1811. Fallada concludes each of his nine ‘Calendar Stories’ with an explicit moral, in which he gives expression to his humanist principles.

  Fallada’s short stories attracted attention outside Germany during his lifetime. In the autumn of 1932, a Mr G. E. Halliday from the Curtis Brown literary agency in London approached Rowohlt for permission to translate some of Fallada’s shorter fiction. Between 1933 and 1936 a number of stories appeared in newspapers and magazines in England. In January 1936, Halliday’s translation of ‘Fifty Marks and a Merry Christmas’ appeared under the title ‘Wishing is Free’ in The Argosy, a magazine devoted to short stories. This story even made its way across the Atlantic to the USA, where it was included in a reader for students of German in 1937. The following year the Oxford University Press included ‘I Get a Job’ in its Modern German Short Stories, where the title was translated as ‘I Find Work’. In this anthology Fallada found himself in the company of Thomas Mann, Ricarda Huch, Franz Kafka and Arthur Schnitzler, among others. The inclusion of Fallada’s short story in this prestigious volume was evidence of Fallada’s standing as a German writer in the English-speaking world at the time. It was also an indication that not everyone shared the author’s reservations about his shorter fiction. In January 1939, the London publisher Robert Hale announced his intention to buy the translation rights to Fallada’s second volume of children’s stories. The outbreak of the Second World War put paid to such plans, however, and it has taken a further seventy-four years for the first collection of Fallada’s short stories to appear in English.

  The stories in this volume are populated with characters close to Fallada’s heart: the ordinary man and woman in the street who bear the brunt of economic and political crises, the victims of the criminal justice system, the weak and the powerless, who are trapped in situations from which they cannot escape, as well as the children who bear the hope for the future. Fallada’s acute observation of the human condition finds expression in a particularly concentrated way in the shorter fiction form. And through it all flows the author’s commitment to human decency and his unflagging belief in the power of the human spirit. Or, as he put it in his sixth ‘Calendar Story’: ‘victories won by force are not lasting. Lasting victories are only obtained by love and patience and common sense.’

  Jenny Williams, 2013

  The Wedding Ring

  (1925)*

  1

  The women troop out to the field where they’re going to lift potatoes. It’s late autumn, there’s been a light freeze overnight. Frost sparkles in the low sun. They’re cold, but they walk slowly, and at the back of the line dawdles foreman Wrede, with his hands stuffed into his pockets.

  He listens with half an ear to the women’s chatter, he’s had a bad night, his debts kept him awake. But all his thinking didn’t help: it’s only a small sum, thirty or forty marks, but he’s damned if he knows how to lay his hands on it. Now, if he was a steward! It’s ridiculously easy to make a few hundredweight of rye vanish without anyone being any the wiser. But as a foreman … what a hopeless life! He yawns; spits.

  The line has reached the potato field. The tops are brownish-black and sodden, the ground is claggy and wet. Wrede assigns them to their respective rows, of course there’s some backchat from the women, he ignores it, sits down on the wagon thill. The first flash of a mattock in the sun, then things quieten down and work begins. Slowly the stooped figures make their way over the ground.

  Wrede pats his pocket for his tobacco pouch, but he’s left it at home. A sullen rage stirs in him against this life, so grim, so monotonously bleak, a rage looking for a way out. He tramps off after the labourers. Where he spots a potato overlooked, he swears, but it’s no release, his rage continues to boil.

  He has to go back to the box cart, the first baskets are being emptied, he has tokens to give out. He stands on the thill and checks that the baskets are properly full. He’ll show them who’s boss all right, no one’s going to get a token for anything less than a brimming basket. Why should they all be merry as grigs when he’s out of sorts?

  And now here’s the Utesch woman. Another one of those bitches: thinks just because she’s pretty and married young, she’s exempt. He’s slipped her potato tokens once or twice on the sly, but she’s not to think she can make a monkey out of him. Anyway, she’s in love with her man.

  You couldn’t say her basket was full, not with the best will in the world. He looks thoughtfully at the tubers rolling around at the bottom of her almost empty basket, looks at the woman standing on tiptoe, her basket held way over her head, and his eye fixes on
her hand, jammed between basket and box, earth on it, but for a labourer’s slender and shapely.

  Something glints among the rolling potatoes. Wrede moves, is about to say something. Then bites his tongue. The woman takes back her empty basket, he gives her a token, she walks off.

  He stands there quite still, his face suddenly feels hot, his brow is creased – is he thinking about something, very hard? Suddenly he yells, jumps into the box like a maniac, stands there with his feet among the potatoes and yells: ‘Which of you has put stones in with her potatoes?’

  He bends down, hurls clods of earth and potatoes out into the field; all the time his hands are groping feverishly. The harvesters are laughing, he hears scraps of mockery from one to another: ‘He’s really lost it this time.’ – ‘His missus must have had a headache.’ – ‘What a bastard, all he can do is torment people, he needs a mattock in his brain.’

  Wrede climbs out of the box. Again, he shouts: ‘If I catch anyone dropping stones in here, she’s out of a job, you hear!’

  But even that is an effort. He feels very hot, his heart is overbrimming. He knows very well he’s going to have to keep this up all morning, if he’s not to incur suspicion. He needs to go on scolding – even though he can now pay his debt.

  He can pay his debt!

  2

  The day’s over. Martha Utesch is in her kitchen, stirring barley mash for her pigs. She dunks her arms up to the elbows in the warm mass, to feel for any intact potatoes and break them up. The creamy mixture feels soothing. A vague feeling of emptiness comes up in her, an unspecific sense of things being somehow altered; slowly she pulls her right arm out of the swill and looks at it. It’s gloved in a thick layer of creamy white. Almost reluctantly she takes out her other hand to help, takes it out of the bucket, her left hand brushes over her right wrist. She watches. Then across the back of her hand, which emerges a soft pink from the dripping swill. Then her knuckles …‘I don’t believe it,’ she breathes. And then she screams. She covers her face with her hands, she can no longer see, she plunges forward.