Iron Gustav Read online

  Hans Fallada

  IRON GUSTAV

  A Berlin Family Chronicle

  Translated by PHILIP OWENS

  Completed by NICHOLAS JACOBS and GARDIS CRAMER VON LAUE

  Foreword by JENNY WILLIAMS

  Contents

  Foreword by Jenny Williams

  Note on the Translation

  ONE

  The Good Days of Peace

  I Hackendahl Wakes Up

  II Frau Hackendahl

  III The Girls’ Bedroom

  IV The Sons’ Bedroom

  V The Key

  VI Erich

  VII The Two Sisters

  VIII Otto

  IX Erich in the Cellar

  X The Cabs Come In

  XI The Stolen Money

  XII Eva’s Treasure

  XIII Horse Versus Car

  XIV Erich is Released

  XV The Jewel Theft

  XVI The School

  XVII Otto’s Secret

  XVIII Father and Son

  XIX Hackendahl Goes to Bed

  TWO

  War Breaks Out

  I The Kaiser’s Policeman

  II Unter den Linden

  III Eva Meets Someone

  IV Erich’s Friend

  V Supper at Home

  VI Otto is Going

  VII The Requisition

  VIII Spy-Catching

  IX Otto Leaves for the Front

  X Sister Sophie Wants to Go Too

  XI Eva Gets to Know Her Sister-in-Law

  XII Hackendahl is Bored

  XIII Conversation in the Dark

  XIV A Doubter and a Believer

  XV Trouble at School

  XVI The Heap of Gold

  XVII Mother and Daughter

  XVIII Some Ponies

  THREE

  The Evil Days

  I The Wind and the Dream

  II In Front of a Butcher’s Shop

  III Hackendahl Becomes a Cabby Again

  IV Father and Daughter

  V Eva Becomes Something Else

  VI In the Shell Hole

  VII In the Rear

  VIII ‘It Would Be Fine’

  IX The Munitions Factory

  X ‘Mud Will Find Mud’

  XI Otto Comes Home

  XII Otto’s Discussion With His Father

  XIII Bubi’s Marriage Congratulations

  XIV Going Begging

  XV Doctor’s Waiting Room

  XVI Doctor’s Check-up

  XVII Off to the Trenches

  XVIII Otto Hackendahl’s Death

  FOUR

  Peace Breaks Out

  I Homework

  II Irma

  III The Procession, and Erich

  IV The Crowd at the Reichstag

  V A People’s Assembly Interrupted

  VI The Kiss

  VII Eva Calls on Tutti

  VIII The War is Not Lost

  IX Justice or Injustice, Knowledge or Feeling

  X Inside the Reichstag

  XI Why Do You Want Power?

  XII Secret Conversation

  XIII A Hand as an Ashtray

  XIV The Two Villas

  XV Hackendahl Burns a Few Things

  FIVE

  Tinette

  I The Exam

  II The Professor and the Firearms

  III No Longer a Comrade Among Comrades

  IV The Tailor and Tinette

  V Her Minion

  VI Sophie Pays a Visit

  VII Ever Greater Shame

  VIIII Heinz Goes Shopping

  IX The Raid on the Nightclub

  X A Visit to Frau Quaas

  XI The Naked Dancer

  XII Heinz and the Professor

  XIII Home to the Comrades

  XIV The Message from a Dead Man

  XV The Message from a Blind Man

  XVI Peace Breaks Out

  XVII Heinz Moves

  SIX

  The Old Cabby

  I The Inflation

  II Hackendahl Meets a Profiteer

  III His Father Says Goodbye to Erich

  IV A Horse Goes Backwards

  V Erich and His Friend Escape

  VI Nakedness and Business

  VII And Erich Knocks Him Down

  VIII Visit to a Prison

  IX The Arrest of Eugen Bast

  X Argument About a Whip

  XI A Little Whip Cracks

  XII Inheritance and Disappointment

  XIII Two Sulkers

  XIV Erich in Amsterdam

  XV Heinz in Hiddensee

  XVI The Second Kiss

  SEVEN

  Work and No Work

  I Dismissed from the Bank

  II The Cabby and the Girls

  III The Old Lady and the Nursing Home

  IV There’s Trouble Coming

  V Hoppe and Co.

  VI Helping the Little Man

  VII Clients in a Bank

  VIII The Mysterious Dr Hoppe

  IX Dismissed

  X Visit to the Police

  XI On the Dole

  XII Teacher Degener Flies a Flag

  XIII Looking for Work

  XIV The Three Registration Forms

  XV Marriage No Marriage

  EIGHT

  The Journey to Paris

  I The French Horsewoman

  II Farewell to Sophie

  III A Son Leaves Home for Good

  IV The Oldest Cabby in Berlin

  V Young Grundeis

  VI The Notice in the Newspaper

  VII Hackendahl Falls Ill

  VIII Leaving the Newspaper Building

  IX Leaving the Town Hall and Leaving Town

  X Those Who Are Left Behind

  XI The Drive Through Germany

  XII The Frontier and the Gravestones

  XIII Paris

  XIV The Tired Traveller

  XV Welcome to Berlin

  THE LAST CHAPTER

  The Beer Glass

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  IRON GUSTAV

  ‘Every so often you come across a book so finely wrought that you have no doubt about its status as a literary classic. Iron Gustav is one … The writing is visual, vivid and visceral, the irony delicate, and even when it is cynical the novel doesn’t sneer … Fallada’s descriptions of material degradation and squalor equal those of Dickens and Dostoyevsky. He has the gift for complex narrative of Thomas Mann combined with the page-turning powers of great thriller writers such as Raymond Chandler, and the structural control of a great painter or composer … This [Penguin Modern Classics edition] is the first authentic version of not just a classic, but a masterpiece of world literature’ Paul Levy, Wall Street Journal

  ‘A serious cause for celebration: one of the finest German-language works of the twentieth century is now available as it was intended to be read … the book triumphs as a study of ordinary Berliners faced with dire adversity; Fallada celebrates them repeatedly, their wariness, their humour, their toughness, their blunt kindness and, above all, their conversation … This remarkable work, now complete after 76 years, could well be one of the finest novels any of us will ever read. Hans Fallada really was that most rare creature, a born novelist who was also a witness’ Irish Times

  ‘Fallada captures the small tragedies of family life, the loss of dignity caused by unemployment, squalid housing and the misery of seeing civilized values destroyed. This anti-war book, censored by Goebbels in the Thirties, is a gripping addition to modern German history’ Daily Mail

  ’A powerful portrayal of the devastating effects of the first world war on a family and a country … The project went through a tortuous journey, with rewrites ordered by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief,
which have been taken out of the new edition … this new edition is as close as possible to Fallada’s original’ Observer

  ’The “hundreds of deep rifts” that tear defeated Germany apart play out in microcosm within [Iron Gustav’s] family … Fallada shuffles melodrama, farce and documentary realism … This, as even Dr Goebbels must have seen, is laughter in the dark’ Boyd Tonkin, Independent

  ’A saga with the same reach and depth as Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks … a chronicle of Berlin in those turbulent early decades of the twentieth century. Key events appear like milestones: war, Versailles, lawless street-fighting, hyperinflation, Weimar hedonism and the first dark shoots of Nazism … Fallada’s voice is as beguilingly lucid as ever, his images clear to the point of stark, his blighted and resilient Berliners ringing astoundingly true’ National

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  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 or in psychiatric care, yet produced some of the most significant German novels and documentary writing of the twentieth century, including A Small Circus, Little Man, What Now?, Once a Jailbird, Tales From the Underworld, Wolf Among Wolves, 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 died in Berlin in 1947.

  Foreword

  On 12 November 1937 Hans Fallada signed a contract to write a novel ‘dealing with the fate of a German family from 1914 until around 1933’. Little did he suspect how much grief this project, which culminated in the publication of Iron Gustav: A Berlin Family Chronicle in 1938, would cause him – or how tortuous the path would be that would lead to the first complete English edition in 2014.

  The manuscript that Fallada submitted on time in February 1938 was not initially intended for publication in book form. He had signed the contract with the Tobis Film Company, one of whose board members was the German film star Emil Jannings (1884–1950), most famous perhaps for his role in The Blue Angel of 1930, in which he had co-starred with Marlene Dietrich. Jannings had been looking for some time for a film script that would offer him an attractive leading role and was delighted with the larger-than-life figure of Gustav Hackendahl. Jannings took an active part in the negotiations between Fallada and Tobis, in the course of which it was agreed that Fallada would submit a novel and that the company’s screenwriters would develop it into a film script.

  Gustav Hackendahl is based on the historical figure of Gustav Hartmann (1859–1938) who, like his literary counterpart, inherited his father-in-law’s coach business, built it into a successful enterprise and became famous for his return journey by coach and horse to Paris in 1928.

  Fallada clearly wrote the novel with filming in mind. The physical appearance of Gustav Hackendahl himself, in his dark coachman’s coat and white top hat, perched on the seat at the front of his coach with the reins of his horse firmly in his hands, is visually striking. His symbolic status is powerful, too: a man of ‘iron’ principle who sees the values of order, discipline and obedience, on which he has built his life, crumble in the face of modernity. The episodic nature of the work, the extensive use of dialogue (and dialect), the clearly delineated characters all lend themselves to a film adaptation, as does the wide range of social settings – from brothel to elegant villa, from stables to parliament buildings, from hospital to stationery shop, from a newspaper’s headquarters to a tenement building. In this novel, as in Wolf Among Wolves of 1937, Fallada explores how the lives of quite ordinary people are affected by the tumultuous events of German history in the first three decades of the twentieth century. In Iron Gustav this social realism focuses on the Hackendahl family where the effects of the authoritarian nature of Wilhelminian Germany, in the form of Gustav’s ‘iron’ principles, result in only one of the five children growing into a ‘decent’ human being. For Fallada, whose view of morality was a decidedly individual one, ‘decency’ (‘Anständigkeit’) is the key to ethical human behaviour.

  When Fallada signed the contract for Iron Gustav in November 1937 he most probably knew that Tobis – like all media organizations – had been taken over by the Nazi Party. What he did not know was that Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945), the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, was beginning to take a keen interest in his work. In January 1938 Goebbels read Wolf Among Wolves and, interpreting the critique of Weimar Germany in the novel as a confirmation of the Nazis’ rejection of everything to do with the Weimar Republic, noted in his diary that this was ‘a super book’ and its author had ‘real talent’. What Fallada ought to have known was that signing a contract in 1938 with a Nazi film company to write a book covering the period 1914 to 1933 in German history would mean including a glowing account of the rise of the Nazi Party.

  Fallada seems to have had no inkling of the collision course on which he embarked in November 1937. In his defence it must be said that his main aim was to create a role for Emil Jannings and to write a social history around the Hackendahl family. This led to him concluding the novel shortly after Gustav’s triumphant return from Paris in 1928.

  Fallada expected the screenwriters to make changes to his manuscript; what he did not expect was the personal intervention of Goebbels, who insisted that the story be continued until 1933 and that Gustav Hackendahl become an ardent Nazi. While Fallada was able to decline Goebbels’s invitation for a face-to-face meeting, he could not ignore his instructions about the conclusion of the novel. He suggested to Jannings that a Nazi author would be much better placed to write the sort of conclusion that Goebbels required. When Jannings conveyed this view to Goebbels, the Minister replied that if Fallada was still unsure about his attitude towards the Party, the Party had no doubts about its attitude towards Fallada. Fallada now found himself faced with an unmistakable threat to his life. How would this non-Nazi, whose work since A Small Circus had constituted an extended plea for human decency, react?

  He capitulated. Like most of Gustav Hackendahl’s family he was unable to resist the iron fist of an authoritarian regime. By way of explanation he would later write: ‘I do not like grand gestures, being slaughtered before the tyrant’s throne, senselessly, to the benefit of no one and to the detriment of my children, that is not my way.’

  Fallada’s great gift lay in his keen observation of the world around him and his talent as a storyteller. His ability to feel his way inside his characters and convey their hopes and fears, their successes and failures, produced realistic figures such as Otto Hackendahl in Iron Gustav, Willi Kufalt in Once a Jailbird and Johannes Pinneberg in Little Man,What Now?. This, his great strength, was also a weakness, for he was unable to rise above his emotional involvement – in his characters, in his attitude to politics as well as in many aspects of his day-to-day life – to develop an analytical or philosophical standpoint. His 1944 Prison Diary leaves no doubt about his hatred of the Nazi regime but it was an instinctive hatred, not one based on a political philosophy. And this left him defenceless against the bully-boy tactics of Joseph Goebbels. He spent August 1938 carrying out Goebbels’s instructions: ‘this month […] is marked in black in my diary. The world filled me with loathing, but I loathed myself even more for what I was doing.’

  Fallada did the minimum necessary to meet Goebbels’s demands. There is no detailed account of the rise of the Nazi Party or the nature of Party meetings, nor is there a celebration of the Party’s much-vaunted achievements. In fact, Party activities are reduced to folding leaflets and getting involved in street brawls. There is no discussion of Party policy apart from Heinz Hackendahl’s question about anti-Semitism, which is left unanswered.

  In order to prepare the ground for first Heinz’s and then Gustav’s Party membership, Fallada added a small amount of material in Chapters Four, Five, Six and Seven in which he underscores the injustices suffered by Germany in the aftermath of the First World War and sharply criticizes the role of the Com
munists in the November Revolution. The first major addition is the insertion at the end of Chapter Seven of three new sections that explain Heinz’s reasons for joining the Nazi Party: his unemployment (which leads to difficulties in his marriage), his meeting with a former comrade of Otto’s (who is a Party member) and the feeling of comradeship and the sense of purpose that Party membership brings. As a member of the Party, Heinz ‘becomes a human being and a real man again’. The additions in Chapter Eight pave the way for Gustav to become a Nazi and the new Chapter Nine describes the death of Gustav’s wife, Heinz and his family moving into the Hackendahl family home and Gustav’s decision to join the Party. The final line of the new conclusion is Gustav’s declaration to Heinz and his comrades: ‘Well, then: let me join you!’

  Heinz and Gustav do not join the Nazi Party because they are convinced by Nazi Party policy. Heinz finds a reason for living and a sense of belonging in his political work (which remains unspecified); Gustav’s reasons for joining are rather unclear.

  Fallada, who later described these changes as ‘stupid tinkering around’, expected that they would not satisfy Goebbels. But to his surprise the Minister approved the Iron Gustav project and work started on the film. However, it all came to a halt in October 1938 when the Party’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), declared that Fallada was not the kind of author that a German state could support.

  Given Rosenberg’s views and the fact that the novel did not constitute a paean to National Socialism, it is not surprising that when the novel appeared at the end of November 1938 it received very negative reviews and was withdrawn from display in bookshop windows.

  Despite the outbreak of war, Fallada’s English publishers, Putnam, bought the rights to Iron Gustav and the first English translation appeared in 1940.

  The 1940 English edition was considerably shorter than the one that had appeared in Germany in 1938. In the first place, it was based on Fallada’s original manuscript and did not include Chapter Nine, the new sections in Chapter Seven and the other material that he had included at Goebbels’s behest. Moreover, Putnam removed an additional eight sections and undertook wide-ranging cuts across the board. They clearly wanted a much shorter book.

  Content that was considered repetitive or not central to the main narrative was simply excised. This affected primarily the portrayal of the Hackendahl children: the account of Sophie’s application to volunteer for nursing at the Front (Two, X), Erich’s visit to Dr Meier (Two, XIV), Otto’s experience of Lille (Three, VII) are all simply omitted. A further three sections relating to Heinz are also cut: his visit with Irma to Tutti and Eva (Four, IX), his row with Tutti (Six, XIII) and his visit to his former teacher and mentor, Professor Degener (Seven, XII). Even Chapter Two, section VIII, which describes Gustav’s walk with Heinz and the incident with the spies on the day he handed over his horses for the war effort, does not appear in the 1940 English translation.