I love the books of Hans Fallada (the pen name for writer Rudolf Ditzen) and this succinct and calm biography places his work in the context of an interesting and colourful life. This embraces German history from 1893 to 1947, but Fallada was not really a major, established writer, although he did become popular after 1932, and his understanding of the great and terrible events to which he was witness is shown to be very weak. He did not entertain any commitment to the various political philosophies available to him from the Left or the Right, and did not attempt to interpret events in terms of any systematic analysis. His commitment was to decency and to the need of ordinary people to make a life for themselves and their families regardless of the social chaos and corruption surrounding them.
Jenny Williams remarks at one point:
"...his great strength as a writer - his ability to reflect the views and emotions of his fellow Germans - was, at the same time, a great weakness, which could render him incapable of independent thought and action." [p148] Similarly:
"...Ditzen was concerned primarily to depict the results of inflation on German society and was not interested in, or indeed capable of , analyzing the causes of the widespread misery..." {p188] Paradoxically, although the same is often observed in other writers and artists, this quite humble perspective, the focus on everyday life, enabled him to produce some of the most insightful and even devastating commentary on his times. For example, his excellent novel "The Small Circus" takes no sides and yet ends up as a powerful indictment of the corruption of local political life in Germany of the time. It is hard to see how democracy could function under such conditions but we did not really need Fallada to point that out; the novel speaks for itself.
His decision to remain in Germany through the Nazi era was arguably naive and severely frustrated his ability to develop as a writer. He felt unable to consider living outside of Germany and was not inclined to be forced to leave, though he very nearly did and was arguably the only respected writer to remain alive in Germany in this period (I do not know enough to assert this, but the book does). He was not a collaborator; he did make some necessary concessions, partly through naivety, partly to survive, but he remained true to his personal ethics and principles, he was willing to tweak the noses of his tormentors and he was fortunate to come through at all. Somehow, as the book wryly observes in an echo of Pastor Niemöller which is not explicit but I am sure intended, he never quite fitted into any of the categories targeted by the Nazis.
"It also has to be said that his opposition to the Nazi regime was an instinctive, emotional one, based on rather nebulous and individual concepts such as 'decency', not on a firm philosophical foundation such as Christianity or Marxism. This does not diminish his rejection of fascism in any way, but it does mean that his opposition remained isolated, individual and, like most opposition inside Germany, largely ineffective." [p175]
For our purposes, it gave him an insight into life under a totalitarian regime which informed his final novel, Alone in Berlin. That in turn helps to appreciate the limits of what was possible for any individual and so the novel reads back into the biography. Indeed, his fiction was very much constructed around his personal experiences and this biography evoked for me countless sparks of recognition, as the novels made additional sense of his life and his life made sense of his novels.
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In Band 2 gehts weiter mit Holly einer Zeitschrift. Wir bekommen wieder einen Einblick von den einige Redakteure dieser Zeitschrift. Immernoch gibt es keine Spur von Annika Stassen, einen kurzen Rückblick bekommen wir von ihrem Unfall der schon was länger zurück liegt. In diesem Band findet auch ein Tot statt und es werden ihre Tagebücher mitgenommen. Wie im ersten Band wird hier wieder mit Tagen geschrieben, dieses mal spielt sich alles im Monat März ab. Es ist nicht so schön, dass bei jedem Kapitelabsatz der Charakter gewechselt wird, da kommt man schnell durcheinander, welche Sicht man nun hat. Was ich mich bis jetzt immer frage, was hat es mit dieser Kamera aufsicht. Ansonsten ist das Buch ganz gut geschrieben und war etwas besser als Band 1.
