There is probably not much left that can be known about Hans Fallada. It is so thoroughly biographed and spelled out that there is between marriage disasters, letters to the children, drug addiction and cautious opportunism in the Nazi era, between the successful novels “Little Man – What Now?” and the posthumously published “Everyone dies for himself” no longer fits a sheet.
Michael Töteberg, who for many years was responsible for media rights at Rowohlt-Verlag and has been chairman of the Hans Fallada Society since 2019, has nevertheless dared to try Fallada’s “tragic story about the human abyss and the incomparable power of literature” – according to the blurb . To do this, he has chosen an interesting, new approach. He tells the story in a novel-like manner, as if Fallada were his own character in a novel, and is limited to the period from September 1945 to his untimely death at the age of 53 in February 1947.
At the end of the war, Fallada was appointed by the Soviets as mayor of Mecklenburg’s Feldberg, an office that overwhelmed him and from which he sought not least by moving to Berlin. Together with his second, much younger wife Ulla, he wanted to make a fresh start there. Suse, the long-time wife and mother of the children, had separated from him in 1944 after his numerous affairs, breakdowns and violent outbreaks.
Michael Töteberg: Fallada’s last love. Novel. Structure Verlag, Berlin 2021, 336 pages, 20 euros.
The story of the “last love” that Töteberg tells is, however, that of a terrible crash, a mutual self-destruction dependent on morphine, driven by a downright feverish need to raise funds. Drug addiction certainly didn’t make survival in the ruined city with housing shortages, ration cards, black market and political uncertainty any easier.
Gottfried Benn, who once provided Fallada with morphine and started a conversation about poetry in his practice, has a guest appearance. More important, however, is Johannes R. Becher, who is responsible for culture in the Soviet sphere of influence, who recruits Fallada for the “Kulturbund”, who provides him with an apartment in Pankow, publication opportunities and book contracts with the newly founded Aufbau Verlag. It is also Becher who sets him on the trail of the working-class couple who were sentenced to death by the Nazis for placing small cards against Hitler in Berlin stairwells.
Fallada can’t do anything with the material at first, but needs the money. He owed the novel for a long time, until more than a year later he did sit down and in a single month produced the 800 manuscript pages of the novel, which would ultimately be called “Everyone dies for himself”. The title tragically anticipates his own lonely death in hospital after rehab. His wife Ulla is in the rehab center herself and not with him.
The literary freedom is manageable, a list of sources would have helped
Töteberg creates a lively picture of the cultural Berlin of the post-war period and delves into the confusing world of newspapers and publishing. That is exciting enough, even if the novel of necessity remains documentary. The literary space is manageable, so a list of the sources would be more helpful than finding out what Fallada might have thought and felt in this or that situation.
There is also a small framework: The Leipzig student Christa Wolf received “Realism in the work of Hans Fallada” as the subject of her diploma thesis from her professor Hans Meyer. So she wrote to Johannes R. Becher, asking if he could help her on Fallada with an autobiographical background. Becher responded evasively. Töteberg’s novel is an attempt to explain this evasive movement and to give its own thorough answer.