WestWords: Hans Fallada and the White-Collar Proletariat

The Fantasy of Rugged Individualism

South Philly, 1989.

Recently several members of my family have been reading the German writer Hans Fallada, who died in 1947. I came late to the party, and I'm not quite sure how many of his novels we currently have in our house. Books travel from home to home in our family, as needed.

I've only read two of Fallada's novels, The Drinker (published posthumously in 1950) and Wolf Among Wolves (1937). At some point I may read Every Man Dies Alone (1947) and his most famous novel, Little Man - What Now? (1932).

But I don't think I'm going to do it right away. Frankly, I find reading a Hans Fallada novel exhausting and depressing. I believe this is because his characters are so real, and the situations he puts them in are so demoralizing.

I do strongly recommend Wolf Among Wolves if you want to understand what life was like during the German hyperinflation of the early 1920s.

In December my son gave me a small book for the holidays - Heinz J. Schueler's Hans Fallada, from 1970. It is a critical analysis of the major themes in Fallada's work, and it tops out at 119 pages, which makes it easily the shortest book connected to Hans Fallada that I will ever read. I would caution an English-language reader that there are extensive quotations in German, which are not translated. They are, however, explained, and you can get the gist of what's going on by just reading the English.

Personally, I discovered that the German I had in graduate school has just about completely disappeared, but I also noticed that if I'd read the novel under discussion, that helped quite a lot.

I found several spots where I was disagreeing with Schueler. There's a whole chapter on Fallada's portrayal of women, which frankly sounds a bit sexist today; Professor Schueler focuses on the role of women in marriage, saying that their job is to save men from isolation. Well, the book did come out in 1970, and that was another time. But I'm thinking of a woman in Wolf Among Wolves, who freely engages in sex for pleasure and who turns down an offer of marriage from a man she likes, but who is a bit stupid. And she's clearly not all that interested in being one of Fallada's angels of salvation. She's been helping an old lady run a junkyard in Berlin, and it's fairly clear the old lady wants her to take over the business. So all kinds of hints of modernity here, but Schueler doesn't write about them.

The main focus of Fallada's writing is the plight of the Kleinburger, or lower-middle class man, during the turbulent twenties. Another term for him is Stehkragenprolet, or white-collar proletarian (although Stehkragen really means "stand-up collar" - the kind of stiff collar, often made of celluloid, that middle-class men in those days kept in collar boxes and attached to their shirts each morning.)

This class - the white-collar proletariat - was a critical element in the rise to power of both Mussolini and Hitler, so what Fallada has to say on the subject has relevance today. The two most important things to know are that Fallada saw them as isolated and demoralized. The people below them - the actual proletarians - often had class solidarity and traditions of mutual dependence and help. The people above them had their networks of power. The Kleinburgers believed in the capitalist canard of individualism, or each man on his own, or each against all, or wolf among wolves.

And that is their fatal flaw. Nobody above them or below them is silly enough to believe they can get by without networks.

It's also what makes the Kleinburgers easy prey for fascists, who give them a place to belong and The Other to fight against.

The flip side of this is what happens when they find their isolation deepening, and their former leaders deny that the little people had simply been doing what their masters told them to do.

Siege warfare: Isolate and diminish. (See The Correct Strategy: Fight.)