Read Online Wolf Among Wolves Hans Fallada Philip Owens 9781933633923 Books
Read Online Wolf Among Wolves Hans Fallada Philip Owens 9781933633923 Books
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This sweeping saga of love in dangerous times – the 1923 collapse of the German economy, when food and money shortages led to rioting in the streets and unemployed soldiers marauding through the countryside —is deemed by many to be Hans Fallada’s greatest work. Yet its 1938 publication made his publisher so fearful of Nazi retribution that he told Fallada, “If this book destroys us, then at least we’ll be destroyed for something that’s worth it.”
It appears here in its first unabridged translation into English, based on a contemporaneous translation by Philip Owens that has been revised and restored by Thorsten Carstensen and Nicholas Jacobs. Carstensen also provides an afterword discussing why the original version of the book was so heavily edited … and why Fallada’s publisher thought a love story might get them killed.
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Read Online Wolf Among Wolves Hans Fallada Philip Owens 9781933633923 Books
"The Weimar Republic, rampant inflation, unemployed starving destitute ex service-men, roaming the countryside fomenting Nationalist Patriotic Racist Revolution. Coming to a Western Bourgeois Liberal Mall near you, soon."
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Wolf Among Wolves Hans Fallada Philip Owens 9781933633923 Books Reviews :
Wolf Among Wolves Hans Fallada Philip Owens 9781933633923 Books Reviews
- I hope my headline doesn't scare away those who like a good story. His straight-forward writing style keeps this from becoming a moralistic book. It assigns no guilt, just shows how after WW1, how the German economy collapsed (I had no idea just how badly it did so), and how even the well-to-do didn't do-so-well. The book mainly follows a well-born gentleman who forsakes his overbearing mother (and his lover) to go out and make it on his own through a series of strange events, he winds up on a farm estate in the country where he has to learn to manage a rapidly deteriorating state of affairs. With the rapidly (daily) rise of inflation (US dollars wind up being equivalent to like 4 billion marks, making paper money worthless), it's every man/woman for themselves as they try to survive.
Intrigue & deceit are the currency of the day, while the protagonist tries to maintain some semblance of moral integrity amongst all the disarray of the times. Read this book!! Also, there are a lot of links to discussions and biographical studies at the end, which I haven't had a chance to read thoroughly. Why Hans Fallada has not gone down as one of the great writers of all time is a mystery to me!!! - One of the best novels ever written. Hans Fallada is a master story teller, I've read all his work, but Wolf Among Wolves is probably his masterpiece. I've been reading it over and over for past 30 years, and never get bored. Too bad he's so widely overlooked... I 100% recommend this book to any intelligent reader. The story is a real thriller, from first page to the last page. When you feel the things will go bad, you can expect they will. The fate is merciless.
Fallada's work is somewhat unballanced, some novels are real treasures, some are average. From the good ones I'd also recommend Little Man, What now?, Who Once Eats Out of the Tin Bowl, Every Man Dies Alone (not for the faint of heart, it's THAT frightening), and finally his outstanding, self-inspired The Drinker.
Hans Fallada is a genius, period. - The "Talking Horse" had a lot to say, and he said a great deal of it in his 1937 novel "Wolf unter Wölfen". Some readers appear to think he said more than he needed to -- this English translation is over 700 pages of dense type -- and at least one prior reviewer has asserted that he didn't say enough about the nastiness of Nazis by and large. I'm reminded of the incident when the Kaiser reprimanded W.A. Mozart for having "too many notes" in a piece of music. Mozart cheekily replied, "No, Your Majesty, not one not too many!" That expresses my response to "Wolf Among Wolves" -- not one scene or character too many.
But it is a sprawling novel, on the scale of War and Peace, Buddenbrooks, or Thackery's "Vanity Fair". The last comparison is the most apt; Fallada's "Wolf Among Wolves" is a scorching portrayal of the vanities and follies od a whole society, that of post-WW1 Germany in 1923 and thereafter. The Wolf of the title is Wolfgang Pagel, the only scion of a wealthy family, who has become estranged from his widowed mother by 'hooking up' with Petra, a former prostitute. Wolf is introduced at his nadir, a compulsive gambler who's lost his last stakes. But Wolf is surrounded by wolves, by a huge cast of other fools and knaves landladies, street lowlives, upper-echelon former officers of the Wehrmacht, rural landowners, cynical servants, poachers and foresters, and in particular a sinister 'activist' on behalf of the Cause, in other words an early agitator for Nazism. The scale of the novel merely reflects the scale of the societal catastrophe in Germany in the era of hyper-inflation. "Wolf Among Wolves" matches "Vanity Fair" in its brilliantly unfunny humor, its relentless satire of wealth and pride, and in its core values of sympathy for "the little man".
I chose to read it in this English translation for two reasons. First, I can read English at least three times as fast as German, and with a novel of 700 pages that's an important consideration. Second, it was unclear to me whether the German edition available was the edited/censored text published in 1937 or the more complete text based on the author's manuscript. This English edition is the latter, an updated and fully re-restored translation. Fallada's "English" is spare and forthright -- a good deal more proletarian than Thackery's -- and closely matches the style of his German in other books of his that I've read. Bluntly, I think it's a solid translation, eminently readable.
"Hans Fallada" was the pen-name of Rudolf Ditzen. "Fallada" was the name of a talking horse-head that exposed a villainy in one of the grimmest of Grimm's Fairy Tales. The author Hans Fallada was as shocking a witness of and denouncer of the rise of Nazism from the rubble of German history as any bloody severed head truth-speaking in the Marktplatz. No, Wolf Among Wolves is NOT a portrayal of anyman's battle against the minions of evil. It's a tilling of the subsoil of evil, of 'anyman' and 'anywoman' enmeshed in rampaging nationalism and ravaging capitalism.
Read it as you would any monumental classic -- slowly, thoughtfully, with relish for its panoramic narrative -- because it IS a monumental 'classic' of 20th C literature. I remain puzzled about the lack of attention, among anglophone readers, to the powerful novelists of the German language in the decades before WW2. Only Thomas Mann seems to have 'cracked' the English market, and that's odd because he was scarcely the most energetic critic of Nazism. Along with Hans Fallada, for readers interested in the social conditions that supported the rise of Hitler, I strongly recommend the works of Alfred Doeblin, Joseph Roth, and Irmgard Keun. - The Weimar Republic, rampant inflation, unemployed starving destitute ex service-men, roaming the countryside fomenting Nationalist Patriotic Racist Revolution. Coming to a Western Bourgeois Liberal Mall near you, soon.
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