Hans Fallada - Wolf Among Wolves

Wolf Among Wolves
First published as Wolf Unter Wlfen by Rowohlt, Berlin, 1937M
Aufbau-Verlagsgruppe GmbH, Berlin 1994 (Published with Aufbau;
Aufbau is a trademark of Aufbau Verlagsgruppe GmbH)
First translated into English by Phillip Owens and published by G. P. Putnams Sons, New York, 1938

This restored, unabridged edition 2010 Melville House Publishing Additional translations by Thorsten Carstensen and Nicholas Jacobs.
Afterword Thorsten Carstensen

Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.mhpbooks.com

First Melville House Printing: April 2010

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fallada, Hans, 1893-1947.
[Wolf unter Wlfen. English]
Wolf among wolves / Hans Fallada ; translated by Philip Owens ; this unabridged edition restored with additional translations by Thorsten Carstensen and Nicholas Jacobs ; afterword by Thorsten Carstensen.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-935554-89-9
1. GermanyHistory1918-1933Fiction. 2. World War, 1914-1918Social aspectsGermanyFiction. 3. GermanySocial conditions1918-1933Fiction. 4. GermanyEconomic conditions1918-1945Fiction. I. Owens,
Philip. II. Title.

PT2607.I6W613 2010
833.912dc 2010001949

v3.1

The author has been reproached by some readers of his novel Once We Had a Child for making his hero, Johannes Gntschow, such a brute. He has read this complaint with some astonishment, for as he wanted to portray a brutal man he could not depict a kind one. To avoid similar complaints the author warns in this preface (which can be glanced through in a moment at any bookstore) that Wolf Among Wolves deals with sinful, weak, sensual, erring, unstable men, the children of an age disjointed, mad and sick. All in all, it is a book for those who are, in every sense, adult.

Another not superfluous observation is that this is a novel, and therefore a product of the imagination. Everything in itcharacters, events, places, namesis invented, and even if time or place should seem to point to a definite person, the novel is nevertheless only invention, fancy, fiction, story.

While not aiming at a photographic likeness, the author wished to picture a time that is both recent and yet entirely eclipsed. It behooves the rescued not altogether to forget past danger, but, remembering it, to appreciate doubly the happy issue.

H. F.

Philip Owens translation of Wolf Among Wolves was published by Putnams in New York and London in 1938. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the book was heavily edited in translation: hundreds of passages, including entire paragraphs, were edited out the first English edition. This new edition restores the novel by comparing the abbreviated English edition with the original German text published by Rowohlt Verlag in September 1937. New passages have been translated by Nicholas Jacobs and myself and added to Owens impressive original.

THORSTEN CARSTENSEN,
New York University

A girl and a man were sleeping on a narrow iron bed. The girls head rested in the crook of her right arm; her mouth, softly breathing, was half open; her face bore a pouting and anxious expressionthat of a child who cannot understand why it is sad.

She lay turned away from the man, who slept on his back in a state of utter exhaustion, his arms loose. Tiny beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and in the roots of his curly fair hair; the handsome defiant face looked somewhat vacant. In spite of the open window the room was very hot, and the pair slept without blanket or covering. This is Berlin, Georgenkirchstrasse, third courtyard, fourth floor, July 1923, at six oclock in the morning. The dollar stands for the moment at 414,000 marks.

Out of the dark well of the courtyard the smells from a hundred lodgings drifted into their sleep. A hundred noises, faint as yet, entered the open window where a dingy curtain hung motionless. On the other side of the courtyard barely twenty-five feet away, a refugee child from the Ruhr suddenly screamed.

The girls eyelids quivered. She raised her head; her body grew rigid. The child wept quietly, a womans voice scolded, a man grumbledand the girls head sank back, her limbs relaxed, and she slept.

In the house there was movement. Doors banged, feet shuffled across the court. There was noise on the stairs; enamel pails knocked against iron banisters; in the kitchen next door the tap was running. On the ground floor a bell rang out in the tin-stamping shed; wheels hummed, machine belts slithered.

The pair slept on

In spite of the early hour and the clear sky, a dull vapor hung over the city. The stench of an impoverished people did not so much rise to the skies, as cling sluggishly to the houses, creep through every street, and seep through windows into every mouth that breathed.

In the neglected parks the trees let fall faded leaves.

An early main-line train from the east approached Schlesische Bahnhofthe wreck of a train, with rattling windows, broken panes and torn cushions. Its carriages clanked over the points and crossings of Stralau-Rummelsburg.

Rittmeister Joachim von Prackwitz-Neulohewhite-haired and slim, with bright dark eyes, retired cavalry captain and tenant of a manorleaned out of the window to see where they had come to, and started back: a spark had flown into his eyes. Miserable dust heap! he muttered angrily, dabbing with his handkerchief.

Fires had been kindled with limp yellow paper and matches whose heads jumped off or which stank. Bad coal or damp rotten wood smoldered; adulterated gas spluttered, burning without heat; blue watery milk warmed slowly; bread was doughy or too dry; margarine, softened by the heat of the flats, smelled rancid.

The people ate their carelessly cooked food as hastily as they slipped into garments cleaned, shaken and brushed too often. Hastily they skimmed the newspapers; because of the rise in prices there had been riots, disturbances and looting in Gleiwitz and Breslau, in Frankfurt-on-the-Main and Neuruppin, in Eisleben and Dramburg, six killed and a thousand arrested and therefore public meetings had been prohibited by the government. The State Tribunal had sentenced a princess to six months imprisonment on the charge of being accessory to high treason and perjurybut the dollar stood at 414,000 as against 350,000 marks on the twenty-third. Salaries would be paid at the end of the month, in a weeks time. What would the dollar be then? Would there be enough to buy food for a fortnight? For ten days? Three days? Would one be able to pay for shoe leather, gas, fares? Quick, wife, heres another 10,000 marks. Buy something with ita pound of carrots, some cufflinks, the phonograph record Yes, we have no bananas, or a rope to hang ourselves withit doesnt matter what. Only be quick, run, dont lose a second.

The early sun was also shining upon the manor of Neulohe. The rye stood in the fields, the wheat was ripe, oats were ready, too. Across the fields a few tractors rattled, lost in the expanse of country. Larks were warbling and trilling overhead.