Novel
Wolf Among Wolves
Wolf unter Wölfen
Hans Fallada · 1937
Opening lines
Auf einem schmalen Eisenbett schliefen ein Mädchen und ein Mann.
On a narrow iron bed a girl and a man were sleeping.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from projekt-gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Berlin, 1923: the mark loses its value by the hour. Wolfgang Pagel, from a good family and estranged from his widowed mother, lives by gambling with his girlfriend Petra Ledig. On the eve of their wedding, he loses everything and runs around the city in search of money, while their landlady throws Petra out, barely dressed, and the police arrest her. Penniless, Pagel meets a former army superior, the cavalry captain von Prackwitz, who persuades him to come and help him as steward on his estate of Neulohe.
Context
The novel appeared in 1937 from Rowohlt, in two volumes. The action takes place in 1923, the year of inflation: some chapters open with the rate of the mark against the dollar, and the title refers to the Latin maxim that man is a wolf to man. Around Pagel, Fallada arranges many secondary plots, in Berlin as in the countryside; his novels are ranked within the New Objectivity. The first complete English translation, by Philip Owens, appeared as early as 1938; the French translation by Paul Genty, from Albin Michel, in 1939 and 1941.
Who it is for
A novel of more than eight hundred pages in the English edition, with many characters, which takes the reader from Berlin to the countryside.
Prizes and reception
Adapted for East German television with Armin Mueller-Stahl, then for the opera by Søren Nils Eichberg, in Koblenz, in 2019.