More Lives than One: A Biography of Hans Fallada by Jenny Williams

Author:Jenny Williams [Williams, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780241952689
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2012-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

The novel ends in a prison cell as ‘Willi Kufalt falls gently asleep, smiling peacefully.’

Willi Kufalt, like his companions, is portrayed as ‘not a criminal by nature; he had become one, he had learnt crime.’ They are the victims of circumstance and the criminal justice system. The novel is an extended plea for a radical reform of the system and, by implication, of society itself.

In ‘Once a Jailbird’, Ditzen draws heavily on his own experience of prison life and rehabilitation. When he left Neumünster prison he also considered setting up the kind of typing bureau which Kufalt and his companions organize. The description of Kufalt’s job with a newspaper owes much to his own experience with the General Anzeiger. In this novel he continues his practice of recycling characters’ names, in this instance Wrede and Lütt, and interweaving into the narrative the names of friends and acquaintances, such as Wendland (after their maid and nanny Marie Wendland), Behn (after Lieschen Behn from Kölpinsee) and Preisach (after Dora Preisach, who typed part of the manuscript).

Ditzen not only describes Kufalt’s return to crime but also charts his gradual slide back into alcoholism – the beer at the station on the day of his release in May, ‘although he had forsworn alcohol’, the three or four schnaps on the way home from his fiancée’s in December ‘so that he could get to sleep more quickly’, and a binge on New Year’s Eve. As we have seen, the period of the novel’s composition coincided with a resurgence of Ditzen’s own drinking problems.

One of the most striking autobiographical passages in ‘Once a Jailbird’ is the flashback to Kufalt’s youth at the beginning of Chapter 10: the Uhufelsen, the small town, the young Kufalt’s relationship with a girl, which results in his expulsion from school, his father’s suggestion that he should take up agriculture as a career – all point to Ditzen’s teenage years in Leipzig and Rudolstadt. The inclusion of this passage, the first fictional representation of the events in his work, is poorly motivated, and the connection between this and Kufalt’s subsequent career in petty crime is unclear. Perhaps Ditzen’s recent breakdown, accompanied – as he told Kagelmacher – by the symptoms he had experienced after the events in Rudolstadt, had revived these memories and led to their incorporation in his current work.

In ‘Once a Jailbird’, Ditzen takes the radical approach he adopted in A Small Circus. This time it is the criminal justice system which is exposed to scrutiny and found wanting. He was aware, as he wrote to his parents in November 1933, that he had written ‘a very controversial book’. The plea for a more humane approach to crime was bound to attract opprobrium, as was the inclusion of a homosexual relationship, an unmarried mother, and a protagonist who views prison as ‘a blessed island in the foggy grey sea of his life’.

He was also aware of the fact ‘that nowadays there are not only artistic considerations but a host of other factors to be borne in mind’.

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