Wolf among wolves
Wolf among wolves is a novel by Hans Fallada from 1937 . The story takes place in the inflation year 1923 . The novel was made into a film in 1964 .
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The title hero Wolfgang Pagel, son from a well-off family, fell out with his widowed mother and lives from gambling. When he lost everything on the night before his wedding of all places, he went looking for money in inflation-ridden Berlin. While Wolfgang is being driven on and on, his girlfriend Petra Ledig is thrown out of the apartment by the landlady Ms. Thumann, inadequately dressed, and arrested by the police because of her elevator. In the end, completely burned down, Wolfgang meets a former superior from the military, Rittmeister von Prackwitz, and lets himself be persuaded by him to assist him as administrator on his estate Neulohe. Wolfgang Pagel finds himself in a family and political quagmire. Rittmeister von Prackwitz doesn't know where to get workers for the harvest and how to pay the rent to his father-in-law. Frau von Prackwitz loves neither her husband nor her father, but she wants to keep things in order. The fifteen-year-old daughter Violet has a secret affair with the Freikorps lieutenant Fritz, who is planning a coup against democracy , but is blackmailed by the seedy servant Hubert Fahrrad. Gutsinspektor Meier cheats his rule. And Sophie Kowalewski, the daughter of the governor, helps her fiance, who is sitting in the penitentiary, to escape. The more things get out of hand at Neulohe, the more Wolfgang Pagel finds his way back to his own inner balance, especially since he learns that Petra has found a secure job in Berlin and is pregnant by him. When in Neulohe, despite his best efforts, everything falls apart and a family catastrophe ensues, he returns to Berlin, reconciles with Petra and his mother and begins studying.
Style and approach to interpretation
Fallada sets various subplots around the story of Wolfgang Pagel, which give a realistic picture of the crazy, over-the-top inflation year in the city and the collapsing old order in the country. However, these "subplots" are not separate from a main plot or are self-contained. Fallada provides certain chapters with preceding information in which the value of the mark is set in contrast to that of the dollar, which illustrates the precarious situation of the protagonists.
Wolf among wolves is a complex portrait of society in which the harshness and selfish motives of the individual protagonists come into play. Due to his "protagonistic-subjective" spelling, the reader can understand the thoughts of the main characters, however abstract or perverse they may be. The characters not only correspond to their role model, but combine contradictions, peculiarities, views and development potential. Fallada's narrative style is never aloof or intellectual, but always close to the people.
As the title suggests, Fallada addresses the anonymity of the individual as a central motif in a world in which everyone only acts according to their own egoistic standards, which draws parallels to today's modernity. Wolf among wolves is thus also a political work that, without flatly moralizing or lifting the index finger, traces the tricky situation of that time in a very realistic form. Nevertheless, kindness and humanity do not fall by the wayside, but prove themselves again and again and also occupy a large place in the love story of W. Pagel and P. Ledig with sometimes romantic scenes.
In its complexity of actors and plot, Wolf Among Wolves is an epic character study and one of “the classics” of German literature. Fallada's work is characteristic of the New Objectivity era with its sober, dialog-heavy narrative style .
Adaptations
The novel was filmed in 1964 as a DEFA television four-part series under the title Wolf among wolves . Directed by Hans-Joachim Kasprzik . Armin Mueller-Stahl played the title role. It was the first DEFA production that was also shown in West Germany.
Søren Nils Eichberg 's opera of the same name based on the novel with a libretto by John von Düffel was premiered in November 2019 at the Koblenz Theater.