When Discipline Was the Therapy: Hans Fallada’s The Drinker

Alcohol has had a long and checkered history in human affairs. Dating back millennia to ancient Egypt, its consumption has been associated with sacredness as well as frivolity. And since at least the ancient Greeks, moral authorities have argued for the virtues of moderation or outright abstinence in its consumption.

Alcohol has also, of course, played a prominent role in the history of health and medicine. It was long prescribed by physicians as a part of treatment regimens (eg. the wine and opium tincture, laudanum) At the same time, it became increasingly seen as a public health scourge, especially among the lower classes.

The physical effects of alcohol consumption, along with the kinds of moral and medical strictures that have more recently accompanied it, have led to a fair amount of consistency in how drinking and alcoholism have been portrayed. Today, both fictional and non-fictional stories about alcohol abuse tend to follow a familiar narrative plot of moral decline: the subject once had it all, then was driven by circumstances to drink, using it to numb his/her pain, eventually leading to the destruction of career, friendships, and marriage. Recovery narratives have added another element, whereby a heroic person, a religious faith, or a self-help organization helps the “drunkard,” inspired finally to abandon drink entirely and adopt a new, healthier lifestyle.

So, it is somewhat disorienting perhaps to read the German writer Hans Fallada’s (1893-1947) novel The Drinker, first published in 1947, with a new edition appearing in English a couple of years ago. Written in a very different time and place from our own-during the final months of Nazi Germany-the book reveals some of the now forgotten aspects of alcohol consumption and treatment.

The novel is, to a great extent, autobiographical. Fallada wrote The Drinker over two weeks in September 1944, while he was staying at a psychiatric facility. A German court committed him there, after he had fired a pistol during an argument with his wife. In order to protect the manuscript during his institutionalization, he wrote it in a coded script that could only later be transcribed.

Fallada’s writing is enjoying something of a renaissance these days, ever since the publisher Melville House took it upon itself in 2009 to begin releasing translations and new editions of several of the author’s novels. These include Every Man Dies Alone, Little Man, What Now?, and The Drinker.

Plight of the alcoholic in history

The Drinker is written from the perspective of Erwin Sommer, a successful and married 40-year-old businessman who, until his business suffers some major setbacks, hardly brought any liquor to his lips. Faced with financial woes, however, he finds comfort in drinking. He quickly begins to consume large amounts of hard liquor, begins lying to his wife and associates, and becomes increasingly unruly. As tensions erupt between him and his wife, he threatens her life, leading the authorities to seek his arrest. Along the way, he is taken advantage of by various riff-raff, lands in prison, and ultimately is committed to a treatment facility.

Sommer is a disquieting person to have as a guide into the mind of a man enamored with what he calls “Queen Alcohol.” He’s not terribly likable, more often than not blaming others for his problems and whining insufferably about his lot. Yet through Sommer’s inner wrangling and inflated self-reflections, Fallada captures the humor and sadness embedded in the obdurate logic common to many in a state of perpetual intoxication.

Fallada’s novel provides a glimpse into a world before self-help recovery movements such as Alcoholics Anonymous had become popular, where therapeutic regimens often differed little from those found in the penal system. Through Erwin Sommer, Fallada does gives an account of personal decline, but it quickly deviates from the narratives commonly found today.

To be sure, the novelist and the protagonist both see Sommer’s fate as a moral collapse, but conventional Christian ideals of virtue and vice do not command center stage. Rather, Sommer becomes increasingly aware of how his circumstances reduce him from an upstanding, civilized man to a base, primitive existence, one in which food, fear, and bare survival dominate one’s waking life. His downfall is felt and described in terms of the loss of bourgeois, middle-class privilege and sensibilities, measured against a social status hard-gained and all-too-easily lost.

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