There is always something desperate in the act of creation. Like the uneasy feeling of anticipation before falling ill. We tell ourselves: “I’m going to get sick, I can feel it coming.” We can do little to assuage this thought until, sure enough, we endure a period of illness and convalesce, emerging renewed after a few appalling days spent in bed. Likewise, a story wells up inside a writer and binds them to their desk for a period of catharsis. Convalescence and catharsis, in this way, are two sides of the same coin; in their stories, writers recover from life and this is why many great works of literature arise from the worst misery and lassitude. Hans Fallada knew this intimately.

Influenced by the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement of the 1920s, Fallada’s work did not aspire towards literary grandeur but found it nonetheless in the deprivation and loneliness of the characters he portrayed. His novel The Drinker (1944) is exemplary of this, delineating the personal ruin of Erwin Sommer, proprietor of a wholesale market produce business, who descends into a self-abasing, alcoholic dependency. Herr Sommer’s fall culminates in a drunken altercation with his wife Magda, whose profound ‘efficiency’ and virtue throughout the novel escalates his own impulses towards self-destruction. Unsurprisingly, this impulse grants Sommer a lifetime sentence in a mental asylum, where he fills his days dreaming of one final descent into alcoholic rapture.

The novel’s greatest attraction is perhaps found in the circumstances of its conception. Fallada never emigrated from Germany when the Nazis attained power in the 1930s and throughout the war his own historically unstable mental health deteriorated further as a consequence of not only an ongoing morphine addiction, but also from pressure to write an anti-Jewish propaganda novel. During a period of institutionalisation in Strelitz in 1944, Fallada obtained writing materials under the pretext of writing such a novel, and clandestinely composed The Drinker.

This first-hand awareness for the reality of asylum life accounts for the vivid portraits of insanity bound up within this novel. Solitude is the loudest voice throughout the work, but is accompanied by a cast of bitterness, vanity and despair. Despite his torrid state, Herr Sommer never relinquishes his claim upon lucidity, sequentially rejecting all aspects and people from his former life as he descends further into solipsism. Departing from the quiet comfort of bourgeois constancy, Fallada portrays the ruinous logic of the addict, ceaselessly postponing all future plans for a hit of ephemeral pleasure. In this state of degradation, looking in on himself, Herr Sommer consoles himself in the sense of entitlement granted by his unhappiness, driving him ever further into the abyss: “Perhaps the most beautiful thing is to let yourself fall, to shut your eyes and plunge into nothingness, deeper and deeper into nothingness.” As The Drinker makes clear, the feeling of self-pity is often the space where humanity finds its greatest happiness.