After Joseph Goebbels in 1937, had read the new novel “Wolf among wolves” by Hans Fallada, he noted in his diary: “A great book . . . That Kid can.“ On the next project of the writer, of the was towards the end of the Weimar Republic to the best-selling author, were, accordingly, great expectations. Fallada looked at it with trepidation: “In the sun Goebbels cher favor – that seemed to me to be an Icarus fate.”
This new project, “The iron Gustav”, the first step should be a movie, a parade role for the celebrated actor, Emil Jannings. However, Fallada was able to write an Exposé: “I can only invent if I have to describe, if I may go into the wide.” Therefore, he wrote a major novel, the movie people, then the script should evaporation. The Film, Jannings was, however, never shot it, although Goebbels himself had forced corrections of Fallada: a conclusion that the delivery to a conversion of the main characters to Nazism.
The DDR cut the “Nazi cock”
The iron Gustav “1938” was released. Already in his prison diary, 1944 Fallada has expressed his displeasure over the “Nazi cock” of the novel. He wanted an edition without this final, died of it during his lifetime – he in 1947 – no longer came. Until 1962, the novel in the GDR was published in a new Form, now without the “Nazi-cock”, with once again the ideological damage. The publisher of Günter Caspar cut a number of other passages that no longer fit into the back of the socialist view of history.
to read Only now, in the Wake of the international re-discovery of Falladas, the “Iron Gustav”, so it promises to be the publisher, “for the first time in the original version”. No doubt about it: The complicated edition history is as exciting as the novel itself, whose sob Rühmann film adaptation in 1958, only fifty of nearly eight hundred pages based. When the jam ends reading of the novel proves to be a large-scale crisis panorama of the years between 1914 and 1928.
A formidable despite the head on the carriage
The Berlin-based fleet operator, Gustav Hackendahl, a modernization is a loser, but in ten years no one will talk of the “petrol stinkern,” predicts the convinced cab driver. On the one hand, he is with his authoritarian character and his taste for military discipline, a kindred Spirit of Heinrich Claus Diederich Heßling from “The Subject”. His Imperial loyalty does not preclude, however, leads him wonderful times, but in the Almost-bankrupt, because he has to sell after the outbreak of war, his thirty horses far below the purchase price to the military and, later, his fortune in war bonds loses.
On the other hand, is Hackendahl a much more personable figure than the unleidliche Opportunist hessling. At first he may appear as a family of fright, the has revealed his favorite son, Erich, after stealing from him, and a tendency to be more expensive pleasure-seeking, in a basement closet locks. Later, the more him, the skins float away, is he as formidable in spite of the head.
