Wolf Among Wolves

Wolf Among Wolves is a novel by Hans Fallada from the year 1937. The story takes place in the year of inflation in 1923. The novel was filmed in 1964 under the same title by DEFA and directed by Hans -Joachim Kasprzik.

Content

The title character, Wolfgang Pagel, son of well-off family, has fallen out with his widowed mother, living from gambling. When he loses everything just the night before his wedding, he goes in inflation- ridden Berlin in search of money. While Wolfgang is pushed further, his girlfriend Petra Single of the landlord Ms. Thumann, inadequately clothed, thrown out of the apartment, and arrested by the police for their lift. Wolfgang meets one completely burned to a former supervisor from the military, Captain of Prackwitz, and can be persuaded of this, help him on his estate Neulohe as administrator. On Neulohe Wolfgang Pagel gets into a familial and political quagmire. Captain von Prackwitz do not know where he get workers for the harvest and how to meet his father pay the rent. Wife of Prackwitz loves neither her husband nor her father, but would like to get the higher-level relationships. The fifteen- year-old daughter Violet has a secret affair with the Free Corps lieutenant Fritz, who is planning a coup against democracy is, but extorted from the seedy servants Hubert wheels. Gutsinspektor Meier cheats on his rule. And Sophie Kovalevsky, the daughter of the people Vogts, helps her seated in the penitentiary fiancée to flee. The more difficult the situation on Neulohe out of joint, the more is Wolfgang Pagel back to his own inner balance, especially since he learns that Petra has found a safe working in Berlin and is pregnant. As in Neulohe finally, despite his efforts really falls apart everything and it comes to family disaster, he returned to Berlin, reconciled itself with Petra and his mother and go to college.

Style and approach to interpretation

Around the story Wolfgang Pagels located Fallada various subplots that give a realistic picture of the crazy, hyped inflation year in the city and the collapsing old order in the countryside. These " sub-plots " but not stand on the sidelines of a main plot or are self-contained. Certain chapter provides Fallada with the preceding information, in which the value of the mark is set in contrast to the dollar, making the precarious situation of the protagonists is made figuratively.

Wolf Among Wolves is a complex society portrait, in which the hardness and the selfish motives of the individual protagonists come to fruition. Due to its " protagonistisch - subjective" notation, the reader, as abstract or perverse this may be the thoughts of the main characters also understand. The figures correspond not only their role models, but unite contradictions, idiosyncrasies, views and development potential. This Fallada's narrative style is never lifted or intellectually but always close to the people.

As was already hinted at in the title theme Fallada as the central motif, the anonymity of the individual in a world in which everyone acts only according to his own selfish standards, raising parallels to our modern age. Wolf Among Wolves is thus also a political work, which, without moralizing or flat to raise the index finger, tracing the intricate situation of that time in a very realistic shape. Nevertheless, the goodness and humanity is not on the track, but prove again and again and also take in the love story of W. Pagel and P. Unmarried with sometimes romantic scenes big square one.

Wolf Among Wolves is in its complexity of actors and action an epic scale character study and a " classic " of German literature. Fallada's work is characteristic with its sober, dialogue -heavy narrative style of the era of the New Objectivity.

Filming

• Wolf Among Wolves: DEFA - TV four-part series in 1964, with Armin Mueller-Stahl in the title role

• Work of Hans Fallada
• Literary work
• Literature ( 20th century)
• Literature ( German )
• Novel, epic