Natalia Gurak Gurak itibaren Sermersheim, France itibaren Sermersheim, France

Erwin Sommer - a suitable name for the weakling narrator. His demise into alcoholism runs a circuitous course of denial and failure, he is always up against the odds and yet so close to snapping out of his habit that we wonder what is the reason for his predisposition to the devil's firewater. I suspect Hans Fallada must have read Dosteovsky and used Dmitry Fyodorovich Karamazov as a template for his narrator's predisposition to failures. Like Dmitry who could marry the noble Katerina Ivanova but instead sends his brother Alyosha to bow to her and withdraw his wish to marry Katya, Erwin doubts his wife Magda's devotion to him despite her ability to run their wholesale business. As Dmitry wreaks havoc throwing money around in raucous exuberance with blood on his face after his father is murdered, Erwin cannot keep his mouth shut while under arrest and manages his way back to his reine d'alcohol where he is easily caught. Through all Erwin's stupidity he still insists (a la Dmitry's insistence on being a scoundrel and not a thief), Erwin insists in the company of other criminals "I was not a 'real criminal' because I had commited no offence against other people's property." When Erwin enters the prison - the point where Dosteovsky abandons Dmitry - he is immersed in prison life and intent on explicating his superiority to his surroundings. The prison is where the novel loses velocity. While Fallada may have sought to engage the pyschological predisposition to drink, it seems he should have also had Chekhov on his bookshelf - thus, he could have used a lesson in restraint and not gotten as entrenched in Erwin's cumbersome descent into alcoholism.