Wolf Among Wolves

Hans Fallada

Oct 2010 · Melville House

About this eBook

Hailed as “Fallada’s best book” (The New Yorker), this sprawling post-WWI is a portrait of Berlin in a time of great upheaval—and of the common man’s struggle to survive it all
 
Set in Weimar Germany soon after Germany’s catastrophic loss of World War I, the story follows a young gambler who loses everything in Berlin, then flees the chaotic city, where worthless money and shortages are causing pandemonium. Once in the countryside, however, he finds a defeated German army that has decamped there to foment insurrection. Somehow, amidst it all, he finds romance—it’s The Year of Living Dangerously in a European setting.

Fast-moving as a thriller, fascinating as the best historical fiction, and with lyrical prose that packs a powerful emotional punch, Wolf Among Wolves is the equal of Fallada’s acclaimed Every Man Dies Alone as an immensely absorbing work of important literature.

“An unmissably brilliant portrait of Berlin before the Nazis.” —The Times of London

About the author

Before World War II, Hans Fallada's novels such as Little Man, What Now? were international best sellers, on a par with those of his countrymen Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse. But Fallada opted to stay in Germany when the Nazis came to power, and eventually had a nervous breakdown under pressure to write anti-Semitic books. He secretly wrote The Drinker while in a Nazi insane asylum, and composed his anti-fascist novel Every Man Dies Alone just after the war, dying before its publication in 1947.