Wolf Among Wolves

By Hans Fallada
Translated by Philip Owens

"His most ambitious novel…deeply moving…he has evoked more than one can bear, but not more than it is necessary to learn, to keep and to understand.”—Alfred Kazin, The New York Times

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

"Out of the multitude of episodes and a large cast of characters, the picture of post-War Germany during the terror of the inflation period, comes into reality, as in almost no other book we have had…A human document–and a moving picture of a Germany gone mad.”—Kirkus Reviews

This sweeping saga of love in dangerous times—the 1923 collapse of the German economy, when food and money shortages led to rioting in the streets and unemployed soldiers marauding through the countryside—is deemed by many to be Hans Fallada’s greatest work. Yet its 1938 publication made his publisher so fearful of Nazi retribution that he told Fallada, “If this book destroys us, then at least we’ll be destroyed for something that’s worth it.”

It appears here in its first unabridged translation into English, based on a contemporaneous translation by Philip Owens that has been revised and restored by Thorsten Carstensen and Nicholas Jacobs. Carstensen also provides an afterword discussing why the original version of the book was so heavily edited … and why Fallada’s publisher thought a love story might get them killed.

Paperback
816 pages
Melville House Publishing, 2010
Originally published in 1937
5.5 x 1.5 x 8.2 inches
ISBN 9781933633923
Historical Fiction