Translated by Michael Hofmann

November is always a busy month with lots of events taking place in the book blogging world, so for German Literature Month (hosted by Caroline of Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Tony of Tony’s Reading List) I decided to read a short story collection that I could dive into now and then throughout the month in between reading other things. Hans Fallada is probably my favourite German author so I thought Tales from the Underworld would be a good choice.

This collection was published by Penguin Modern Classics in 2014 and contains a large number of Fallada’s short stories which were originally published between 1925 and 1946. The stories have been translated from the original German by Michael Hofmann, who has also translated other Fallada books including Alone in Berlin and A Small Circus. Many of the stories are semi-autobiographical, which I would have guessed from the small amount I know about Fallada’s life, but this is covered in more detail in the foreword by Jenny Williams.

As the title of the book suggests, the focus is on the darker side of life – some of the stories are about thieves, prisoners or drug addicts, while others deal with subjects such as poverty and unemployment. You’re probably thinking that it all sounds very bleak and depressing, but Fallada’s lively, conversational style and sense of humour means it’s much less miserable and much more entertaining than it could have been in the hands of a different author. I think my favourite story was Fifty Marks and A Merry Christmas, a lovely, touching story about a young couple, Mumm and Itzenplitz, who are struggling to make ends meet but determined to have a happy Christmas despite their financial problems. This one reminded me very much of the novel Little Man, What Now? which was published in the same year.

The stories range from the very short, such as the sequence titled Calendar Stories, written in the style of fables with an obvious moral, to the more substantial, such as Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism, in which an addict desperately tries to acquire enough morphine to get through the day, looking for pharmacies that will accept fake prescriptions. The addict’s name is Hans, because this is one of the autobiographical stories – Fallada and his wife were both addicted to morphine, which also inspired his 1947 novel, Nightmare in Berlin.

The impact of the two world wars is felt in several of the stories, including The Returning Soldier, where a man comes home from the war with a wounded arm and finds that his father is less sympathetic than he had hoped. Some of the stories deal with urban life – for example War Monument or Urinal? is a satire on the politics and bureaucracy that holds back progress in a small town – while others, such as The Good Pasture on the Right have rural settings and explore the problems facing farmers and the importance of owning land. Fallada also looks at different aspects of marriage and parenthood, with stories like Happiness and Woe, where an unemployed father is tempted into spending the family’s rent money, and The Missing Greenfinches, in which a father tries to teach his young son to value the lives of even the smallest creatures.

I haven’t mentioned even half of the stories here, but I hope I’ve given an idea of how fascinating and varied this collection is. I think it would be a good introduction to Fallada’s work, but if, like me, you’ve already read some of his books, it’s interesting to see how many of these topics come up again in his longer fiction and how many are drawn from his own life. It was a good choice for German Literature Month, just as I hoped it would be!