Fallada, the Journey Continues
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CALIFORNIA STA 1E UNIVERSITY SAN MARCOS THESIS SIGNATURE PAGE THESIS SUBMITIED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE MAS1EROF ARTS IN LI1ERATURE AND WRITING STUDIES THESIS TITLE: Hans Fallada, the journey contirrues. AUTHOR: Thomas Bricke th DA1E OF SUCCESSFUL DEFENSE: December 5 , 2019 THE THESIS HAS BEEN ACCEP1ED BY THE THESIS COMMIT1EE IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MAS1ER OF ARTS IN LI1ERA TURE AND WRITING STUDIES. Dr. Oliver Berghof \2./S- / I °f THESIS COMMIT1EE CHAIR SIG~ DA1E Dr. Rebecca Lush THESIS COMMIT1EE MEMBER DA1Ert./1/'l Dr. Martha StoddardHolmes ..M~J;~ 12./s/1'I THESIS COMMIT1EE MEMBER SIGNATURE DA1E Bricke - 1 Hans Fallada…a journey continues A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of Literature and Writing Studies California State University San Marcos _____________ In Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Literature and Writing Studies by Thomas Bricke December 5th, 2019 Bricke - 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... 3 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 4 I. Rudolf Ditzen ......................................................................................................................... 6 II. Finding Fallada .................................................................................................................... 11 III. Theory and Process ............................................................................................................. 14 IV. Geschichten aus der Murkelei ........................................................................................... 27 Translations .............................................................................................................................. 29 Foreword .............................................................................................................................. 29 The Story of a Haywire Day .................................................................................................. 31 The Story of the Little Baby Brother ..................................................................................... 38 The Story of the Golden Thaler ............................................................................................ 49 The Tale of the Murkelei ...................................................................................................... 77 Notes ........................................................................................................................................ 86 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 90 Bricke - 3 Acknowledgements The journey began in earnest over the winter holidays of 2018, Hans Fallada had entered my life. My friend Dr. Julius Reiter, in a conversation, commented “he’s the most interesting of all” thus galvanizing a path I would follow during this last year, I thank him for his advice and friendship. I owe a tremendous debt of thanks to Sabine Lange for both her encouragement during the process, her invaluable insight into the life and literature of Hans Fallada and the friendship we developed that summer day in Carwitz. I thank my aunt and uncle, Johanna and Dieter Bricke who facilitated the Fallada presentation at the Mozart Stift in Ainring, Germany - it forced me to dive in and provided a wealth of necessary feedback at the front end of the project. Bernhard Reiter graciously allowed me to live in his Berlin apartment during my search for Fallada and Beate Butsch joined me as a travelling companion in Carwitz, her own insights and questions driving the process forward. The graciousness of all those at the Fallada Museum was extraordinary, as was the assistance offered and provided by the museum’s director Dr. Stefan Knüppel and the archivist Ericka Becker.. To my family thanks for hanging in there as I went away to work on this project. Finally I dedicate the translations to my grandchildren who I hope will enjoy the stories as much as I have. Bricke - 4 Introduction Hans Fallada…a journey continues Die Geschichte von seiner Geschichte geht weiter… Hans Fallada was the pseudonym of Rudolf Ditzen, a well-known German author of the early twentieth century. It’s difficult to classify Fallada in any literary movement, as his prodigious output explored many different genres, but his early novels are usually classified as examples of an art movement in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s called Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity. 1 Despite his success in the early 1930’s, when the novels Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben2 and Kleiner Mann - was nun?3 established Ditzen as a significant new author, he was and still is relatively unknown in the English language. There has recently been a small resurgence of interest in Ditzen as evidenced by a new translation of his final novel, Jeder stirbt für sich allein4 published by Penguin, in 2010 under the title Alone in Berlin. The enduring question Little Man What Now?, posed in the title of Ditzen’s early novel earmarks his early and posthumous fame, the ability to capture in his stories the circumstances of ordinary people caught in the shifting realities of life, realities that still resonate with readers to this day. This literary giant5 of the first decades of the twentieth century has been relegated to a dark corner, confined by the moral complexities of his own life and joined in obscurity by a generation of intellectuals and artists, the Innere Immigranten6 that were marginalized by a war 1This is specifically true for Fallada’s early novels. Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity was an artistic movement during the period of the Weimar Republic (1920-1933). In Fallada’s case it manifested itself in his writing about the themes that included societal relationships and the effects of authority. 2 Published in 1931 it is Fallada’s first successful novel and details the farmer rebellion of 1929 in the Schleswig- Holstein city of Neumünster. 3 Kleiner Mann was nun was turned into the 1934 Hollywood movie Little Man, What Now?, the book itself was critically acclaimed, well received and translated into multiple languages. 4 Published in 1947 by the Aufbau-Verlag. 5 Rudolf Ditzen was one of the best-selling authors in Germany during the 1930s. 6 During the Nazi era, artists who remained behind rather than fleeing the artistic limitations of the Nazi era were called Innere Emigranten (interior emigrants – artists who fled the Nazi regime within the country) . Bricke - 5 and a changing century that left none of them entirely unscathed. The author’s decision to stay in Germany after the rise of the Nazis is emblematic for his positioning outside of the German literary canon – that singular choice left him derided by the intellectual elite, censored by the Nazi regime … and lost to history and scholarly interest, because of the appearance of an ambiguous morality. The primary focus of this thesis is the translation of Ditzen’s book of children’s stories Geschichten aus der Murkelei. As part of this focus I will address the problems and successes of my translation process. This collection of children’s stories was first published in 1938. The first edition has 188 pages, with 11 pages of illustrations, and there are no copies of older manuscripts. Ditzen’s works are currently still widely available in Germany and his children’s stories remain a popular staple of early childhood literature, demonstrating his continuing influence. Though a number of Ditzen’s novels have been translated into English - as of yet no translations into English of the Geschichten aus der Murkelei has been made. As a first translation of this book into the English language, this project offers an unhemmed opportunity to apply the theories of translation with which I became acquainted as a graduate student. The translation journal that I kept during the process recorded my insights into where I went wrong and where I seem to have succeeded. In conjunction with the information in the journal I am going to examine the processes and methodologies used by scholarly translators in an effort to identify the theoretical underpinnings that both support and argue against my individual approach to the translation process. It is my hope that the translations provide access to what is a complex literary figure from the early twentieth century, who recorded the times succinctly, with a narrative that captured the characteristics and rhythms of the time. Bricke - 6 I. Rudolf Ditzen “We are interested in them, they are important to us…like us, they were poor men who swam desperately as we do against the tides in the perennial disaster of living.” (Ortega Y Gasset) To fully engage in the translation process the translator needs to harness the extralinguistic aspects of the texts. These are the influences that according to Y Gasset affect the author, the reader and the translator. Part of capturing the extralinguistic pressures on a text is a familiarity with the author and his time period. In 1931, at the age of 38, Rudolf Ditzen had arrived on the literary landscape in Germany with his first critically acclaimed novel Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben. 7 A year later the novel Kleiner Man – was nun? would become an international bestseller. The