Hard though it is to define a literary classic, sometimes you read a book so finely wrought that you have no doubt about its status. Hans Fallada's "Iron Gustav," recently reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic, deserves the label.
Hans Fallada (pronounced fa-la'-da) is a name derived from Grimm's Fairy Tales, Hans from "Hans in Luck" and Fallada from a horse in "The Goose Girl." It was the pen name of Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen (1893-1947), taken to live in Berlin when he was 6 by his father, a magistrate who would end up on the supreme court and who gave his children a taste for Shakespeare and Schiller.
Fallada had a miserable adolescence. He was run over by a cart and kicked in the face by its horse when he was 16, contracted typhoid a year later, and, at 18, killed a friend in a bungled suicide pact. It is hardly surprising that he was in and out of mental institutions.
"Iron Gustav" is based on the story of Gustav Hartmann (1859-1938), who inherited a horse-cab business from his wife's father, built it up, only to see it destroyed by the rise of the automobile and the economic devastation of the interwar years. Nearly 70, he became a celebrity in 1928 for making a return journey from Berlin to Paris by coach and horse.
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