The proprietor of a successful business, Sommer turns to alcohol when a minor deal doesn’t fall his way. He tries to hide his failings from his wife, Magda, but when she asks him about his drinking he accuses her of trying to take his money. When she calls for a doctor he flees, but not before spending a debauched night with a barmaid. At a loss and convinced of his wife’s maliciousness, Sommer ends up in the company of a conman who prompts him to rob his own home, where, drunk, Sommer threatens to kill Magda. He ends up first in jail and then in an asylum where he is forced, agonisingly, to come to terms with a life of repetition and deprivation. A fellow inmate tries to bite off his nose.

As a narrator, Sommer is both ironic and sincere. He aspires towards individualism, determined that no one is going to put one over him – but is obviously doomed. Successive decisions reduce his control over his life. Cornered by his mistakes, he never ceases to be baffled by his own bad luck. What appeared to be a good life becomes a horrible trap for Sommer (and indeed a hypnotic nightmare for the reader, who in turn experiences the anguish firsthand thanks to Sommer’s first-person narration. The trajectory of the novel is ski jump-like; Sommer hurtles downwards, before, with a shock, hopelessness gives way to nothingness. The downward spiral he takes can be explained only in part by his delusions; tacit existential anger and terror drive him.

Sommer’s drinking is never static or anything less than paradoxical. On one page, he reassures himself that he has never been that much of a drinker; on the next, he needs help; a few pages later, things aren’t so bad. His inconsistencies are the source of a deep, subtle vein of black humour that runs through the novel, rising to the surface whenever Sommer is forced to recall his drunken exploits: ‘Dimly I remembered having said something like “Tomorrow night I’ll come and kill you,” but that was only drunken babble.’

There is barely a moment’s certainty, and the problem of Sommer’s unreliability is compounded by his determination to save face. What’s more, the present tense amplifies the chaos of Sommer’s demise. His paranoia increases with his alcohol consumption: ‘You can look in the mirror as often as you like, look your clothes over, try every button, but when you have had something to drink, you are never quite sure.’ How much and how often does he drink? Sommer doesn’t so much get drunk as get normal.

Sommer deludes himself in his addiction. When he wakes in the middle of the night and drinks the house dry, he declares, ‘Let Magda come and catch me drinking. I’d tell her to her face that I’d become a drunkard, and that she had driven me to it, she and her infernal efficiency!’ Hours later, however, he returns to the scene of the crime, ‘so heavy-hearted’, and fills the bottles with water to gain ‘two or three days’ grace’. The exaggeration is always within the realm of credibility, and for all the self-destruction, inebriation, and Sisyphean torture of The Drinker, a visionary clear-headedness prevails. The empathy that The Drinker both represents and demands from its reader is superhuman, and goes way beyond the appeal of booze.

In the end, the thing that is most notable about the novel is what is so conspicuously omitted: the Nazi régime under which it was written. Fallada never makes direct reference to political systems, ideologies, or doctrines – in fact, he makes do with surprisingly little concrete information about place, time, and setting, in general – but the horror of 1944 is felt elliptically, projected onto the hostile world in which Sommer is trapped.

Early in the novel, before things have really taken a turn for the worse, when Magda tries to help him, the unspoken existential anxiety of Nazism is hinted at: ‘you’re really good to me, Magda. If only you weren’t so damned efficient!’ Later in the town centre, on his way to the bank – one of the great bureaucratic symbols of the twentieth century – Sommer remarks, ‘Here I was well inside enemy territory.’ In this light, it is easy to imagine that the horror of Sommer’s life was also that of Fallada’s in Nazi Germany, to hear the echo of the author’s cries in those of his narrator, and to recall the Kurosawa quote: ‘In a mad world, only the mad are sane.’