Hans Fallada

Hans Fallada (the literary pseudonym of Rudolf Ditzen) was born in 1893 in Greifswald and died in 1947 in Berlin. He held various professions, including surveyor, accountant, night watchman, grain merchant, and advertiser. After World War I, he worked as a translator and journalist. Initially influenced by expressionism, he made his literary debut in 1920 with his novel "Der junge Goedeschal." In 1926, he covered the famous trial of the peasant uprising in Neumünster as a journalist. His novel "Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben" was inspired by the trial records. Fallada joined the artistic movement "New Objectivity" and embraced social naturalism with a conscious use of simple style. In 1932, he published his novel "Kleiner Mann - was nun?" (English edition: "Little Man, What Now?"), which depicts the daily life of proletarianized small-town citizens. This book brought Fallada worldwide fame. He then bought a farm in Mecklenburg and engaged in farming. He went on to write about twelve more novels and a book of autobiographical memoirs. Notable works include "Wolf unter Wolfen" (1932), an accurate depiction of social chaos during the Weimar Republic, "Wer einmal aus dem Blechnapf frisst?" (1934), and "Der eiserne Gustav" (1938), a sweeping novel portraying life in Berlin from 1914 to 1924, offering a dark and harsh description of the decline and gradual impoverishment of the middle class. Fallada left his farm and settled in Berlin, where he died in February 1947 from an overdose of sleeping pills, having completed the novel "Alone in Berlin" ("Jeder stirbt für sich allein," English translation: "Every Man Dies Alone"), about the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel, who were executed by the Nazis during the war for their anti-fascist activities. In 1950, his most personal book, "Der Trinker" ("The Drinker," English edition: 1944), was published, a deeply autobiographical account of life under the Nazis. Hans Fallada remained a popular author in Germany after his death, although some of his unpublished works are believed to have been lost or sold, partly due to negligence and partly due to the drug addiction of his second wife and sole heir, Ulla Losch. The resurgence of this significant author from obscurity occurred in 2009 when the American publishing house Melville House Publishing reissued his books "Little Man, What Now?", "The Drinker," and "Every Man Dies Alone" in English, which subsequently saw translations into many languages.