The German novelist Hans Fallada (1893–1947), whose most famous work, Little man – what now?, became the last bestseller of the Weimar Republic, was one of the very few liberal humanist writers to remain in Germany throughout the Nazi era. Many of his novels were successful in English translation, until the war when they vanished from the literary scene in the English-speaking world. He narrowly survived the Nazi regime; briefly arrested in 1933, he was categorized as ‘undesirable’ and a ‘cultural bolshevik’. As an author he refused collaboration – Goebbels wanted him to write an anti-Semitic novel – but the few concessions he did make damaged his anti-Nazi reputation, his life and work suffered, and in 1944 he was committed to an asylum for the criminally insane after a breakdown. After the war, his reputation outside Germany seemed unrecoverable and was further compromised for some by his living and publishing in Germany’s Soviet Zone.

Fallada’s work is still widely read in Germany today. It provides an unusually honest record of the country’s crisis and decline after the First World War; Fallada always stands alongside his fictional characters, never in judgement over them. He also described his own mortal struggle against the morphine and cocaine addiction which began in his youth. His life throws a new, sometimes surprising light on Germany. From his comfortable but psychologically disturbed midddle-class upbringing, and his years of active delinquency (leading to several periods in asylums and prisons), through his private happiness and public success in the late Weimar years, to the often self-inflicted humiliations of the Third Reich period and his self-destructive last years, Fallada hardly stopped writing and bearing witness.

This frank biography, which uses unpublished manuscripts and letters, as well as the author’s interviews with Fallada’s first wife, family and friends, is the first of Fallada in English and the most comprehensive in any language.

Published by Libris in 1998