Translated by Charlotte and A.L. Lloyd
Introduction by John Willett

First published in German in 1950 (and published in this translation by Putnam in 1952), this autobiographical novel, written during its author’s confinement in an asylum in 1944, is a startlingly honest portrait of a man losing control.

Blotting out the reality of the world around him, Fallada set his novel in an exclusively local Germany, bare of all references to all historical, political or social events. Erwin Sommer is a small businessman in an agricultural town north of Berlin, whose marriage is fragile, who rapidly becomes alcoholic, then violent, and is finally committed to a mental asylum. The story is told in the apparently unreliable but vivid and convincing words of the protagonist himself.

Erwin Sommer and his story are in fact the creation of a once internationally acclaimed author, struggling to survive his own total breakdown by writing this book. It is this that contributes to its unusual combination of control and destructive self-revelation.

The introduction traces Fallada’s unusual career and literary output, and tells the story of his reputation and fate in Nazi Germany. In doing so it brings out the horror of the events which lay behind the book.

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Der Trinker first published in 1950 (by Rowohlt)
This translation first published by Putnam in 1952
Published by Libris in 1989