Hans Fallada: Part of the Process
Part of the Process is a series in which we chronicle the often turbulent, usually absurd and always interesting lives of authors we admire. It’s not easy to be a writer in the 21st century, but in a strange way, reading about the trials and tribulations of those who seem to have ‘made it’ can be a reminder that it has always been a difficult process.
Hans Fallada, the German writer whose real name was Rudolph Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen, is frequently considered one of the greatest German novelists of the past century. He is known for novels like Little Man, What Now? (1932) and Every Man Dies Alone (1947, also translated as Alone In Berlin), but a large part of his acclaim has come posthumously. In his lifetime, Fallada had a number of challenging and ridiculous experiences that tangentially led him to literary achievement.
Fallada’s work is synonymous with the New Objectivity literary style, a movement that arose in 1920s Germany as a reaction to Expressionism, which venerated facts, believed in emotionless reportage and precision of detail. Fallada’s pen name derives from the cast of characters found in the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the protagonist of Hans In Luck and Fallada, the magical talking horse in The Goose Girl.
Born to a magistrate who was on his way to becoming a supreme court judge, the young Fallada was siphoned to different cities including Leipzig, Greifswald and Berlin, immersed himself in books and eschewed more age-appropriate writers for authors like like Flaubert, Dostoevsky and Dickens. Maybe the mishaps of Fallada’s life are indicators of life in 1909, but many seem exclusive to him.
At the age of 6, he was run over by a horse-drawn cart and then kicked in the face by the horse, followed by contracting typhoid at the age of 17. The drug addiction he battled with for most of his life seems to have started after the pain-killing medicine he was prescribed for his injuries. This led to multiple attempts at taking his own life.
In 1911, one such attempt was foiled by Fallada’s inexperience with weapons. His friend, Hannes Dietrich von Necker, and him made a suicide pact that resulted in Fallada shooting his friend, even though his friend missed him. Fallada was so distraught, he picked up his friend’s gun and shot himself in the chest, but somehow survived. He was found innocent of murder by reason of sanity, and went on to multiple stints in mental institutions.
In the aftermath of the first World War, Fallada worked at several agricultural jobs to support his growing drug addiction. Shortly after the publication of Anton und Gerda, he was imprisoned for stealing from one of his employers.. He was imprisoned again, less than three years later, due to a series of thefts from employers.
In 1928, he finally overcame addiction and married Anna "Suse" Issel in 1929, before maintaining a string of respectable jobs in journalism, working for newspapers and eventually for the publisher of his novels, Rowohlt. Four years later, Fallada enjoyed meteoric success for Kleinner Man - was nun? (Little Man - what now?) This was eclipsed by his anxiety over the rise of nationalistic socialism and he suffered a nervous breakdown. Although the book flew largely under the Nazi radar, a German film was made based on it by late 1932 and was only released after severe censorship by 1933. The compounding anxiety of being a writer in Nazi Germany was exacerbated by the loss of his child a few hours after childbirth.
In 1933, he was jailed by the Gestapo for what was arbitrarily deemed as “anti-Nazi” activities but when no evidence was found after a raid of his home, he was released a week later. In 1934, his novel Wir hatten mal ein Kind (Once We Had A Child), received positive reviews, but the official Nazi publication denounced it. The same year, the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, dictated the removal of the book from all German public libraries while the public campaign against Fallada tanked his book sales, finally leading to another nervous breakdown in 1934.
Being declared an “undesirable author” in 1935 was the final nail in the coffin. His novel, Old Heart Goes A-Journeying caused him trouble with the Reich Literary Chamber because it showed Christianity to be the great unifier amongst Germans instead of Nazism. It was at this point his writing shifted from artistic and political to merely a source of income. In 1937, the publication of Wolf unter Wölfen (Wolf Among Wolves), signified his return to the form. Goebbels, who praised the book by calling it a “super book” and suggested the writer compose an anti-Semitic tract.
Fallada wasn’t an impassioned resistance fighter, and has been critiqued by peers like Thomas Mann for compromising his work on account of remaining in Germany. He enrolled his son with the Hitler Youth, while giving financial and legal support to the system’s outcasts. But in that environment, even the most moderate acts of resistance carried the threat of imprisonment and death. Many of his associates and friends were killed by the Nazis, and it seems clear that Fallada was pushed to create politically ambiguous works, in which he essentially declared that the events in his books took place before the rise of the Nazis and were clearly "designed to placate the Nazi authorities".
In 1938, Fallada finally decided to immigrate with the help of his British publisher. He was going to whisk him and his family out of Germany on a private boat. Word goes Fallada packed and loaded the bags and asked his wife to unpack since he realized he couldn’t “live in any other place than Germany, nor write in any other language.” The war years were a difficult period marked by limited rations and squabbles.
In 1944, a drunk Fallada and his wife were involved in an argument in which she claimed Fallada fired a shot. His wife took the gun from her husband and hit him over the head with it, before calling the police, who admitted him into a psychiatric facility. It was during his incarceration that Fallada, having secured permission to work on a novel about the financial scandal Goebbels so wanted him to write about, wrote a deliberately almost illegible manuscript—writing in a very small hand, and first filling the pages, then writing upside down in the spaces between the lines, then writing in any remaining spaces, so that the manuscript was not deciphered until some years after his death, when it was found to consist of several different texts. In addition to some uncontroversial short stories, it contained both his politically sensitive account of his clashes with the Nazi authorities, and his novel The Drinker, about the life of an alcoholic under the Nazi regime. If caught, he would have been punished by death but instead he was released at the end of the year when the Nazi government disintegrated.
Post war, despite a seemingly successful reconciliation with his wife, he married Ursula Losch, widow of the artist Kurt Losch and moved to Feldburg. After the Soviets invaded the area. Fallada, as a celebrity, was asked to give a speech at a ceremony to celebrate the end of the war and then appointed interim mayor of Feldberg for 18 months. Despite this, his addiction, along with Ursula’s addiction and mounting debts, only worsened. Suffering from deep depression and spending his time between hospitals and mental institutions, he reportedly wrote Every Man Dies Alone in just 2 months in an institution before his death in 1947.
Following his death, Every Man Dies Alone made a huge impact in Germany, was rediscovered by Melville House in 2009 and became a bestseller in the US and UK, even adapted into a film in 2016. Fallada lived many lives, and despite his encounters with insanity, Nazis, guns, women, drugs, debt, success and failure, he remains one of the most interesting voices to emerge from World War Europe. His is a tale of a different kind of resistance, as well as a reminder of the way in which art, politics and the personal have always intertwined in surprising and often terrifying ways.