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Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada

Biography of Hans Fallada ( Rudolf Ditzen)

Prior to WWII, the novels of German writer Hans Fallada (the pen name Rudolf Ditzen) were international bestsellers, on a par with those of his countrymen Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse. In America, Hollywood even turned his first big novel, Little Man, What Now? into a major motion picture. Once it became known that the movie had been made by a Jewish producer, however, steps were taken to prevent Fallada’s work being sold outside Germany, and the rising Nazis began to pay him closer attention. When he refused to join the Nazi party he was arrested by the Gestapo—who eventually released him, but thereafter regularly summoned him for "discussions" of his work.

Crucially, unlike Mann, Hesse, and others, Fallada refused to flee to safety, even when his British publisher, George Putnam, sent a private boat to rescue him. The pressure took its toll on Fallada, and he resorted increasingly to drugs and alcohol for relief. After Goebbels ordered him to write an anti-Semitic novel he snapped and found himself imprisoned in an asylum for the "criminally insane"—considered a death sentence under Nazi rule. To forestall the inevitable, he pretended to write the assignment for Goebbels, while actually composing three encrypted books—including his tour de force novel The Drinker—in such dense code that they were not deciphered until long after his death.

Fallada outlasted the Reich and was freed at war's end. But he was a shattered man. To help him recover by putting him to work, his friend Johannes Bechel—a poet who had became a cultural minister in the post-war government—gave him the Gestapo file of a simple, working-class couple that had resisted the Nazis. Inspired, Fallada completed Every Man Dies Alone in just twenty-four days.

He died in February 1947, just weeks before the book's publication.

http://www.bookbrowse.com/biographies/index.cfm/author_number/1678/hans-fallada

Every Man Dies Alone (from Haaretz.com Aug. 27, 2010) by Masha Zur Glozman

He was mentally ill, a drug-addict, a one-time favorite of Goebbels - and a gifted writer. 'Every man dies alone,' Rudolf Ditzen's (aka Hans Fallada ) masterpiece is now being published in Hebrew.

In the Brothers Grimm fairy tale "The Goose Girl," there's a talking horse by the name of Falada. The horse belongs to the Every man dies alonestory's heroine, a modest, good-hearted princess. While on her way to a faraway kingdom to join the prince to whom she's betrothed, her evil maidservant forces her to switch places and swears her to silence - on pain of death. When the two reach the prince's kingdom, to keep Falada from revealing the truth, the false princess orders that the horse be beheaded. The real princess, now forced to tend the geese, bribes the local butcher to place the head of Falada on the fence she passes each day so she can see a friendly face. From then on, every day, as she goes out to work, the decapitated head of the talking horse says to her: "O princess, if your mother could only see you now, it would break her heart in two."

Hans Fallada's "Every man dies alone" was translated to Hebrew from the German by Yosefa Simon and published by Yedioth Books . Not for nothing did its author, Rudolf Ditzen, choose the pseudonym Fallada (which he spells with two Ls ): His book, just like the horse's head in the fairy tale, reveals a simple truth. The prose is spare and utterly straightforward. It is a book written by a man fighting for his sanity, who knows his days are numbered, who conducted profound soul-searching - and surely viewed himself above all as that disembodied head, telling all of Germany and every German: "If your mother could see you now, it would break her heart in two."

Decades after the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, the nations of the world still cannot make up their minds: Were the Germans of the Nazi era a monolithic bloc of inhuman monsters? Or were they human beings, like me and you? This is a double-edged sword: Say that the Nazis and their supporters were human beings and you're ostensibly saying that the responsibility for the horrors does not fall on them alone, but also on their life circumstances; say that the Nazis and their supporters were inhuman monsters caught in the grip of mass psychosis and you've absolved all the individuals of responsibility.

In "Every man dies alone," Ditzen/Fallada tells the truth about these people, under extreme conditions. Conditions in which the average person discovers his true identity: as either a despicable creature or a human being.

The biography of Ditzen is complicated, replete with contradictory events, due to the alternating demonization and glorification of him by successive generations. He was born in northern Germany in 1893, the son of a respected judge who moved from city to city in accordance with the demands of his work. Until adolescence, he was raised at home with strict Prussian discipline; afterward he was sent to boarding school. At 16, he was struck by a traveling cart (the horse also kicked him in the face ) and at 17 he became ill with typhus. The many medicines and pain-relievers Ditzen took because of his injuries and his illness fostered a dependence that developed into a life-long addiction to drugs.

At 18, a melancholy young adult acting in the finest German romantic tradition, he made a morbid agreement with his best friend, Hans Dietrich von Necker. The two wanted to commit suicide, but felt that it was too shameful a way to die. So they decided that they would face each other in a duel and kill each other. But only Ditzen hit his target. Von Necker was killed and Ditzen immediately shot himself in the chest - but the bullet missed his heart. He was arrested and charged with murder, but acquitted by reason of temporary insanity and committed to a mental hospital in what would be the first of many hospitalizations over the years.

After World War I (in which he served as a supply clerk, far from the front ), Ditzen worked at a wide variety of jobs (book salesman, farming consultant, estate agent, accountant and potato grower ), the money from which mostly went to feed his addiction to morphine; twice he was convicted of stealing seeds. By the time of his second prison stint, in 1926, he was completely addicted to morphine and also a full-blown alcoholic. Nonetheless, he still managed to publish two novels, which did not garner much attention. In prison, at any rate, he was weaned off the morphine, and upon his return to Hamburg, aimless and unemployed, he married a woman by the name of Anna Margarete Issel. He got a respectable job at the local newspaper in Holstein and things began to look up.

In 1930, he resumed writing, and in 1932 his most famous work was published - "Little Man, What Now?" which depicts the life of a young couple, a clerk and the daughter of a working-class family (alter-ego of his wife Anna ), who are struggling to survive in the shadow of the terrible unemployment crisis that ravaged Germany in those years.

Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse and Graham Greene were among those who praised the book and made it a best-seller in Germany, England and the United States. Two years later, it was made into a Hollywood movie.

When the authorities in Nazi Germany discovered that the movie's producers (Universal Studios ) were Jewish, they prohibited Ditzen from selling translation and adaptation rights to his books outside of Germany. In 1935, he was blacklisted. He returned to alcohol and drugs, had an affair with another morphine addict (whom he later married in 1945 ) and was repeatedly summoned for questioning due to his ongoing refusal to register as a member of the Nazi Party. His British publisher even organized a rescue boat to help him escape, but Ditzen decided at the last minute that he couldn't leave his home.

For a while he also became a favorite of Joseph Goebbels, thanks to a novel he wrote that was perceived by the Nazi propaganda ministry as a polemic against the Weimar Republic. But after rebuffing Goebbels' attempts to get him to write an anti-Semitic novel - and following an incident in which he threatened to shoot his ex-wife - Ditzen was committed to a hospital for the criminally insane. In an effort to buy time, he promised to write the requested anti-Semitic novel, but instead used his time and the paper he was provided with to write three other novels, in a coded text that was only deciphered after his death. One of these books was "The Drinker," thought by many to be his best work. It's the brutally honest confession of a chronic drunk, based in large part on the author's autobiography.

Toward the end of World War II, when the Red Army conquered the city of Feldberg, as a well-known figure unaffiliated with the Nazi regime, Ditzen was asked to give a speech. In wake of the address, he was appointed mayor of the city, but only served for 18 months. From there he moved to East Berlin. In 1945, Johannes Becher (who later became the East German culture minister) gave him the Gestapo file on the Hempel couple, and encouraged him to write a novel based on their story.

'You and your Fuhrer'

Otto and Elise Hempel were a middle-aged, working-class couple, among the small minority of Germans who independently opposed the Nazi regime. Their resistance included the writing of protest postcards against Adolf Hilter and the Nazi regime, and disseminating them in Berlin. Although their protest barely caused a ripple (most of the postcards that were found were immediately handed over to the Gestapo), their activity embarrassed the heads of the secret police, who for over two years were unable to put their hands on the unknown distributors of the cards.

Ditzen took on the challenge of writing their story and did so with lightning speed (some say the entire book was written in just 24 days; others say it took 47). This was not unusual for the author, who since the early 1930s had been writing his books at a very fast clip, even remarking once that his "writing attacks" were not much different in their intensity from his episodes of drinking or drug-taking. However, his unstable mental state and serious addiction finally did him in: Just a few weeks before the book came out, Ditzen died of a morphine overdose. "Every man dies alone" is based on the story of the Hempels, but it is fiction. This is a novel whose framing story is the resistance campaign waged by a couple called Otto and Anna Quangel. But it also paints a broader picture of all the tenants of the building in which they live, at 55 Jablonski Strasse, close to Alexanderplatz. The tenants comprise a wide array of characters: old Mrs. Rosenthal, the last Jew in the building; the eminent Judge Fromm, who also takes action against the Nazis in some ways; the pitiful postwoman Eva Kluge, who is harassed by her no-good ex-husband and is devastated to learn of her son's horrifying activity in the service of the SS; Borkhausen, the informer and his prostitute-wife; and the loathsome and loud Persicke family, consisting of drunkard father and cowed mother, two sons in the SS plus the most successful son, Baldur, an ambitious type climbing his way up the Nazi ladder thanks to his loyalty and devotion to the party's ideology and activities.

The book opens with a letter from the army that the postwoman, Kluge, delivers to the Quangels on the day the German nation learns of France's surrender. The letter does not contain good news: They are informed that their only son, who was stationed at the front, has been killed.

Anna, distraught with grief, vents her fury at her husband, shouting at him: "You did this with your miserable war! You and your Fuhrer!" Otto is profoundly hurt by this sudden and unfair association with the Fuhrer, and so begins his process of rebellion. It is a process that will evolve throughout the book, a process that starts with his taking exception to the words "your Fuhrer," continues with the dissemination of the resistance postcards and culminates, of course, with the execution of the Quangels for incitement and treason against the Nazi regime.

In the book, Ditzen presents a world ruled by fear, and perhaps above all, by the pernicious culture of informing. There are no one-dimensional heroes or villains in this tale. The author depicts the complexity of each character not in order to justify or praise that character's actions, but like any good story-teller, to paint an authentic picture in many shades of gray. The main protagonist, Otto Quangel, for example, is not a nice fellow. He doesn't like to chat with his neighbors, doesn't join his co-workers for smoking breaks, doesn't like to visit relatives and has no friends. There is just one person in the world whom Otto truly loves, and that is his wife Anna; he loves their son mostly to please his wife. And the love Otto shows for Anna isn't very warm and tender; although there are moments when he desires to express his love more affectionately, he's just not that kind of guy, and he accepts that. Perhaps the reason he accepts it is that he knows that deep down he is a decent person. He has never cheated anyone, never lied to anyone, never informed on anyone, has always worked hard (even when the authorities transferred him from his job as a master carpenter, which he loved, to a job as a plant manager, which bores and depresses him, although he performs it well nonetheless ). He is repulsed by the Nazis, but at first prefers to just ignore the situation around him and quietly await their downfall and defeat. But there comes a time when he decides to take a stand. To risk his life and confront the reign of terror.

"Every man dies alone" has barely any out-and-out bad guys, but it has evil aplenty, and anyone is liable to be on the receiving end, including those who perpetrate the worst deeds. By the same token, there are no unreservedly good guys, and those characters that do good are far from perfect angels. They get scared, they get angry, they would prefer above all else (like most people ) to just safeguard their own home and family, but extreme circumstances push them to go out on a limb and take action.

Refuting the criticism

After his death, Rudolf Ditzen was sometimes accused of anti-Semitism and collaboration with the Nazis. The first claim is not very difficult to refute; perhaps the clearest evidence is the main character in "Little Man, What Now?" - a Jew by the name of Johannes Pinneberg, represents the typical little German man, a decent fellow just trying to survive in a world that is going mad. At one moment of crisis in the story (one of many ), in which the protagonist and his wife are confronted with a new edict obliging the salespeople in the shop where Pinneberg works to meet a certain sales quota (a practically impossible goal, given the deep economic recession ), Pinneberg's wife Lammchen says: "What they are doing now, to the workers for some time and now to us, is creating nothing but wild beasts and - I tell you, Sonny - they've got something coming to them." Johannes agrees and says: "It certainly will. Most in this place are Nazis already."

As far as the accusation of collaboration with the Nazis: It is true that the author did have a certain relationship with Goebbels, one that evidently caused him much suffering and which he maintained solely in order to survive. But he steadfastly refused to write the anti-Semitic novel that Goebbels pressured him to produce, even though this refusal could have cost him his life. "Every man dies alone" contains a particularly grotesque depiction of a relationship between Goebbels and a random protege.

After he died, Ditzen was gradually forgotten outside of Germany. The fact that he hadn't fled from Nazi Germany at a time when most German writers did, and the fact that he chose to settle in the Soviet-conquered territory and to support the Soviets after the war, made his name unfashionable in certain circles - especially in the English-speaking world, in the shadow of the Cold War. In Israel, where many translations of works by writers from the "new Germany" (Gunter Grass, Heinrich Boll and others ) can be found, only Ditzen/Fallada's "Little Man, What Now?" and "Who Once Eats Out of the Tin Bowl" have been translated into Hebrew, and his name was hardly known in the past. And this is the author of the book ("Every man dies alone" ) that Primo Levi once called "the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis." Well, now readers of Hebrew have their chance.

The book, also publsihed under the title "Alone in Berlin", was first entitled "Every Man Dies Alone" - a concept which is "something you will never understand," Quangel tells his interrogator, when he finally realizes the ineffectiveness of his resistance. "It doesn't matter if one man fights or 10,000; if the one man sees he has no option but to fight, he will fight, whether he has others on his side or not. I had to fight, and given the choice I would do it again only I would do it very differently."

"Every man dies alone" is a must-read for anyone who has ever asked himself, "What would I have done if ...?" But not because it supplies clear-cut answers. No great literary work provides a message that can be boiled down to five words. "Every man dies alone" is a great literary work first of all because it is wonderfully written and affords a broad perspective of a period that human society has yet to fully grasp (and probably never will ). But its profound moral importance lies in the way it reminds every reader of conscience that, in the end, every individual, even when waging a struggle for change that could cost him his life, lives and dies for himself. According to Ditzen's outlook, the heroism of self-sacrifice is a mere byproduct. In a reality of evil and oppression, any display of decency and good-conscience is the result of an inner compulsion felt by a human being who understands that the war between good and evil is played out, first and foremost, within his or her soul.

The Fallada phenomenon

A year ago, "Every man dies alone" was published in the United States by Melville House Publishing, a small independent publisher. Its trajectory contrasts neatly with that of Jonathan Littell's "The Kindly Ones," another tale of Germans under the Nazis. After Littell's book made such a big splash in Europe, the U.S. rights were sold for an astronomical sum, but sales subsequently proved quite disappointing. "Every man dies alone" was purchased for a modest sum, but became a chart-breaking best-seller, dubbed "the literary event of the year" in numerous articles and made "Hans Fallada" a celebrated name in American literary circles.

The British distribution rights to "Every man dies alone" were purchased by Penguin, and the book became a best-seller in England, too.

"I feel that a lot of good literature disappeared during the time between the two world wars, and so every time I hear about someone who is traveling or about someone who knows something that I haven't heard about before, I get interested right away," says Dennis Johnson of Melville House, by telephone from New York.

"One of the first books we published was in cooperation with fashion designer Diane von Furstenburg. We published a book about a relative of hers who was a doctor who did forced labor at Auschwitz. She told us about Hans Fallada and said she couldn't understand why this writer was unknown in the English-speaking world. I started looking into it and discovered that some of his books had been translated into English in the 1930s. Of course, all the copies were long gone, but I went on a private hunting expedition and I found them. I made up my mind that I had to rescue him from oblivion. At some point, I met an admirer of Fallada who had also translated 'Every man dies alone' into English and was searching for a publisher. It was a lousy translation, but at least I could read him in English.

"When I finished reading it, I knew that I had to publish it. I knew it would make people think and that as soon as they finished the book they would have to talk about it with someone. The book was received very well. It started with a very good review in The New York Times and it took off from there. That's how it works in publishing: You gamble on something and you have to go with your instincts. But our goal wasn't just to publish one book of Fallada's so that it would be a hit. The goal was to bring him back to people's awareness."

Asked about the secret to the book's hold over readers, Johnson says: "One of the main achievements of 'Every man dies alone' is that you cannot help thinking 'What would I have done in that situation? Would I have been able to show such courage?' The Quangels' resistance activity has little effect, it's almost pathetic, but they know that they are risking their lives and they do in fact end up paying with their lives.

"I read the book for the first time during the Bush presidency, when America had become a very right-wing country. I'm not saying that Bush is a Nazi, but a lot of people felt that their country was slipping through their hands. The United States behaved like a bully, and attacked countries that had no connection to the events of September 11. These were very dark moments in our country's history, especially when we began to discover all kinds of frightening truths about this administration. I think that's also something that made the book reverberate. People talked about it."

As a rule, he adds, the danger of a fascist regime is never very far away. "After reading 'Every man dies alone,' it's very easy to imagine your neighbors as some of the characters. You think to yourself: 'I have a neighbor who's just like that. I have a neighbor who would behave in just the same way in those circumstances. How would I behave in such circumstances?' This is what great art does, and why I consider this book a masterpiece."

Ditzen was accused of collaboration with the Nazis.

Johnson: "I think that 'Every man dies alone' is also his atonement for not having done more to oppose the Nazis. And in a certain sense I also see this book as his final metaphor. For what do his protagonists do in order to oppose the regime? They write. Yes, they write postcards, and the modesty and ineffectualness of their struggle evokes pity, but they still risk their lives with their writing. And that's what the author himself did."

http://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page/every-man-dies-alone-1.310559?trailingPath=2.169%2C2.212%2C2.213%2C

Who Was Hans Fallada?

Who was Hans Fallada, this man with the almost unparalleled inter-war literary success? Most who have heard of him or even read his books know little more than the fact that Hans Fallada was a pseudonym and that his real name was Rudolf Ditzen. The photos that have been published show a pale and slightly chubby face with short hair, sad eyes and a somewhat offended-looking mouth. They can be interpreted as anything and do not really tell us very much. His contemporaries probably labelled him a ‘quiet litterateur’, the archetype of a solid and bourgeois poet living in peace and calm somewhere in the countryside where he would spend his days writing a certain number of pages every day while spending his extra time tending his roses and playing bridge with his wife and neighbors in the evening.

Well – that image was removed from the truth to put it mildly. After his death, more aspects of his personal life came to the surface. Hans Fallada – that is, Rudolf Ditzen – was born in Pomerania in 1893. His father was a high-ranking civil servant in the justice system, with a very strict sense of morality and held others to similarly high standards, not least his own children. These – Rudolf and his three sisters – were raised under a typical Prussian regime of strict discipline. Fallada was the weakest one. Of high importance for his later development was his dysfunctional relationship with his mother. When he would try to confide in her, she would run in misguided loyalty to her husband, the family despot. This might have contributed to the sense of confusion and homelessness that would haunt Fallada for the rest of his life.

In school he was a so-called «inattentive» student, who instead of cramming homework abandoned himself to day-dreaming to compensate for his loveless life. His father’s fury and admonition did not affect him. Finally he was taken out of his expensive gymnasium and sent to a boarding school. But this ended in tragedy. Here at the strict boarding school, where things were even worse than at his cold, loveless home, the boy soon sank into despair. He decided together with a like-minded friend to commit suicide. They planned to disguise it as a dual so as to make it a more honorable event; they were supposed to fire their guns at the same time so that Fallada would shoot his comrade and he Fallada. This desperate plan did come to fruition, but with the result that his friend was killed and Fallada survived. It is unknown whether this was due to Fallada being to quick on the trigger or if it happened because his classmate got second thoughts.

This, of course, was an outrageous scandal. The murder of a fellow student! The young Fallada was a killer. In addition to the guilt of being a failed student, he now had another and more crushing cross to bear. He was found innocent of murder by way of insanity, but was institutionalized. At one of these sanatoriums he was put to work as a farmhand, something he took an instant liking to. The simple, wholesome life of the countryside helped him overcome the shock of the botched suicide pact.

He spent six months in prison, but the punishment did not stop there. Socially, he was a beaten man. He was now an outcast in his hometown and his family and former friends had distanced them from him long ago. The prodigal son of a respected citizen, Fallada stumbled through another series of random jobs. How he made a living is a mystery. But in the midst of this miserable existence he was still capable of writing two books, which however did not gain him much attention (Der junge Goedschal, 1920, and Anton und Gerda, 1923). At the time of his second prison stint in 1926, he was a full-blown drug addict and alcoholic.

Prison helped him get rid of his addiction, but at the time of his release he had lost any zest for life and initiative. He lived in Hamburg at this time, but he did not have any sort of employment. One thing is important to note about this period of Fallada’s life: It did not occur to him to seek out the emerging Nazi organizations for support and a sense of belonging like so many of his peers in similar situations did at the time. But this was not for him. It may be opportune to put this out here, because his later political beliefs have been misunderstood by many.

At this low-point of his life Fallada met a warm-hearted woman who was brave enough to want to marry him. This meant the beginning of an entirely new chapter in his existence. He got a job at a local newspaper as a kind of combined reporter and ad-salesman and worked hard to support his little family. Another stroke of luck came his way: He bumped into his old publisher who apparently had not lost faith in him after his first two unimpressive books. He made him an offer that was as unexpected as it was generous: For exactly twice the money he was making at the newspaper, the publisher wanted Fallada to work for him, decide his own hours and write whatever he wanted to. This was exactly what the shy and probably insecure Fallada needed. Supported by his wife he started hammering away on his typewriter and the result – Little Man, What Now? (Kleiner Mann, was nun?) made him world famous.

Obviously, over time, no person can handle the extreme mental and physical pressures resulting from an effort like this. Neither did Fallada. In the brakes between each burst of activity, his nerves screamed after relaxation and ease. Again he resorted to narcotics and alcohol. The consequence of this was a series of sojourns to various mental hospital and rehabilitation homes. At the time of the Second World War, he was again a broken man. And yet he seemed to have been relatively happy during this period. He had purchased a small holding which he turned into a rather successful enterprise.

The only thing bothering him was the Nazi government. Goebbels sent repeated requests for him to write a propaganda novel, but he wriggled his way out of it every time. As a punishment he was blacklisted, his books were forbidden and he was under constant surveillance. To add to these problems, Fallada found himself arrested yet again – not because of his resistance to the Nazis – but for the attempted murder of his own wife. He was imprisoned in a Nazi insane asylum for a year and when he was released he had lost his home and family. He never recovered from this blow.

During the Soviet occupation after the war, he approached the communist circles and the new Aufbau publishing house. He fraternized and drunk with Russian officers and they made him the interim mayor of his new hometown of Feldberg, a role that the rumors say suited neither Fallada or the town. The binge drinking with the vital Russians was more than the by now tired man could handle. He was institutionalized yet again, and this time he did not recover. A February morning in 1947 a nurse found him in his bed, dead. No one had been with him when he died.

Fallada had been productive to the end. Some of his best works, The Drinker and Everyone Dies Alone (Alone in Berlin), had been written in the Nazi insane asylum and during his last hospital stay, respectively. Understanding what kind of man Hans Fallada / Rudolf Ditzen really was is no easy task. But that he was a troubled man leading an intense life both privately and literary, is beyond question. His life reminds us what art really is – and what it costs.

Interview with Fallada's son, Ulrich Ditzen from The Irish Times by Louise East

'My father, he went to the limits'

LOUISE EAST meets Hans Fallada's son Ulrich Ditzen, now 80 years old and still living in Berlin

‘IN THAT novel, my father stayed very close to the facts,” says his son, Ulrich Ditzen. “He had an understanding of people you don’t learn in school. Everywhere we went, I remember, he would talk to people, simple people, big people, everyone.”

Now 80 years old and living in a light-filled apartment in Berlin, Ulrich Ditzen was just 16 when his father, who had taken the name Hans Fallada, died. He flips through the pages of a photo album until he finds a picture taken at the family house in Carwitz, some 70 kms outside Berlin.

Ulrich is a fat-palmed baby, waving at the camera, his father a tall figure with a slight resemblance to Truman Capote. “There you have father. With the unavoidable cigarette.”

Did he smoke a lot?

“Fifty to 100 a day,” Ditzen says, smiling and shaking his head. “We’d find it a little excessive.”

To Ditzen, his father’s astonishing feat in completing such a complex atmospheric book in less than a month is hardly worthy of comment.

“When he was working on a book – those times, he was very strange. He woke up at around three in the morning, drank some coffee and sat down at his desk by four. He worked continuously until 10am or so and then it was over for the day. He had one devilish principle - never to write less on one day than he’d written the day before. You put yourself under such stress by having such a rule, but my father, he went to the limits.”

In writing, so too in life. As a teenager, Fallada made a suicide pact with a friend. They would enact a duel, each shooting the other to avoid bringing shame to their families. Fallada’s shot hit home, his friend’s didn’t, and Fallada was charged with murder. Instead of prison, he was incarcerated in a mental institution, a pattern repeated throughout his life until he ended up in a Nazi-run asylum after shooting at his estranged wife. Even there, the prolific Fallada managed to write a novel, The Drinker.

It was after the publication of an earlier book in 1932, Little Man, What Now?, that Ditzen moved his young family to Carwitz.

“The money just flowed in,” Ulrich says, pointing to photos of himself and his brother and sister holding up field mushrooms as big as their heads and jumping in the lake in front of the house. “We never made a very orderly impression. There was always too much to do. For me, it was a wonderful, wonderful chaos.” Beyond the smallholding at Carwitz, chaos of a very different kind reigned. Of his father’s decision not to leave Germany once the true nature of National Socialism became clear, Ulrich Ditzen says simply: “He hoped to sit it out. He thought, hoped, that eventually it would end. Which it did.

“We talked quite a lot about the Nazis. I reported to him what I had heard on the radio,” says his son. “At one time, I had a list of 52 foreign broadcasting stations I would listen to at night. I was a fool to do so – it was so very dangerous – but I wanted to know everything about the war.”

By 1946, Ditzen’s parents had divorced, and father and son were back living in Berlin. In November of that year Fallada embarked on the frenzied writing spree which would result in Alone in Berlin . Two months later, before the book was published, he was dead, his health broken by years of morphine and alcohol abuse.

“I was not yet 17,” says Ulrich Ditzen bleakly. “I hear from other people that it’s quite good to have a father at that time.”

QUITE WHY THE BOOK wasn’t translated into English, and even in Germany had all but disappeared from view, is a matter of debate.

“People here,” says Ditzen. “As far as I personally can judge, had heard enough about the atrocities. It just vanished from the market.”

However, eventually, rights were bought, the esteemed translator, Michael Hofmann was commissioned, and late last year, the book was published in the US to enormous critical fanfare.

“It is wonderful,” Ulrich Ditzen says of his father’s Lazarus-like publishing success. “Wonderful! It has completely mystified me after six decades of rest for the book.”

Days after finishing the book,

I tell him, its atmosphere of fear and suspicion lingered in my mind, its strange reversals of morality pushing questions at me I wasn’t sure I could answer.

Ulrich Ditzen’s eyes light up.

“That is the art of Fallada! That is what he really can do.”

Publisher dusts off missing chapter in Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin

Bestseller set in Nazi Germany and published in communist era is to have controversial chapter reinstated

The newly discovered chapter of Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin depicts the Quangels as grateful to Hitler...
More than 60 years since Hans Fallada's international bestseller Alone in Berlin was published, readers will be able to digest the unabridged version for the first time.

Germany's Aufbau publishing house recently dug out Fallada's original manuscript from its archive, only to find there was an extra chapter, and a rather different story. They decided to reprint the novel as Fallada originally wrote it.

Based on fact, Alone in Berlin tells the bleak story of a working-class couple, Otto and Anna Quangel, in wartime Berlin. Crushed by the news that their son has been killed at the front they begin a resistance campaign, distributing anti-Nazi postcards. Hounded by the Gestapo, the couple are finally tried and executed.

The missing chapter 17 reveals a side of the Quangels only hinted at in the first version. "No one suspected that the original in our archive differed from the published version," says René Strien, the director of Aufbau.

Yet the changes were considerable. Handwritten corrections on the original manuscript show that chapter 17 was completely cut, and the style and politics of the novel consistently toned down.

"The first edition was more tame, more black and white. There are more shades of grey in this original edition," said Strien. "But remember, Aufbau was an East German publisher and there was censorship back then. A communist should be a marvellous person, a Nazi should be bad."

Founded in 1945, Aufbau became the major publishing house in postwar East Germany and specialised at first in communist and anti-fascist literature.

The changes shift the reader's understanding of the story, according to the Penguin editor Adam Freudenheim. "I was surprised to read the new chapter," he said. "It was clear in the existing version that they are not heroic resisters, it's the death of their son that causes them to search their consciences. But this is more dramatic. There's not just good and evil."

Fallada's original portrayal of the Quangels is more ambivalent. At the start, they are an average German family, settled into the political status quo. Chapter 17 depicts them as actively taking part in national socialist society.

They are grateful to Hitler that Otto has work as the foreman in a furniture factory. His wife admires the Führer and volunteers for the National Socialist women's league – details deleted from the published edition.

It is only after they lose their son that the couple turn against the regime.

"This is really exciting," said Manfred Kuhnke, a Fallada researcher and old family friend. "These are substantial changes. Fallada didn't want flawless anti-fascists. He would never have taken this chapter out."

Linguistically, the original also brings you closer to the writer, according to the critic Hajo Steinart. "It's grittier, more authentic, we're learning more about the author's state of mind," he said.

Fallada's life was troubled by mental illness and addiction. He died shortly before the novel was published and it is not clear whether he ever proofread the corrections. Aufbau says the first edition may even have been the version Fallada wanted.

"It's not as if the poor British readers have the wrong book," said Strien. "They are both legitimate versions."

The reprint will initially only be available in Germany but Penguin said it was considering a reprint with the rediscovered chapter 17 as an appendix.

The novel has been translated into 20 languages and sold more than 300,000 copies in the UK alone. In Germany, it is called Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Everyone Dies Alone).

Guardian.co.uk

From Harriet:

People often ask me how I choose the books I use. I chose Every Man Dies Alone because it is so different from most of the books we read about WWII. Please think about the following.

The book was written in 1946, not during WWII but close to the end. What is valuable to the reader about the time the book was written?

A few of the minor characters appear to represent "goodness." Who were they and what did they say? Why do you think the writer included them in the book? Do you think people like that existed in Germany during the war?

Some of the characters grow and develop into complex characters. Some do not. In your opinion, which people grow and in what way? Which people do not? Is there a way to account for this growth or lack of it?

Do any of the Nazis show humanity? If so, which ones and how?

How does Fallada present family and how does the condition of the particular family affect its members and reflect the society at large?

If you were to recommend this book to friends, how would you present it?

Does the fact that the story of Otto and Anna coame from a true story make you feel different about the book, than if it were totally fictional? If so, why?

Which characters were complex and which flat? Which develop into more complex characters?

What themes do you see in the book?

Does it seem to be a book written by an unbalanced or insane person?

What do you think of the end Fallada chose?

Which characters enunciate what you think are the author's views? Do these characters and theirviews affect other characters and their actions?? If so how?

Residents of apartment house on Jablonski Square:

• Otto and Anna Quangel
• Baldur Persicke and his family
• Frau Rosenthal
• Kuno- Dieter - Borkhausen's son?
• Borkhausen
• Judge Fromm
• Trudel - fiancee of the Quangel's son whio is killed in the war
• Eva and Enno Kluge
• Kienschaper - Country teacher, Eva's husband
• Ulrich Heffke - Anna Quangel's brother
• Hetty- pet store owner who shelters Enno
• Karl Hergesell - Trudel's husband
• Grigoleit - Communist, old associate of Karl and Trudel
• Mr. Reichhardt - Otto's cellmate in prison
• Inspector Zott
• Inspector Escherich
• Obergruppenfuhrer Prall - Zott and Escherich's superior