Hans Fallada

Hans Fallada wrote Alone in Berlin, about a working-class couple who resisted the Nazis with postcards, and he wrote it in twenty-four days shortly before dying of a morphine overdose. He was born Rudolf Ditzen, and his life was chaotic in ways his fiction used: a suicide pact at eighteen disguised as a duel in which he killed his friend and survived, morphine and alcohol addiction from his twenties, two spells in prison for embezzling from employers to pay for both, and periods in asylums. Little Man, What Now? in 1932 made him famous - a clerk and his wife going under in the Depression, and one of the best accounts of what the last years of Weimar felt like from the bottom. He stayed in Germany after 1933, was denounced, briefly arrested, and spent the Nazi years writing largely harmless books and one commissioned antisemitic novel, which he later said he had corrupted from within; the question of his compromises is unresolved and he did not resolve it either. In 1944 he shot at his ex-wife, was confined to a criminal asylum, and wrote The Drinker there in code. In 1945 a Soviet officer handed him a Gestapo file on Otto and Elise Hampel, executed in 1943 for leaving anti-Nazi postcards around Berlin. He turned it into a novel in under a month and died before it appeared. Primo Levi called Alone in Berlin the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis, which is a large claim for a novel drafted in under a month by a dying morphine addict. It was not translated into English until 2009, sixty-two years after his death, and then sold enormously. The Hampels were caught because a neighbour turned in one of the cards.

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