The story was written by Hans Fallada, whose birth name was Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen. He was born into a distinctly bourgeois family in 1893. His father was a judge and later, a supreme court judge. In 1911, Fallada and a friend planned their joint suicide which was staged as a mock duel. The friend died, but Fallada survived. He was committed to a psychiatric institution. He failed to graduate from high school and went, instead, to an agricultural school. During World War I, despite Germany's desperate need for military manpower, he was rejected as unfit for military service. He held several jobs, but between 1917 and 1919 he was committed to several institutions for alcohol and drug abuse. Despite these institutional attempts to break his addiction, he remained a life-long substance abuser.
In 1923, he was sentenced to several months in prison for embezzlement. He spent 2½ years in the Neumuenster prison for fraud from 1926 to 1928. In 1929, he married Anna Issel and began, by 1930, to achieve some success as a writer of fiction. His most successful novel, published in 1931, was Little Man, What Now? [Kleiner Mann, was nun?].
His considerable earnings from this book enabled him to buy a house and property in Carwitz in 1933.
Fallada as a youth. |
Tne Neumuenster prison. |
Carwitz from the air. |
Fallada's property, lakeside. |
Fallada's house, lakeside. |
Where Fallada died. |
In 1943, the Nazis briefly appointed him to the position of Special Leader in the Reich Labor Front and assigned him to a position in occupied France. This service to the Nazi regime was to haunt him for the short time he lived after the war.
In 1944, his marriage was dissolved. Shortly thereafter, he committed his second psychotic act. During an argument with his former spouse he fired a gun at her. The bullet missed her, but he was convicted of attempted murder. As a result of this conviction, he was committed to an institution for the treatment of alcoholism.
In the chaos immediately following the German capitulation in 1945, he was briefly appointed mayor of a small town in the Soviet sector of occupied Germany. In that year, he married Ursula Boltzenthal who was also an alcoholic and drug abuser. He was a "person of interest" to British and US intelligence because of his brief service in the Reich Labor Front and his international reputation as a writer.
He died in 1947 in a clinic to which he had been committed for drug abuse. The official cause of death was given as heart failure.
Fallada was a person of essentially no political convictions. His survival with lifelong drug addiction gave him the habit of betrayal which, in its earlier and less sophisticated form, led him into criminality. In later years, it manifested itself as political opportunism. The Nazis, the Soviets, and the Anglo-Americans would have regarded him as unstable and untrustworthy, but possibly useful, because of his literary reputation, in narrowly circumscribed assignments where he could be kept under tight control.