"I lived the same life as everyone else, the life of ordinary
people, the masses." Sitting in a prison cell in the autumn of
1944, Hans Fallada sums up his life under the National Socialist
dictatorship, the time of "inward emigration." Under conditions of
close confinement, in constant fear of discovery, he writes himself
free from the nightmare of the Nazi years. His frank and sometimes
provocative memoirs were thought for many years to have been lost.
They are published here for the first time.
The confessional mode did not come naturally to Fallada the
writer of fiction, but in the mental and emotional distress of
1944, self-reflection became a survival strategy. In the "house of
the dead" he exacts his political revenge on paper. "I know that I
am crazy. I'm risking not only my own life, I'm also risking the
lives of many of the people I am writing about," he notes, driven
by the compulsion to write. And write he does: about spying and
denunciation, about the threat to his livelihood and his literary
work, about the fate of many friends and contemporaries such as
Ernst Rowohlt and Emil Jannings. To conceal his intentions and to
save paper, he uses abbreviations. His notes, constantly exposed to
the gaze of the prison warders, become a kind of secret code. He
finally succeeds in smuggling the manuscript out of the prison,
although it remained unpublished for half a century.
These revealing memoirs by one of the best-known German writers
of the 20th century will be of great interest to all readers of
modern literature.
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