Hans Fallada - World War II

World War II

Fallada once again dedicated himself to writing children's stories and other non-political material suitable for the sensitive times. Nevertheless, with the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and the subsequent outbreak of World War II, life became still more difficult for Fallada and his family. War rations were the basis for several squabbles between his family and other members of his village. On multiple occasions neighbors reported his supposed drug addiction to authorities, threatening to reveal his history of psychological disturbances, a dangerous record indeed under the Nazi regime.

The rationing of paper, which prioritized state-promoted works was also an impediment to his career. Nevertheless he continued to publish in a limited role, even enjoying a very brief window of official approval. This window closed abruptly near the end of 1943 with the loss of his 25-year publisher Rowohlt, who fled the country. It was also at this time that he turned to alcohol and extra-marital affairs to cope with, among other matters, the increasingly strained relationship with his wife.

In 1944, although their divorce was already finalized, a drunk Fallada and his wife were involved in an altercation in which a shot was fired by Fallada, according to Suse Ditzen in an interview she gave late in her life to biographer Jenny Williams. According to Suse Ditzen, she took the gun from her husband and hit him over the head with it before calling the police, who confined him to a psychiatric institution. (The police record of the call to the altercation makes no mention of shots being fired.) Throughout this period Fallada had one hope to cling to: the project he had concocted to put off Goebbels's demands that he write an anti-Semitic novel.

It involved the novelization of "a famous fraud case involving two Jewish financiers in the nineteen twenties" which, because of its potential as propaganda, was supported by the government and had eased pressure on him as he worked on other, more sincere projects. Finding himself incarcerated in a Nazi insane asylum, he used this project as a pretext for obtaining paper and writing materials, saying he had an assignment to fulfill for Goebbels's office. This successfully forestalled more harsh treatment: the insane were regularly subjected to barbarous treatment by the Nazis, including physical abuse, sterilization, and even death. But rather than writing the anti-Jewish novel, Fallada used his allotment of paper to write — in a dense, overlapping script that served to encode the text — the novel Der Trinker (The Drinker), a deeply critical autobiographical account of life under the Nazis. It was an act easily punishable by death, but he was not caught, and was released in December 1944 as the Nazi government began to crumble.