100th birthday of Hans Fallada - Germany / Federal Republic of Germany 1993 - 100 Pfennig

Hans Fallada is one of the few German authors who succeeded in combining a valid literary composition of the reality of their time with an extraordinary literary success. Rudolf Ditzen - as a writer he put himself the pseudonym Hans Fallada - was born on July 21, 1893 as the eldest son of a district judge in the small university town of Greifswald. After attending grammar schools in Berlin and Leipzig, he had to go to Rudolstadt in 1911 because of academic failure, where he was arrested after a duel with fatal outcome and was admitted to a closed institution for the mentally ill. In the following years Fallada took up various agricultural activities, which were interrupted from 1917 by several stays in sanatoria for addicts. 1920 to 1923 he worked as a rendant on some estates in Mecklenburg, West Prussia and Silesia. He was sentenced to prison for various crimes. After the release, he managed a fresh start as an advertiser and local reporter in Neumünster. Inspired by his participation as a reporter in the country folk process in Neumünster Fallada 1929 wrote his first major novel "peasants, bigwigs and bombs", which he published in 1931. A year later, the 1932 novel »Little Man, What Now?« Helped him achieve his final literary breakthrough. The fascism that broke in over Germany did not cause him to emigrate; he believed he could adapt to the changed circumstances. As long as the fascist repression lasted, Fallada published only two important novels: "Who Eats Out of the Tin Bowl" (1934) and "Wolf Among Wolves" (1937). The National Socialist regime judged the successful novels refusing, so that the popular author, in order to avoid a verdict, next to them mostly books at a high entertainment level, far from any political issues wrote. One last time he collected his creative powers and wrote a novel about the Nazi era, "Everybody dies alone". On February 5, 1947, Hans Fallada died in Berlin as a result of his addiction. The individual life of Hans Fallada is symptomatic of the disunity and disorientation of the time between the world wars. Through crime, punishment, and bourgeois declassification, the poet gained that sovereign knowledge of the environment and of humanity, which later made possible for him the unsurpassably exact description of the crisis-ridden petty bourgeoisie in the Weimar Republic. Less systematic thinking and reflection as much as the most accurate observation of the economic and social situation of the "little man" characterizes his work. Especially with his novel »Little Man, What Now?« Fallada provided a detailed psychogram of the German petty bourgeois, who gradually sank in the hopeless struggle against unemployment as a result of the global economic crisis. In the slow dwindling of hope and the corresponding increase in resignation - and here lies the contemporary historical dimension in Fallada's literary work - emerging catastrophes stand out. The minute description of the petty bourgeois in his social environment clearly demonstrates his political viability and usability. Nevertheless, Fallada is not to be understood as a political poet. Not proclaiming political messages is his concern, but showing things "as they are". Thus, in the novels of the time of the National Socialist regime, "Who once eats from the tin bowl" and "Wolf among wolves", Fallada described as in his last novel "Everybody dies for himself alone" further symptomatic individual fates. His most important novels were celebrated as prototypes of the "New Objectivity" thanks to their concise language and the consistently realistic narrative style. As an outstanding representative of this literary era, Hans Fallada occupies a permanent place in the history of German literature. (Text: Dag-Stefan Rittmeister, German Department of the University of Bonn)