Der Trinker

The Downfall of a Small-Bourgeois

In just over two weeks, until September 21, 1944, Fallada wrote his most personal novel. At that time, he was living in the Strelitzer Landesanstalt for three and a half months under a court order. This followed a dispute with his ex-wife, during which Fallada fired an indiscriminate shot from his Terzerol. "As long as I write, I forget the bars in front of the window," he shared with his mother in a letter. Surrounded by sick criminals, guards, and caregivers, rarely undisturbed, Fallada not only wrote the novel but also five short stories and his perspective on the Nazi era. To protect the manuscript, he disguised it by making it illegible: he turned finished, closely written manuscript pages upside down and wrote in the spaces in between. Sometimes he repeated the process, so that the pages appeared as if with a...