More Lives Than One

The German novelist Hans Fallada (1893-1947), whose most famous work, Little Man - What Now?, became the last bestseller of the Weimar Republic, was one of the very few liberal humanist writers to remain in Germany throughout the Nazi era.
Fallada's work is still widely read in Germany today. It provides an unusually honest record of the country's crisis and decline after the First World War; Fallada always stands alongside his fictional characters, never in judgement over them. He also described his own mortal struggle against the morphine and cocaine addiction which began in his youth. His life throws a new, sometimes surprising light on Germany. From his comfortable but psychologically disturbed middle-class upbringing, and his years of active delinquency (leading to several periods in asylums and prisons), through his private happiness and public success in the late Weimar years, to the often self-inflicted humiliations of the Third Reich period and his self-destructive last years, Fallada hardly stopped writing and bearing witness.