AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Little man meme11/19/2022 In Tannenfeld, he had been writing, poems mostly, but when he got out he was thrown not into the creative and political maelstrom of contemporary Berlin or Vienna but onto a nearby dairy farm. He spent his nineteenth birthday in Tannenfeld Sanatorium near Jena and was released just as the rumblings began of what would soon become World War I. He was charged with murder and put (again) into a psychiatric clinic on the grounds of diminished responsibility. In October 1911, Fallada and a friend decided to shoot themselves – no, shoot each other. Released from the clinic and enrolled in a new school near Leipzig, he declared himself at eighteen to be already ‘weary of life’. A few months later again, he was placed in a psychiatric clinic near Weimar after he told a friend he was going to cycle out of town and hang himself (the bicycle black humour seemed to have escaped him – I hope the later memoirist smiled). He initially tried to poison himself, then cut his throat. A few months after this, and no doubt related, he made the first of a number of suicide attempts. He started smoking and drinking heavily, and they became lifelong addictions. He was put on the critical list the dizzy spells and headaches continued for some time.Īt the age of seventeen, he contracted typhoid and became, according to his mother, ‘strangely changed’. He collided with a butcher’s cart, ignominious enough, but then had the wheel roll over him and his face kicked by the horse. In his memoir, he relates how this incident had the effect of ‘turning my world completely upside down’ and here (as opposed to elsewhere) he seems not to be exaggerating. It is in many ways a disarming book: the matter-of-factness of the prose, the light-heartedness of both the characters, and often the story itself, belie a life already lived that would have undone most of us.įallada’s troubles started – or seem to have started – with a bicycle accident at the age of fifteen. It wasn’t until the publication in 1932 of Little Man, What Now? that he really broke into the public consciousness. Fallada took his pen name at the age of twenty-six and the early works written under it were largely autobiographical and much influenced by the newly-fashionable Expressionism. His father was a judge of an evening he and his wife would play piano together and read aloud to the children. So who was Hans Fallada, a writer who for many English readers had until recently been little more than a name that appeared occasionally in the index of works by or about better known German writers? Fallada’s was a life of such tragedy and struggle, at a time of such upheaval, that it is a wonder it lasted as long as it did, until the age of 53, when he died in the now-ravaged Berlin that had both inspired and cruelled him.įallada was born Rudolf Ditzen in 1893 into a well-to-do family. On the back of this success, a new wave of Fallada-in-English publishing began, which now includes Scribe’s reissue of the Bennett translation of Little Man, What Now? alongside The Drinker (1950) and Wolf Among Wolves (1938). Released in the UK as Alone in Berlin, it once again had Fallada’s work on the bestseller lists, this time on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1996, Libris published a new translation by Susan Bennett of Little Man, What Now? but it was not until the reissue in 2009 of Every Man Dies Alone, translated by Michael Hofmann, that Fallada’s resurrection was realised. Putman also brought out the posthumous novel The Drinker in 1952, but by this time Fallada-mania, in the English-speaking world at least, seemed to have settled. The only Fallada-less year for his now avid English readership in this sequence was, significantly, 1939. On the back of the success of the original German editions, British publisher Putman & Co translated a run of Fallada books almost annually from Little Man, What Now? in 1933 to Iron Gustav in 1940. So when the newly published English language edition of his best-known work Kleiner Mann – was nun? ( Little Man, What Now?) recently landed in my hands and I read the first page and was hooked, I thought what a sad and uninteresting life those bungee jumpers must lead.įallada was enormously popular in his day. It is not as if I was unfamiliar with early-twentieth century literature in German: Robert Walser, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil and Thomas Mann are all writers on my shelves I go back to often. Living writers are such a dime a dozen, it’s great to find a new one who’s dead.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |