Hans Fallada

(pen name of Rudolf Ditzen). Born July 21, 1893, in Greifswald; died Feb. 5, 1947, in Berlin. German writer.

Fallada followed a number of occupations before becoming a professional writer in 1932. He exposed the government’s treacherous policies toward the peasants, as well as the mores of the cheap popular press, in his novel Peasants, Bigwigs, and Bombs (1931). The novel Little Man, What Now? (1932; translated into Russian as What Now?, 1934) deals with the tragedy of petty bureaucrats oppressed by the threat of unemployment and poverty. Fallada attributed the moral degradation of the “little man” to the amorality of the bourgeois system, for example, in The World Outside (1934). He exposed the myth of the “harmless” German burgher in Man Strives Upward (1943, published 1953).

Fallada was persecuted under fascism. Antibourgeois and an-timilitarist themes appeared in his epic novels Wolf Among Wolves (1937; Russian translation, 1957) and Iron Gustav (1938; Russian translation, 1969). In the postwar years, Fallada served as burgomaster of Feldberg, in the Soviet occupation zone. He took part in the Kulturbund. The most significant of Fallada’s realistic works was his novel Every Man Dies Alone (1947; Russian translation, 1948), which depicts life in Hitlerite Germany and the antifascist struggle of a working-class family in Berlin.