Hans Fallada Livres

"Mai 1940, on fête à Berlin la campagne de France. La ferveur nazie est au plus haut. Derrière la façade triomphale du Reich se cache un monde de misère et de terreur. 'Seul dans Berlin' raconte le quotidien d'un immeuble modeste de la rue Jablonski, à Berlin. Persécuteurs et persécutés y cohabitent. C'est Mme Rosenthal, juive, dénoncée et pillée par ses voisins. C'est Baldur Persicke, jeune recrue des SS qui terrorise sa famille. Ce sont les Quangel, désespérés d'avoir perdu leur fils au front, qui inondent la ville de tracts contre Hitler et déjouent la Gestapo avant de connaître une terrifiante descente aux enfers. De 'Seul dans Berlin', Primo Levi disait, dans 'Conversations avec Ferdinando Camon', qu'il était 'l'un des plus beaux livres sur la résistance allemande antinazie'. Aucun roman n'a jamais décrit d'aussi près les conditions réelles de survie des citoyens allemands, juifs ou non, sous le IIIe Reich, avec un tel réalisme et une telle sincérité." [Source : 4e de couv., tirage 2012]

Dans l'Allemagne entre les deux guerres, Erwin Sommer, respecté et propriétaire d'un magasin, voit sa vie basculer à cause d'échecs professionnels et de tensions conjugales. Il sombre dans l'alcoolisme, illustrant sa descente dépressionnaire.

Le quotidien d'un morphinomane. Un alcoolique cherche à se faire emprisonner pour arriver enfin à se désintoxiquer. Une paysanne au mari jaloux perd son alliance pendant la récolte des pommes de terre. Un cambrioleur rêve de retourner en prison où la vie est, finalement, si tranquille. Un mendiant vend sa salive porte-bonheur. Fallada nous offre une plongée passionnante dans son époque, qui tend un miroir singulier à la nôtre : c'est cet écho qui a guidé le choix de ces textes. Exercices d'écriture quotidiens, anecdotes ou tranches de vie au long cours, ces nouvelles sont très souvent autobiographiques. Elles reflètent remarquablement la diversité de l'écriture de Fallada, retraçant sa vie, ses obsessions, ses passions et ses vices, ses lubies et ses trouvailles, et son inépuisable désir de raconter le monde tel qu'il est, au quotidien, chez monsieur et madame Tout-le-monde.

I lived the same life as everyone else, the life of ordinary people, the masses. Sitting in a prison cell in the autumn of 1944, the German author Hans Fallada sums up his life under the National Socialist dictatorship, the time of inward emigration .

Wolf among Wolves is a sweeping saga of the collapse of a culture – its economy and government – and the common man's struggle to survive it all. Set in Weimar Germany soon after Germany's catastrophic loss of World War 1, the story follows a young gambler. Wolfgang Pagel, who loses everything in Berlin, then flees the chaotic city, where worthless money and shortages are causing pandemonium. Once in the countryside, however, Pagel finds a defeated German army that has decamped there to foment insurrection. Somehow, amidst it all, he finds romance. Fast-moving as a thriller, fascinating as the best historical fiction, and with lyrical prose that packs a powerful emotional punch. Wolf among Wolves is an immensely absorbing work of literature.

Intransigent, deeply conservative coachman Gustav Hackendahl rules his family with an iron rod, but in so doing loses his grip on the children he loves. Meanwhile, the First World War is destroying his career, his country, and his pride in the German people. As Germany and the Hackendahl family unravel, Gustav has to learn to compromise if he is to hold onto anything he holds dear.

The return of a “superb” forgotten masterpiece about a young couple living in Weimar Germany during the Nazi’s rise to power (Graham Greene) Written just before the Nazis came to power, this darkly enchanting novel tells the simple story of a young couple trying to eke out a devent life amidst an economic crisis that’s transforming their country into a place of anger and despair. It was an international bestseller upon its release, and made into a Hollywood movie—by Jewish producers, which prompted the rising Nazis to begin paying ominously close attention to Hans Fallada, even as his novels held out stirring hope for the human spirit. Ultimately, it is the book that led to Hans Fallada’s downfall with the Nazis. It is presented here in its first-ever uncut translation, by Susan Bennett, and with an afterword by Philip Brady that details the calamitous background of the novel, its worldwide reception, and how it turned out to be, for the author, a dangerous book. “Painfully true to life . . . I have read nothing so engaging as Little Man, What Now? for a long time.” —Thomas Mann

“I lived the same life as everyone else, the life of ordinary people, the masses.” Sitting in a prison cell in the autumn of 1944, the German author Hans Fallada sums up his life under the National Socialist dictatorship, the time of “inward emigration”. Under conditions of close confinement, in constant fear of discovery, he writes himself free from the nightmare of the Nazi years. He records his thoughts about spying and denunciation, about the threat to his livelihood and his literary work and about the fate of many friends and contemporaries. The confessional mode did not come naturally to Fallada, but in the mental and emotional distress of 1944, self-reflection became a survival strategy. Fallada’s frank and sometimes provocative memoirs were thought for many years to have been lost. They are published here for the first time.