German writer Rudolf Ditzen used a pseudonym when he began to write, afraid that such a career would disappoint and embarrass his father, a prominent judge. He named himself after two characters from The Brothers Grimm: Hans, a boy who puts little stock in worldly riches, and Falada, a talking horse who always speaks the truth.
This year marks a century since the event that haunted Fallada (who added an "l" to the name to make it his own) all his life. In 1911, at the age of 18, he and a friend staged a duel to obscure their planned double suicide. The friend missed.
Fallada promptly shot himself in the chest, severely injuring himself. Cleared of murder charges, he was sent instead to the first of many psychiatric institutions. Another suicide attempt, addiction to morphine, embezzlement, then prison time and clinic stays followed.
Somehow, in the next 35 chaotic years, Fallada managed to write nearly 30 books. Not long before dying in 1947, he wrote the novel that would become, thanks to Michael Hofmann's English translation in 2009, an international bestseller.
Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Every Man Dies Alone) tells the story of working class couple Otto and Anna Quangel, scraping by in their Berlin apartment during the Second World War. The death of their only son during the invasion of France spurs them to work against the state in their own quiet way.
They begin dropping hand-written postcards in buildings throughout the city. Denouncing the Hitler regime with words that no-one would dare speak aloud (Deutsches Volk Wache Auf! German people wake up! We must free ourselves from Hitlerism!) they do their Sunday card-writing in the hope that others will read them and feel called to their own acts of resistance.
Otto and Anna were based on a real couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, who were eventually arrested in October 1942, sentenced to death and beheaded. Fallada wrote the 500-page novel in just under a month, after setting himself the task of writing more each day than he had the day before.
He finished the book, but never saw it published, dying from morphine overdose in 1947 at the age of 53.
Falada the faithful horse comes to a bad end, too. A treacherous servant has him butchered for being witness to her betrayal of the princess.
But the true princess pays the butcher to hang Falada's head under the bridge where she can see him each morning. And it's Falada's daily greeting to his "young queen," that is reported to the king and leads to the discovery of the servant's evil.
Fallada the writer is a master of the small moment. In Every Man Dies Alone, he sets out his characters as carefully as Otto places his tools on the table: inkpot, blank cards, white gloves. Such power resides in these commonplace things, such potential for good or evil. Fallada, who was himself falsely denounced by an acquaintance's letter and briefly arrested, would have us take note.
