Why Do You Wear a Cheap Watch?

'It was what we call in the trade a potato...' 
 
Tales of low-lifes and grifters trying to make ends meet in pre-War Germany. 
 
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Hans Fallada was born in Germany in 1893. His life was checkered by a failed adolescent suicide pact in which his friend died, addiction to morphine and alcohol, periods of incarceration in prison and mental hospitals, and brushes with the Nazi regime. His most famous novels include Little Man, What Now?, The Drinker and Alone in Berlin, written in 24 days. Fallada died weeks before its publication, in February 1947 in Berlin.

A Berlin Family Chronicle

Iron Gustav

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A powerful story of the shattering effects of the First World War on both a family and a country - from Hans Fallada, bestselling author of Alone in Berlin 
 
'This remarkable work, now complete after 76 years, could well be one of the finest novels any of us will ever read' Irish Times 
 
Gustav Hackendahl's will is law. Known as 'Iron Gustav', he runs his family and his Berlin carriage business with stern, unyielding discipline. But his children have wills of their own, and soon they slip from his control - some to better lives, some towards disaster. As war breaks out and Gustav's beloved Germany is devastated by hardship and violence, he finds everything he believes in destroyed. Can the man of iron endure, or even change? 
 
Brutal and moving, written with Hans Fallada's gift for capturing the small tragedies of ordinary lives, Iron Gustav is a heartbreaking family chronicle and an unflinching portrayal of the First World War and its aftermath.

Every so often you come across a book so finely wrought that you have no doubt about its status as a literary classic. Iron Gustav is one ... The writing is visual, vivid and visceral, the irony delicate, and even when it is cynical the novel doesn't sneer ... Fallada's descriptions of material degradation and squalor equal those of Dickens and Dostoyevsky. He has the gift for complex narrative of Thomas Mann combined with the page-turning powers of great thriller writers such as Raymond Chandler, and the structural control of a great painter or composer ... This [Penguin Modern Classics edition] is the first authentic version of not just a classic, but a masterpiece of world literature

A powerful portrayal of the devastating effects of the first world war on a family and a country ... The project went through a tortuous journey, with rewrites ordered by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief, which have been taken out of the new edition ... this new edition is as close as possible to Fallada's original

Fallada captures the small tragedies of family life, the loss of dignity caused by unemployment, squalid housing and the misery of seeing civilized values destroyed. This anti-war book, censored by Goebbels in the Thirties, is a gripping addition to modern German history

There is a serious cause for celebration: one of the finest German-language works of the 20th century is now available as it was intended to be read ... A vivid, atmospheric portrait of Berlin ... Fallada's literary genius rests not only in how he can sustain a multithreaded narrative but in how he, apparently effortlessly, develops characters through chronicling their actions ... the book triumphs as a study of ordinary Berliners faced with dire adversity; Fallada celebrates them repeatedly, their wariness, their humour, their toughness, their blunt kindness and, above all, their conversation ... This remarkable work, now complete after 76 years, could well be one of the finest novels any of us will ever read. Hans Fallada really was that most rare creature, a born novelist who was also a witness

The 'hundreds of deep rifts' that tear defeated Germany apart play out in microcosm within [Iron Gustav's] family ... Fallada shuffles melodrama, farce and documentary realism ... This, as even Dr Goebbels must have seen, is laughter in the dark

A powerful novel ... this new version is something of a publishing coup as it is the first time we have the novel in its entirety in English ... Iron Gustav acutely highlights the chequered fortunes of the ordinary 'little man' against the larger picture of Germany's moral and economic breakdown ... [this is] a saga with the same reach and depth as Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks ... a chronicle of Berlin in those turbulent early decades of the 20th century. Key events appear like milestones: war, Versailles, lawless street-fighting, hyperinflation, Weimar hedonism and the first dark shoots of Nazism ... This is a social history writ large and mercifully free of sanctimonious preaching or soft-focus distortions ... Fallada's voice is as beguilingly lucid as ever, his images clear to the point of stark, his blighted and resilient Berliners ringing astoundingly true

Hans Fallada was one of the best-known German writers of the twentieth century. Born in 1893 in Greifswald as Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen, he took his pen name from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. His most famous works include the novels Little Man, What Now? and The Drinker. Fallada died from an overdose of morphine on 5 February 1947 in Berlin.

Selected Shorter Fiction

Tales from the Underworld

Darkly funny, searingly honest short stories from Hans Fallada, author of bestselling Alone in Berlin 
 
In these stories, criminals lament how hard it is to scrape a living by breaking and entering; families measure their daily struggles in marks and pfennigs; a convict makes a desperate leap from a moving train; a ring - and with it a marriage - is lost in a basket of potatoes. 
 
Here, as in his novels, Fallada is by turns tough, darkly funny, streetwise and effortlessly engaging, writing with acute feeling about ordinary lives shaped by forces larger than themselves: addiction, love, money.

A powerful chronicler of human weakness shot through with hope

A Small Circus

A Small Circus is a powerful 1931 portrayal of a German town on the brink of chaos, from bestselling author Hans Fallada (writer of Alone in Berlin) 
 
It is summer, 1929, and in a small German town a storm is brewing. The shabby reporter Tredup leads a precarious existence working for the Pomeranian Chronicle - until he takes some photographs that offer the chance to make a fortune. In Krüger's bar, the farmers are plotting their revenge on greedy officials. A mysterious travelling salesman from Berlin , Henning, is stirring up trouble - but no one knows why. Meanwhile the Nazis grow stronger and the Communists fight them in the streets. And at the centre of it all, the Mayor, 'Fatty' Gareis, seeks the easy life even as events spiral beyond his control. 
 
As tensions erupt between workers and bosses, town and country, Left and Right, alliances are broken, bribes are taken and plots are hatched, until the tension spills over into violence. 
 
'Uncommonly vivid and original' Robert Musil 
 
'Real love and real humanity' Hermann Hesse 
 
'The best account of small-town Germany ... so terribly genuine, it is frightening' Kurt Tucholsky 
 
'This novel's genius ... lies in Fallada's ability to reveal ... as well as to analyse the macabre game of musical chairs that was the Weimar Republic. Fallada gives us front-row seats to Germany's decade-long quest for a sacrificial scapegoat that culminated in the Nazi takeover ... Two years after Alone in Berlin's runaway success, A Small Circus continues the Fallada revival that owes so much to the efforts of its translator, the poet Michael Hofmann' André Naffis-Sahely, Independent 
 
'Fallada creates characters with Dickensian prodigality, each yokel, hack, pig and pen-pusher brought to life in Michael Hofmann's beautifully judged translation ... a generous, life-affirming treat' Jake Kerridge, Telegraph 
 
'Michael Hofmann ... comes as close as possible to giving us Fallada's work in all its coarse, humorous, immediate, tragic glory' Charlotte Moore, Spectator 
 
'Not for the first time, all praise is due to Michael Hofmann's art and feel for nuance. His translation catches the many voices - some exasperated, others bewildered, a few downright angry - that make this bold, exuberant and candid narrative sizzle with life and the relentlessly shocking reality of it all' Irish Times 
 
'Fallada's own experiences as a regional journalist in north Germany underlie the action, and it is this sense of realism, combined with an ear for dialogue and an acute understanding of human frailty, that make the novel such an authentic portrayal of an imploding era' Ben Hutchinson, Observer

The best account of small-town Germany ... so terribly genuine, it is frightening

This novel's genius ... lies in Fallada's ability to reveal ... as well as to analyse the macabre game of musical chairs that was the Weimar Republic. Fallada gives us front-row seats to Germany's decade-long quest for a sacrificial scapegoat that culminated in the Nazi takeover. ... Two years after Alone in Berlin's runaway success, A Small Circus continues the Fallada revival that owes so much to the efforts of its translator, the poet Michael Hofmann

Fallada creates characters with Dickensian prodigality, each yokel, hack, pig and pen-pusher brought to life in Michael Hofmann's beautifully judged translation ... a generous, life-affirming treat

Michael Hofmann ... comes as close as possible to giving us Fallada's work in all its coarse, humorous, immediate, tragic glory

Not for the first time, all praise is due to Michael Hofmann's art and feel for nuance. His translation catches the many voices - some exasperated, others bewildered, a few downright angry - that make this bold, exuberant and candid narrative sizzle with life and the relentlessly shocking reality of it all

Fallada's own experiences as a regional journalist in north Germany underlie the action, and it is this sense of realism, combined with an ear for dialogue and an acute understanding of human frailty, that make the novel such an authentic portrayal of an imploding era

Hans Fallada was one of the best-known German writers of the twentieth century. Born on 21 July 1893 in Greifswald as Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen, he took his pen name from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. His most famous works include the novels Little Man, What Now?, The Drinker and the bestselling Alone in Berlin. Fallada died from an overdose of morphine on 5 February 1947 in Berlin. 
 
Michael Hofmann is the author of several books of poems and a book of criticism, Behind the Lines, and the translator of many modern and contemporary authors.

Once a Jailbird

Fallada is a unique novelist, a writer of great sweetness and charm whom historical circumstances forced to take an interest in violent turmoil

Hans Fallada was one of the best-known German writers of the twentieth century. Born in 1893 in Greifswald as Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen, he took his pen name from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. His most famous works include the novels Little Man, What Now? and The Drinker. Fallada died from an overdose of morphine on 5 February 1947 in Berlin.

For Willi Kufult, prison life means staying out of trouble, keeping his cell clean, snagging a precious piece of tobacco - and dreaming of the day of his release. 
 
Then he gets out. 
 
As Willi tries to make a new life for himself in Hamburg, finding a job and even love, he still cannot escape his past. Gradually he becomes sucked into a world of drink, desperation and deceit, and with one terrible act, he is ensnared in a noose of his own making... 
 
Hans Fallada's dark and moving 1934 novel brilliantly describes a seedy criminal underworld of shabby lives and violent deeds, showing how our actions always catch up with us.

Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism

Hans Fallada was one of the best-known German writers of the twentieth century. Born on 21 July 1893 in Greifswald as Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen, he took his pen name from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. His most famous works include the novels Alone in Berlin, Little Man, What Now? and The Drinker. Fallada died from an overdose of morphine on 5 February 1947 in Berlin.

'...I stare at the coffee I poured myself, and I think: caffeine is a poison that stimulates the heart. There are plenty of instances of people killing themselves with coffee, hundreds and thousands of them. Caffeine is a deadly poison, maybe almost as deadly as morphine. Why didn't it ever occur to me before: coffee is my friend!' 
 
Drawing on Hans Fallada's own history of addiction, these two stories and are written with a remarkable, tough, spartan clarity. As a man desperately, haplessly tries to get enough morphine to make it through the day and a drunk embezzler struggles to get himself arrested, they are at one second crushing, the next darkly comic. 
 
This book includes A Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism and Three Years of Life.

Alone in Berlin

THE ACCLAIMED INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 
 
'One of the most extraordinary and compelling novels written about World War II. Ever' Alan Furst 
 
Inspired by a true story, Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin is a gripping wartime thriller following one ordinary man's determination to defy the tyranny of Nazi rule 
 
Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm and the unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France. Shocked out of their quiet existence, they begin a silent campaign of defiance, and a deadly game of cat and mouse develops between the Quangels and the ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich. When petty criminals Kluge and Borkhausen also become involved, deception, betrayal and murder ensue, tightening the noose around the Quangels' necks ... 
 
This Penguin Classics edition contains an afterword by Geoff Wilkes, as well as facsimiles of the original Gestapo file which inspired the novel. 
 
'Terrific ... a fast-moving, important and astutely deadpan thriller' 
Irish Times 
 
'An unrivalled and vivid portrait of life in wartime Berlin' 
Philip Kerr 
 
'To read Fallada's testament to the darkest years of the 20th century is to be accompanied by a wise, somber ghost who grips your shoulder and whispers into your ear: "This is how it was. This is what happened"' 
The New York Times

One of the most extraordinary and compelling novels written about World War II. Ever.

Terrific ... a fast-moving, important and astutely deadpan thriller.

A classic study of a paranoid society. Fallada's scope is extraordinary. Alone in Berlin is ... as morally powerful as anything I've ever read.

The greatest book ever written about the German resistance to the Nazis.

Fallada assembles a cast of vivid low-life characters, stoolies, thieves and whores

Visceral, chilling ... has the suspense of a Le Carré novel

A classic study of a paranoid society. Fallada's scope is extraordinary. Alone in Berlin is ... as morally powerful as anything I've ever read

First published in Germany in 1947 and evoking the horror of life in Germany in the Second World War. A rediscovered masterpiece that makes you want to seek out more works by this great chronicler of events in my own lifetime.

Barry Humphries, Books of the Year, Sunday Telegraph

The other fictional high point of 2009 was Alone in Berlin ... Hans Fallada's 1947 portrait of an ordinary German couple stung into a life of protest by the death of their soldier son is harrowing and masterly.

[This novel] suggests that resistance to evil is rarely straightforward, mostly futile, and generally doomed. Yet to the novel's aching, unanswered question: 'Does it matter?' there is in this strange and compelling story to be found a reply in the affirmative. Primo Levi had it right: This is the great novel of German resistance.

'What Irène Némirovsky's "Suite Française" did for wartime France after six decades in obscurity, Fallada does for wartime Berlin.'

'[Alone in Berlin] has something of the horror of Conrad, the madness of Dostoyevsky and the chilling menace of Capote's "In Cold Blood"'.

'Fallada's great novel, beautifully translated by the poet Michael Hofmann, evokes the daily horror of life under the Third Reich, where the venom of Nazism seeped into the very pores of society, poisoning every aspect of existence. It is a story of resistance, sly humour and hope'

A marvellous book, almost a masterpiece. The tension he maintains despite a fogegone conclusion is miraculous. This is the truest, most vivid I-was-there novel of the epoch.

The stand-out book this year for me was Alone in Berlin (Penguin Classics £9.99) ... It's a page-turning moral thriller, based on fact, of a &shy;working-class German &shy;couple and their small-scale attempts to resist Nazi rule in Berlin. Bleak, chilling, utterly compelling and unforgettable.

Penguin's reissue of Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin, brilliantly translated by Michael Hofmann, makes available one of the great novels of the past century. An almost unbearably intense challenge to its readers.

What makes Alone in Berlin such a cracking read is that it pushes us into the midst of that grim reality and yet allows us to put it down - only at the very end - with a feeling of warm humanity.

Hans Fallada wrote Alone in Berlin between September and November 1946, in postwar East Germany. He told his family that he had written "a great novel". He would die a few months later. .... Fallada was correct: he had written a great book, in circumstances and a space of time which make the achievement almost miraculous. But it's the double miracle of translation which gives us Fallada's novel in English as Alone in Berlin. Michael Hoffman is a fine poet, whose acute ear and eloquent understanding of the transition-points between the two languages make the text as powerful as it is down-to-earth.

Hans Fallada was one of the best-known German writers of the twentieth century. Born in 1893 in Greifswald as Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen, he took his pen name from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. His most famous works include the novels Little Man, What Now? and The Drinker. Fallada died from an overdose of morphine on 5 February 1947 in Berlin. 
 
Michael Hofmann is the author of several books of poems and a book of criticism, Behind the Lines, and the translator of many modern and contemporary authors. Penguin publish his translations of Kafka's Metamorphosis and Other Stories and Irmgard Keun's Child of All Nations.

Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm and the unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France. Shocked out of their quiet existence, they begin a silent campaign of defiance, and a deadly game of cat and mouse develops between the Quangels and the ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich. When petty criminals Kluge and Borkhausen also become involved, deception, betrayal and murder ensue, tightening the noose around the Quangels' necks ...

Hans Fallada

Michael Hofmann

Superb ... There are chapters which pluck the nerves. There are chapters which raise the spirits

An inspired work of a great writer ... Fallada is a genius. The "Little Man" is Mr Everybody

Performs the most astounding task, of taking us to a moment before history

The book that made Hans Fallada famous, Little Man, What Now? is filled with an extraordinary mixture of comedy and desperation. It tells the story of one of European literature's most sympathetic young couples - 'Boy' and 'Lämmchen' - as they battle indomitably through a world of grotesque threats in Depression Berlin. A rich gallery of hulking crooks, maternity nurses, nudists, a terrible mother and Nazi streetfighters cannot shake their love for each other. But is love enough in a city as cold and indifferent as Berlin in 1932? 
 
The great novel of Weimar Germany, Little Man, What Now? is full of men and women trying to keep ahead of their bills and hang on to their daydreams, from harrassed men's clothing assistants to a very unlucky chocolate shop owner. This brilliant new translation by Michael Hofmann brings to life an entire era, one that was - as neither Fallada nor his characters knew - just about to be swept away.

Hans Fallada

Praise for Little Man, What Now?

Superb ... There are chapters which pluck the nerves. There are chapters which raise the spirits

An inspired work of a great writer ... Fallada is a genius. The "Little Man" is Mr Everybody

Such closeness to life

Superb ... There are chapters which pluck the nerves. There are chapters which raise the spirits

An inspired work of a great writer ... Fallada is a genius. The "Little Man" is Mr Everybody

Such closeness to life

Superb ... There are chapters which pluck the nerves. There are chapters which raise the spirits

An inspired work of a great writer ... Fallada is a genius. The "Little Man" is Mr Everybody

Such closeness to life

Books by Hans Fallada

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