Authors: Hans Fallada
Translated by
PHILIP OWENS
Completed by
NICHOLAS JACOBS
and
GARDIS CRAMER VON LAUE
Foreword by
JENNY WILLIAMS
X Sister Sophie Wants to Go Too
XI Eva Gets to Know Her Sister-in-Law
II In Front of a Butcher's Shop
III Hackendahl Becomes a Cabby Again
XII Otto's Discussion With His Father
XIII Bubi's Marriage Congratulations
V A People's Assembly Interrupted
IX Justice or Injustice, Knowledge or Feeling
XV Hackendahl Burns a Few Things
II The Professor and the Firearms
III No Longer a Comrade Among Comrades
XIV The Message from a Dead Man
XV The Message from a Blind Man
II Hackendahl Meets a Profiteer
III His Father Says Goodbye to Erich
XII Inheritance and Disappointment
III The Old Lady and the Nursing Home
XII Teacher Degener Flies a Flag
XIV The Three Registration Forms
III A Son Leaves Home for Good
VI The Notice in the Newspaper
VIII Leaving the Newspaper Building
IX Leaving the Town Hall and Leaving Town
XII The Frontier and the Gravestones
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
âEvery 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' Paul Levy,
Wall Street Journal
âA serious cause for celebration: one of the finest German-language works of the twentieth century is now available as it was intended to be read ⦠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'
Irish Times
âFallada 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'
Daily Mail
'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'
Observer
'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' Boyd Tonkin,
Independent
'A saga with the same reach and depth as Thomas Mann's
Buddenbrooks
⦠a chronicle of Berlin in those turbulent early decades of the twentieth century. Key events appear like milestones: war, Versailles, lawless street-fighting, hyperinflation, Weimar hedonism and the first dark shoots of Nazism ⦠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'
National
Hans Fallada was born Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen in 1893 in Greifswald, north-east Germany, and took his pen-name from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. He spent a number of years in prison or in psychiatric care, yet produced some of the most significant German novels and documentary writing of the twentieth century, including
A Small Circus, Little Man, What Now?, Once a Jailbird, Tales From the Underworld, Wolf Among Wolves, The Drinker
and
Alone in Berlin
, the last of which was only published in English for the first time in 2009, to near-universal acclaim. He died in Berlin in 1947.