Hans Fallada

Hans Fallada's real name was Rudolf Ditzen. He was born on 21 July 1893, the eldest son of the District Magistrate Wilhelm Ditzen and his wife Elisabeth in Greifswald. Due to his father's career, the family moved to Berlin in 1899, where Rudolf entered grammar school in 1901. Eight years later Wilhelm Ditzen was promoted to judge at the imperial court and transferred to Leipzig.
At the age of eighteen, Rudolf and his schoolmate Hans Dietrich von Necker attempted a double suicide: They had intended to shoot each other in a duel. But, as opposed to his classmate, Rudolf Ditzen survived despite his injuries. He was then forced to leave school without a degree and to spend some time in the psychiatric clinic at the university in Jena. He began training in agriculture, volunteered for the army in 1914, but only spent a few days in the military and ended up getting by as a worker on an estate, an assistant in the agricultural administration in Szczecin and an employee in potato production in Berlin from 1915/16. Because of his dependence on morphine and alcohol, he underwent withdrawal treatments in 1917 and 1919. In 1920, he published his first novel: Der junge Goedeschal (Young Goedeschal), under the pseudonym “Hans Fallada” (Falada is the name of the beheaded horse in the Brothers Grimm's fairy tale “The Goose Girl”). In 1923, Fallada was sentenced to three months imprisonment for embezzlement, and from 1926-1928 he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for fraud. On 5 April 1929, Fallada married Anna Margarete (Suse) Issel, who was eight years his junior. (Their children were born in 1930, 1933 and 1940.) After several jobs on estates in Mecklenburg, West Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania and Holstein, he worked in advertising sales and journalism in 1929, before he began work as an editor in the Rowohlt publishing house the following year. Published in 1932, the novel Kleiner Mann – was nun? (Little Man, What Now?) made Hans Fallada famous. The fee made it possible for him to acquire property in 1933 in Carwitz, Mecklenburg. After his marriage ended in divorce on 5 July 1944, Fallada reportedly shot at Anna without hitting her on 28 August 1944. He wasn't sentenced to yet another prison term, however, but sent to a sanatorium for three and a half months instead. On 1 February 1945, he married the widow Ursula (Ulla) Losch, who was also an alcoholic and addicted to morphine, and thirty years younger than he was. In September he moved with her to Berlin. On 5 February 1947, Fallada died in a Berlin hospital.