I’d like to say a few words about one of this month's titles. Nightmare in Berlin is a remarkable book we’ve just released — and had to reprint before publication.
The celebrated German writer Hans Fallada only wrote two post-war novels — Alone in Berlin and this work — which were both published posthumously. This is the first English-language edition of Nightmare in Berlin to be published.
Fallada, who died not long after World War II, lived through some of the most tumultuous periods of the twentieth century, and produced a series of superb novels about his life and times. His genius was recognised internationally, and he became one of the most famous German writers of his day.
However, it was only several years ago, when his mid-career novels were reissued, and especially when Alone in Berlin was published, that a new generation came to appreciate his special qualities.
Addicted to drugs and alcohol, and a frequent psychiatric inmate, Fallada struggled with his demons all his life. Partly as a result, his writing is suffused with an unusual degree of intensity, vividness, and urgency. He was also remarkably honest, about himself and his fellow citizens.
This is perhaps what makes his work so compelling for us today. As World War II approached, and fantasies of an Aryan Übermensch came to dominate Nazi propaganda and iconography, Fallada resolutely refused to write about anything other than ordinary people and their foibles. Eerily, he published the presciently titled Little Man — What Now? in 1932, a year before Hitler came to power.
In the last year of his life, as he wrote Nightmare in Berlin, Fallada saw the psychological devastation that had been wrought by the war. For a long time — stretching back before World War I — Germany had engaged in national self-delusion about its war aims and the implications of its militaristic ambitions. Fallada, who knew himself and his people too well, had no such illusions.
The product of a tortured soul, Nightmare in Berlin wears the burden of a collective guilt, when few Germans were willing or able to don this mantle. As an early reviewer has written, ‘It is easy to see why Graham Greene — no small master of moral thrillers himself — so admired this writer.’