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 and in psychiatric care, yet produced some of the most significant German novels of the twentieth century, including Little Man, What Now?, Iron Gustav, Once a Jailbird, A Small Circus, 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 also wrote many remarkable short stories, the best of which are collected in Tales from the Underworld. Fallada died in Berlin in 1947.
Iron Gustav, Once a Jailbird, A Small Circus and Alone in Berlin are all published in Penguin Modern Classics.
Michael Hofmann is the author of several books of poems and the translator of many modern and contemporary German authors. Penguin publishes his translations of Fallada’s Alone in Berlin and A Small Circus, Kafka’s Amerika and Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel, Irmgard Keun’s Child of All Nations and Jakob Wassermann’s My First Wife.
Jenny Williams is Professor Emeritus at Dublin City University and is the author of More Lives than One: A Biography of Hans Fallada, which is published by Penguin.