* An apt and suggestive echo of the beginning of Knut Hamsun’s great first novel Hunger (1880), to which I have adapted my beginning. It goes (in Robert Bly’s 1967 translation): ‘All of this happened while I was walking around starving in Christiania – that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him …’ The events Fallada describes happened – más o menos – in early 1919.

* The Alexanderplatz, heart of the eastern part of Berlin.

* Fallada wrote ‘80’ in figures.

* Perhaps Leopold von Sacher-Masoch?