This sweeping saga of love in dangerous times the 1923 collapse of the German economy, when food and money shortages led to rioting in the streets and unemployed soldiers marauding through the countryside is deemed by many to be Hans Fallada's greatest work. Yet its 1938 publication made his publisher so fearful of Nazi retribution that he told Fallada, "If this book destroys us, then at least we'll be destroyed for something that's worth it." It appears here in its first unabridged translation into English, based on a contemporaneous translation by Philip Owens that has been revised and restored in full by Thorsten Carstensen and Nicholas Jacobs. Carstensen also provides an afterword discussing why the original version of the book was so heavily edited ... and why Fallada's publisher thought a love story might get them killed.

Prior to WWII, the novels of German writer Hans Fallada (born Rudolf Ditzen) were international bestsellers. But when Jewish producers in Hollywood made his 1932 novel, Little Man, What Now? into a major motion picture, the rising Nazis began to take note of him. His struggles increased after he refused to join the Party and was denounced by neighbors for “anti-Nazi” sympathies. Unlike many other prominent artists, however, Fallada decided not to flee Germany. By the end of World War II he’d suffered an alcohol-fueled nervous breakdown and was in a Nazi insane asylum, where he nonetheless managed to write—in code—the brilliant subversive novel, The Drinker. After the war, Fallada went on to write Every Man Dies Alone, based on an actual Gestapo file, but he died in 1947 of a morphine overdose, just before it was published.