S3E3: All Men Are Cowards

In 1932 Hans Fallada releases his big hit, Little Man, What Now? a somewhat autobiographical novel about a young middle-class family trying to survive in an age of mass unemployment and hyperinflation. As The novel can be read as an indictment of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi’s spare it when they take power and begin mass book burnings in April 1933. But to stay in print Fallada agrees to change the novel’s highly unsympathetic Nazi character into a “footballer.” In his next novel, Once a Jailbird, he bends to pressure to write a forward saying that the inhumane justice system described in the novel is now, thankfully, a thing of the past - thanks to the Nazi’s. Doubly ironic because at the time he writes this forward, he’s already been a Nazi prisoner and will most definitely be one again…