S3E4: Desperate Literature

Fallada hunkers down on his farm where he plans to wait out the war writing and tending to his vegetable garden in sobriety. But the bomber jets buzzing overhead and the Nazi censors who only allow him to publish idyllic “memoirs” of his country life prove too much for him. He retreats to the bottle and descends into an alcoholic madness in which he brandishes a gun at his now ex-wife Suze. The incident lands him in a Nazi psychiatric hospital which he chronicles in a novel entitled The Drinker. He also writes a memoir about his life in the Third Reich with the belief that both the war and the nightmare he’s been living in since the Nazi’s took power will soon be over. He’s right about the first part, but not the second…