Hans Fallada: Drunk

The novel Drunkard was published in 1950. The German writer Hans Fallada depicted the story of a well-to-do merchant in a small town. Ervin Sommer falls into alcoholism, begins to neglect business and socially declines. After a conflict with his wife, he is imprisoned, then ends up in the cruel confines of a psychiatric hospital. In this novel, Fallada capitalized on his own life experiences: The writer was in a similar institution for forced treatment during the Nazi terror in 1944. He smuggled paper into the institution and secretly wrote his masterful novel in tiny print as a sanity-saving measure. Adapted for radio by Pavel Soukup from a translation by Vera and Karel Houb. Directed by Vlado Rusko. The text was written in the Mecklenburg provincial town of Strelitz, a Nazi hospital for alcoholics and drug addicts, where the author was undergoing forced treatment. Fallada managed to smuggle a hundred sheets of lined paper into the institute and procured a pen and ink. He wrote to save his sanity - in 16 days, from 6 to 21 September 1944, he wrote a whole novel, Drunkard, in addition to a series of small stories. For Fallada, however, working on a literary work was not only a salvation in the constitution, but also a mortal danger. Fallada had to disguise his writing: He covered the pages of the paper with his lines at three-inch intervals, in writing so tiny that it was impossible to read with the naked eye and looked like a meaningless scrawl punctuated here and there by a letter. When Fallada reached the last page, he turned the paper upside down and kept writing, in the middle of the three-centimeter gaps. And when he reached the end again, he turned the paper over a second time. But even so, he did not dare to write the full truth about the Constitution and moved the story back to the vague times of the Weimar Republic. When this bundle of scrawled paper was found in Fallada's estate, it was at first thought to be a curiosity, but only when examined with a magnifying glass did it turn out to be a coherent text. It took a month to decipher and transcribe. Despite the difficult conditions of its creation, it is almost unbelievable that this brilliantly composed book was written as a first draft, which the author never returned to.