Novelist Hans Fallada resented the constraints of the Nazi era but did not desist in his craft

Hans Fallada is the romantic nom de plume invented by a man who lived through some of the most difficult episodes in his country's history and came out indifferently, neither a hero nor a villain. "Hans" recalls the Grimms' Lucky Hans, a fairy-tale fool who smiles even as he is cheated; and "Falada" is the talking horse in another Grimm tale who, though slaughtered by his mistress's treacherous chambermaid, continues to speak truth to power as a taxidermied trophy. Fallada the man avoided the fate of Falada the horse. "I do not like grand gestures," he said, "being slaughtered before the tyrant's throne, senselessly, to the benefit of no one and to the detriment of my children, that is not my way." He made this excuse, rather grand itself, in 1938, after accepting edits of his latest novel, Iron Gustav. The book was part of a Nazi film project, and Joseph Goebbels wielded the blue pencil. Iron Gustav tells the story of a coachman whose authoritarian parenting ruins most of his children but who becomes a national hero after he refuses to relinquish his horse and carriage for an automotive taxi. Taking up his editor's suggestions, Fallada extended his narrative's endpoint from 1928 to 1933, twisted Gustav's one decent son into becoming a Nazi storm trooper and made the other, criminal son a member of the Communist Party. ...