Memoiren in Romanform. Zu Hans Falladas Gefängnistagebuch 1944

Memoirs in the Novel Form. Hans Fallada’s Gefängnistagebuch 1944 As opposed to other German-speaking authors, Hans Fallada did not decide on emigration from the Hitlerite Germany. The author of the topos of the man in the street stayed in The Third Reich, where, while wanting to keep on writing, he had to subject to the propaganda censorship. Although his books did not appear on the blacklist, he was rather unpopular in the Party. He was imprisoned twice. When being incarcarated in 1944, he started writing a prison diary, a fact which he managed to conceal from the wardens. In these diaries, in the first person, he describes his own struggles as an average citizen of the Nazi Germany. He takes up motifs typical for other compatriots; the reform of the authorities’ system, the so-called internal emigration, which he after did not belong to, his writings despite the existing censorship, or the general attitude towards Jewish people. When it comes to the narrative form, the diary, which content was camouflaged by Fallada in extenso between the lines of The Drinker, partially resembles the genre of memoirs with the first-person narrative voice. Curiously enough, despite using this particular kind of narrator, from whom one can expect far-reaching subjectivity, he remains in his narration extremely mature, precise and above all-credible. As a result, the prison diary is one of the most authentic literary documents concerning the life of a common man in Nazi Germany and a unique insight into his everyday dilemmas