Posthumous bestseller

Late German author Hans Fallada has often been dismissed by literary experts as a "bourgeois" writer, but now, over six decades after his death, his work is attracting international acclaim. Following the recent translation of his wartime novel - titled "Alone in Berlin" in the UK and "Every Man Dies Alone" in the United States - he has gained a large following in the English-speaking world.

In the UK alone, 100,000 copies of the novel have been sold since its initial release in hardback in 2009. Penguin Classics, the novel's UK publisher, expects to sell 250,000 copies by the end of this year. For a country where translated novels usually account for only one percent of the book market's sales volume, this is a particularly astonishing figure.

'A new, surprising angle'

Based on a true story, the novel recounts how a working-class Berlin couple, Otto and Anna Quangel, become politically active when their only son dies in battle during World War II. They come up with their own resistance campaign: distributing anti-Hitler postcards around Berlin. The pair is fully aware that being caught would cost them their lives.

According to Adam Freudenheim, publisher for Penguin Classics and commissioner of the English translation, the novel offers "a new, surprising angle on World War II, which is of course of perennial interest."

It also "forces you, the reader, to ask yourself the question, 'What would I have done if I'd been in these circumstances?'" Freudenheim told Deutsche Welle. "It's a great, memorable novel."

In a recent segment dedicated to the novel on the American TV talk show "Charlie Rose," New York Times book reviewer Liesl Schillinger pointed out that while much has been written about World War II, the fate of ordinary German citizens during that time remains largely unaddressed.

"What other novels about ordinary Germans in wartime do we know?" asked Schillinger rhetorically.

In her review, Schillinger writes that to read the novel is "to be accompanied by a wise, somber ghost who grips your shoulder and whispers into your ear: 'This is how it was. This is what happened.'"

Intense texts from a troubled mind

Hans Fallada was born as Rudolf Ditzen in the German city of Greifswald in 1893. His pseudonym derives from a combination of characters found in Grimm's Fairy Tales. From adolescence onwards, his life was marked by accidents, illness, drug addiction and mental instability, leading to several stints in insane asylums. He died of a morphine overdose in 1947.

His most widely known work until now has been the novel "Little Man, What Now?" Published in 1932, a year before Adolf Hitler's rise to power, the book's instant success was marred by Fallada's anxiety over the rise of Nazism and a subsequent nervous breakdown. Today, the novel is considered to be a modern classic, due to its intense descriptions of the last days of the Weimer Republic.

Great for some, 'bourgeois' for others

Despite his literary successes, Fallada's works have gone unheeded by German critics. This "could be due to the fact that Fallada is particularly good at describing everyday life and ordinary people," Andrea Doberenz, a spokeswoman for Fallada's German publisher Aufbau Verlag, told Deutsche Welle.

"This could be seen as bourgeois, but, as always, it's a matter of perception," added Doberenz.

Nevertheless, Doberenz emphasizes that Fallada's work has already been well received in Germany since the 1970's, but for this same reason it does not have the "boom potential" on home soil that it is now having abroad.

However, a different kind of Fallada renaissance is currently taking place in Germany - in the form of stage adaptations of his works, most notably the play "Little Man, What Now?"

Author: Eva Wutke

Editor: Kate Bowen