Iron Gustav: Novel

Gustav Hackendahl is a prosperous businessman with his taxi company and a cruel father to his five children. On July 29, 1914, the day of the killing in Sarajevo, his world falls apart. His favored son robs the family coffers to fund a life of gambling, one daughter leaves home, and the other steals and falls in love with a philanderer. Meanwhile, the vehicle is advancing imperceptibly and endangers his life. Fallada exploits the plight of a bourgeois family to reveal the pre-war era's cultural and socio-psychological landscape. Biography Rudolf Ditzen, also known as Hans Fallada, was born in Greifswald in 1893 as the son of a high-ranking judicial officer. He attended the humanistic Gymnasium and served an agricultural apprenticeship without graduating. From 1915 to 1925, he worked as a farm laborer, court inspector, and bookkeeper. Between 1928 and 1931, he worked as an address clerk, advertisement collector, and publishing company employee. 1920 first novel "Der junge Goedeschal"; independent writer since 1931. Numerous translations of Fallada's work Kleiner Mann was a nun? (1932) brought him international renown. On his six-acre farm in Mecklenburg, he lived in solitude as a "undesirable author" throughout the Nazi period. He relocated to Berlin in 1945 and died there in 1947.