Peasants, bigwigs & bombs: Novel

Peasants, Bigwigs, and Bombs, published for the first time in 1931, is the great modern book that made Fallada renowned and one of the most widely read authors of his day. The narrative is inspired on a peasant rebellion in the northern German village of Neumünster, where Fallada worked as an advertisement and reporter for the local newspaper. Before the fall of the Weimar Republic, Fallada paints a portrait of a society that was hopelessly split. Everyone fights against everyone else: the city population vs the rural population, the workers versus the employers, the peasants versus the state, and the state representatives, political parties, and their morally dubious representatives battle among themselves. This book explains the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis more vividly and clearly than any other history book. The parallels to societal trends in present-day Germany cannot be missed, making the novel more timely than ever. 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.