Book review: A Stranger in My Own Country - a tortured writer's memoir

A Stranger in My Own Country
by Hans Fallada
Polity

With time, the insidious creep of censorship makes outcasts of all those who dare to differ. And those who believe in the rhetoric, or give themselves to it, sow fear among others in order to consolidate their righteousness.

"The little tyrants are more dangerous than the big ones," writes Hans Fallada, whose memoir A Stranger in My Own Country is finally in print - half a century after its writing.

Fallada, one of Germany's most well-regarded writers of the 20th century, tells the tale of a writer and his friends, and how the swell of Nazism means there's always a listening ear outside the door - except this time he's telling his own story.

In 2010, the English translation of Fallada's Alone in Berlin, a thriller set in Nazi Germany, became a publishing sensation six decades after he wrote it, creating some anticipation for his memoir. This story of censorship and a government intolerant of criticism will sound familiar to anyone who has spent time in China or been witness to the slow march of mainland policies in Hong Kong.

Fallada, who died in 1947 aged 53, was a drug addict and alcoholic whose family was falling apart. In 1935 he had been declared an "undesirable writer" following the publication of Once a Jailbird and Once We Had a Child. He was hounded by the Nazis, and had already seen the inside of prison cells for his political transgressions.