Hans Fallada's work is little known in the English-speaking world, but it is both famous and important in Germany. His best-known novel is Every Man Dies Alone (1947), which my sister recommended to me a few years ago and turned out to be a extremely powerful anti-fascist novel. The quality of is writing will compare handsomely with that of any writer who has ever lived.

Fallada (born Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen, 1893-1947) had a difficult life because of addictions to alcohol and morphine, and also because his country was taken over by the Nazis. The Wiki article on him will explain better, but there is controversy because he surrendered to Nazi pressure for a while during the 1930s, writing some material for Goebbels's propaganda office.

The change comes when he abruptly chooses not to leave Germany when he has the chance, and spends WW2 going in and out of mental wards writing anything but Fascist drivel.

This novel by Fallada that I've begun, The Drinker, was written during the war, in an asylum, while he was pretending to work on an anti-semitic novel. It is clearly a great masterwork of alcohol literature (based on only 32 pages), and I am delighted to have come across a copy last week. It seems to have gotten Laura Earle's attention as well.