Never too Late to Read Classics discussion

Our Sepember author, Hans Fallada , takes us to the Eastern part of Germany.
He is most well-known for his novels, Little Man, What Now? and Alone in Berlin.
Years ago I was fortunate enough to find some of his lighter non-fiction books at a university book sale. They're about the adventures of his young family and various pets while they were living in the country.

I've been reading In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson, the story of Professor William E. Dodd America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany. Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha., who was also friend or lover to Carl Sandburg and Thornton Wilder. Martha parties with all and has affairs with both Nazis and Russian Communists but in the section I read today, she has a revelation when visiting Hans Fallada, who stayed in Germany when others like the Mann brothers left. An internet article explains that Martha:

"finally got the message when she and a dissident friend paid a visit to the author Hans Fallada, who had supposedly come to some sort of accommodation with the Nazis. "I saw the stamp of naked fear on a writer's face for the first time," she recalled, "

The book section has Fallada explaining that he ran the ending of his then current novel by Nazi authorities first. It was interesting reading about Fallada writing during the Nazi regime and Thomas Mann's statement that novels written in such a manner should be ignored.

That is interesting.
Thomas Mann's brother, Heinrich Mann, wasn't impressed at Thomas' leaving Germany and they had a real falling out.
I admire Thomas Mann as a writer, but he comes over as a pretty harsh person when I read that statement.

Rosemarie wrote: "I admire Thomas Mann as a writer, but he comes over as a pre..."

This is the exact Thomas Mann quote contained in the book:

"It may be superstitious belief, but in my eyes, any books that could have been printed at all in Germany between 1933 and 1945 are worse than worthless and not objects one wishes to touch. A stench of blood and shame attached to them. They should all be pulped."

But to understand Mann's statement, the book's previous paragraph described Fallada's compromising as follows:

"Fallada made more and more concessions eventually allowing Goebbels to script the ending of his novel Iron Gustav, (Iron Gustav: A Berlin Family Chronicle) which depicted the hardships of life during the past world war. Fallada saw this as a prudent concession. "I do not like grand gestures," he wrote; "being slaughtered before the tyrant's throne, senselessly, to the benefit of no one and to the detriment of my children, that is not my way."
He recognized that his various capitulations took a toll on his writing, He wrote . . . "I cannot act as I want to - if I want to stay alive. And so a fool gives less than he has."

i would note that Fallada wrote Little Man, What Now? before the Nazi's started overseeing book publishing. His other famous book Alone in Berlin aka in USA as Every Man Dies Alone was published in 1947, 2 years after the end of WWII. So no capitulations were made when writing those 2 novels.

Writer capitulations were also made in the Soviet Union, as with Vasily Grossman's Stalingrad, the predecessor to his Life and Fate. Important novels can still be written under these constraints.

That's really interesting, I understand that it may not be exactly as the author intended but it must take a lot of guts to even begin to write novels like this under such regimes. I'm reading Stalingrad currently and I wasn't aware of this and thought that it wasn't published until much later. I wonder how these works would have been originally? I wonder if any of the original drafts exist?
I am about a third of the way through Alone in Berlin and I would be interested to read Little Man, What Now? to see if there are any marked differences in the experiences the characters go through.
I'm enjoying alone in Berlin so far, I didn't know much about this going into it and was expecting a lot more war, but it's much more of a thriller than I was expecting and it's got me hooked.