Hans Fallada novel, Nightmare in Berlin, gets first English translation

Story of married couple contending with a devastated postwar Berlin follows runaway success of Alone in Berlin

Hans Fallada’s 1947 novel Alone in Berlin was the hit book of the summer six years ago, selling 300,000 copies and making a bestseller of an author who had been largely forgotten. Now the late German author’s Nightmare in Berlin, an autobiographical novel beginning on the day the war ends, is to be published in English for the first time.

Released in German as Der Alpdruck (“The Nightmare”) in 1947, the year of Fallada’s death, the novel is the only book other than Alone in Berlin to have been written by the author in the post-war period. It tells of a man, Dr Doll, and his wife, who are taking shelter in the German countryside, haunted by nightmarish images at night, when the Russians invade. They return to Berlin after the end of the war, and attempt to resume their lives, but confronting the reality of life in the devastated city, they fall into morphine addiction, with each dose a “small death”.

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