Damaged and desperate, but still dedicated A Stranger in My Own Country: The 1944 Prison Diary. By Hans Fallada. Translated by Allan Blunden. Polity; 267 pages; $25. Buy from Amazon.comGERMAN intellectuals in the 1930s faced a painful choice between exile and danger. Hans Fallada chose to stay. Even as war was looming, after years of harassment and humiliation, he turned down an offer of life abroad for himself, his wife and his three young children. He loved Germany too much to leave it. “What kind of German would I be if I had slunk away to a life of ease in my country’s hour of affliction and ignominy?” he wrote.Those words were scribbled in a psychiatric prison in 1944, in tiny and all but illegible handwriting in a secret diary. The result is one of the most powerful accounts of life in the Third Reich. It was published in German only in 2009 thanks to the extraordinary editing skills of Jenny Williams and Sabine Lange, who deciphered the text, unravelled the deliberately confusing structure, and...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21637350-life-third-reich-english-last-right-write?fsrc=rss%7Cbar
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