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Penknife

A podcast about writers who may or may not have written about crime, but who definitely committed it.

03/10/2023

All good things must come to an end - even the third season of !

While we kiss our dear Hans Fallada goodbye, please meet Penknife’s favourite cats - Babooshka and Covfefe - pictured here laying on Corey’s desk, the very place where Season Three was written and edited, under the watchful eye of our beloved Patricia Highsmith.

Thank you for listening!

12/09/2023

🎙Episode 5 delves into Hans Fallada's fascinating post-war novel, 'The Nightmare in Berlin'.

🖋 Written during his voluntary committal at a medical clinic, the act of writing the novel was Fallada's attempt at recovery from addiction.

📖 'The Nightmare in Berlin' is an extraordinary novel that provides a unique perspective of post-war Berlin from a German who stayed. And believe us, it's well worth reading.

📚 Published by and translated by Allan Blunden

🎧 Listen to this week's episode now. Available wherever you get your podcasts!

11/09/2023

Episode 5: The Nightmare

On April 8th, 1943 Otto and Elise Hampel, a working class couple from Berlin, are guillotined for leaving hundreds of postcards containing anti-N**i messages in public places throughout the city.

They, and their small everyday acts of futile resistance, are in many ways the opposite of Hans Fallada, who continues to do just enough to appease the N***s in order to survive under their regime. If anything, he sees the Hampel’s deaths as proof that his capitulations to N**i demands were the right course.

But after the Third Reich falls and Fallada is forced to try to survive in bombed-out Berlin without money or food and with a new wife (who is also hopelessly addicted to morphine), it's the Hampels’ story that he turns to in order to write the first novel about domestic resistance to the N***s. He writes the 550 page novel in 24 days - it’s an absolute masterpiece, and it kills him…

05/09/2023

Ever dreamed of moving to the country, clean up, have a family and be happy for ever after? Well, Hans Fallada definitely did, but it didn’t turn out so idyllic - hear all about it in…

Episode 4: Desperate Literature

Fallada hunkers down in his farm, where he plans to wait out the war writing and tending to his vegetable garden in sobriety. But the bomber jets buzzing overhead and the N**i censors, who only allow him to publish idyllic “memoirs” of his country life, prove too much for him. He retreats to the bottle and descends into an alcoholic madness in which he brandishes a gun at his now ex-wife Suze.

The incident lands him in a N**i psychiatric hospital, which he chronicles in a novel entitled The Drinker. He also writes a memoir about his life in the Third Reich, with the belief that both the war and the nightmare he’s been living in since the N***s took power will soon be over. He’s right about the first part, but not the second…

31/08/2023

Slide to see a small sample of some of our favourite covers of Fallada’s first few books.

Season three of Penknife, Little man, what now? The life and times of Hans Fallada is out now, wherever you find your podcasts.

29/08/2023

Out now wherever you get your podcasts!

Episode 3: All Men Are Cowards

In 1932, Hans Fallada releases his big hit, Little Man, What Now? a somewhat autobiographical novel about a young middle-class family trying to survive in an age of mass unemployment and hyperinflation.

As the novel can be read as an indictment of the Weimar Republic, the N***s spare it once they take power and begin mass book burnings in April 1933. But to stay in print, Fallada agrees to change the novel’s highly unsympathetic N**i character into a “footballer.”

In his next novel, Once a Jailbird, he bends to pressure to write a forward saying that the inhumane justice system described in the novel is now, thankfully, a thing of the past – thanks to the N***s. Doubly ironic, because at the time he writes this forward, he’s already been a N**i prisoner and will most definitely be one again…

14/08/2023

Penknife Season Three: Little Man, What Now? starts today.

Season 3 is a five-episode series that explores the life and times of Hans Fallada, a writer whochronicled life in Germany during WWI, the Weimar Republic, the rise of the N***s, WWII, andbombed-out postwar Berlin. He is arguably the only significant writer who stayed in Germanyduring the Third Reich. His detractors say he stayed because he was a N**i, and point to
concessions he made to N**i censors as proof. The truth though, is much messier. Andstranger. Hans Fallada was not a N**i but he was a criminal who shot and killed his friend in a
botched su***de pact and years later shot another gun while fighting with his ex-wife. He spenthis life lying, cheating and stealing to finance his morphine and alcohol addictions, and time and
time again, through regular visits to jails and sanatoriums, he lost everything. But he alwaysmade sure there was ink in his pen. With it, he bore witness to perhaps the most horrifyingcollective nightmare in human history…

14/08/2023

Season 3, Episode 1: Lucky Hans
Now available wherever you get your podcasts!

Early morning October 17 1911, Two teenagers climb a hill outside of Leipzig, Germany with the intention of killing each other in a duel. Rudolph Ditzen fires his gun and hits his mark but his friend Hans misses. Ditzen turns the gun on himself but survives and stumbles down the hill covered in blood. Years later Rudolph Ditzen will publish his first novel under the pseudonym Hans Fallada. By then he’d already killed a man, attempted to kill himself a number of times and been institutionalized nearly as many. His new name will go on to acquire just as much ignominy as the old one: multiple jail stints for theft and embezzlement, another attempted murder charge, and constant visits to sanatoriums for alcohol and morphine addiction. But Hans Fallada will also be responsible for publishing some of the greatest novels about life in Germany before, during and after the Second World War.

14/08/2023

Penknife Season 3
Little Man, What Now? The Life and Times of Hans Fallada
starts today!

Season 3 is a five-episode series that explores the life and times of Hans Fallada, a writer who chronicled life in Germany during WWI, the Weimar Republic, the rise of the N***s, WWII, and bombed-out postwar Berlin. He is arguably the only significant writer who stayed in Germany during the Third Reich. His detractors say he stayed because he was a N**i, and point to concessions he made to N**i censors as proof. The truth though, is much messier. And stranger. Hans Fallada was not a N**i but he was a criminal who shot and killed his friend in a botched su***de pact and years later shot another gun while fighting with his ex-wife. He spent his life lying, cheating and stealing to finance his morphine and alcohol addictions, and time and time again, through regular visits to jails and sanatoriums, he lost everything. But he always made sure there was ink in his pen. With it, he bore witness to perhaps the most horrifying collective nightmare in human history…

07/08/2023

Season three of , Little Man, What Now? The Life and Times of Hans Fallada begins August 14.

You can subscribe and listen to it wherever you get your podcasts.

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