Iron Gustav
Fallada HansThe novel went through a tortuous journey, with rewrites ordered by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief, which have been taken out of the new edition. It does not include, for example, an ending in which the main protagonist joins his son in becoming a member of the Nazi party.
In the introduction to the edition, Fallada's biographer Jenny Williams writes that when signing a 1937 contract for a story of "a German family" from 1914 to 1933, Fallada little suspected how much grief it would cause him.
Fallada refused to join the Nazi party and was denounced by neighbours for "anti-Nazi" sympathies. Goebbels made clear that if Fallada did not know what he thought of the Nazi Party, then the Nazi party would draw its own menacing conclusions. Succumbing to the pressure, Fallada added passages, making a son of Gustav a stormtrooper and showing that membership of the party made someone "a real man again".
In a 1946 letter he admitted that the changes were made from fear: "The guilt of every line I wrote then still weighs on me today." As it transpired, the book was still deemed to be insufficiently pro-Nazi and was removed from shops.