Fallada was born in Greifswald, Germany, the child of a magistrate on his way to becoming a supreme court judge and a mother from a middle-class background, both of whom shared an enthusiasm for music, and to a lesser extent, literature.

Jenny Williams notes in her biography More Lives than One (1998), that Fallada's father would often read aloud to his children works by authors such as Shakespeare and Schiller.

In the wake of the war, Fallada worked at several farmhand and other agricultural jobs in order to support himself and finance his growing drug addiction.

Shortly after the publication of Anton und Gerda Fallada reported to prison in Greifswald to serve a 6-month sentence for stealing grain from his employer and selling it to support his drug habit.

Fallada married Anna "Suse" Issel in 1929 and maintained a string of respectable jobs in journalism, working for newspapers and eventually for the publisher of his novels, Rowohlt.

His breakthrough success came in 1930/1931 with A Small Circus (German: Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben; "Peasants, Bosses and Bombs") based on the history of the Rural People's Movement in Schleswig-Holstein and the farmers' protest and boycott of the town of Neumünster.

[4] Williams notes that Fallada's 1930/31 novel "..established [him] as a promising literary talent as well as an author not afraid to tackle controversial issues".

A German film of the book was made by Jewish producers at the end of 1932, and this earned Fallada closer attention by the rising Nazi Party.

On Easter Sunday, 1933, he was jailed by the Gestapo for "anti-Nazi activities" after one such denunciation, but despite a ransacking of his home no evidence was found and he was released a week later.

After Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Fallada had to make a few changes to the novel that removed anything that showed the Nazis in a bad light: a Sturmabteilung (SA) thug had to be turned into a soccer thug, for example, and the book stayed in print until 1941, after which war time paper shortages curtailed the printing of novels.

German reviewers agreed that the tone and the structure of the novel had not suffered from the cuts, but that the restored sections added 'colour and atmosphere,' such as a dream-like Robinson Crusoe island fantasy taking the main character away from his drab everyday life, a visit to the cinema to see a Charles Chaplin movie, and an evening at the Tanzpalast (Dance Palace).

Although his 1934 novel Wir hatten mal ein Kind (Once We Had a Child) met with initially positive reviews, the official Nazi publication Völkischer Beobachter disapproved.

[8] Meanwhile, the official campaign against Fallada was beginning to take a toll on the sales of his books, landing him in financial straits that precipitated another nervous breakdown in 1934.

In September 1935 Fallada was officially declared an "undesirable author", a designation that banned his work from being translated and published abroad.

According to Jenny Williams, Fallada had actually packed his bags and loaded them into the car when he told his wife he wanted to take one more walk around their smallholding.

On multiple occasions neighbors reported his supposed drug addiction to authorities, threatening to reveal his history of psychological disturbances, a dangerous record indeed under the Nazi regime.

[14] Finding himself incarcerated in a Nazi insane asylum, he used this project as a pretext for obtaining paper and writing materials, saying he had an assignment to fulfill for Goebbels's office.

But rather than writing the anti-Jewish novel, Fallada used his allotment of paper to write — in a dense, overlapping script that served to encode the text — the novel The Drinker (Der Trinker), a deeply critical autobiographical account of life under the Nazis, and a short diary In meinem fremden Land (A Stranger in My Own Country).

Losch's addiction to morphine appears to have been even worse than Fallada's, and her constantly mounting debts were an additional source of concern.

Fallada wrote Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Every Man Dies Alone) between September and November 1946 (shortly before his death), whilst in a mental institution.

At the time of Fallada's death in February 1947, aged 53, from a weakened heart from years of addiction to morphine, alcohol and other drugs, he had recently completed Every Man Dies Alone, an anti-fascist novel based on the true story of a German couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, who were executed for producing and distributing anti-Nazi material in Berlin during the war.

After Fallada's death, because of possible neglect and continuing addiction on the part of his second wife and sole heir, many of his unpublished works were lost or sold.

[19] Other German writers who had quit the country when Hitler rose to power felt disgust for those such as Fallada who had remained, compromising their work under the Nazi regime.

In popular culture "Hans Fallada" was one of the protagonists of Colin Wilson's 1976 novel, "The Space Vampires," turned into a major fim, "Lifeforce" in 1985.