His ability to feel his way inside his characters and convey their hopes and fears, their successes and failures, produced realistic figures such as Otto Hackendahl in Iron Gustav, Willi Kufalt in Once a Jailbird and Johannes Pinneberg in Little Man,What Now?. This, his great strength, was also a weakness, for he was unable to rise above his emotional involvement – in his characters, in his attitude to politics as well as in many aspects of his day-to-day life – to develop an analytical or philosophical standpoint. His 1944 Prison Diary leaves no doubt about his hatred of the Nazi regime but it was an instinctive hatred, not one based on a political philosophy. And this left him defenceless against the bully-boy tactics of Joseph Goebbels. He spent August 1938 carrying out Goebbels’s instructions: ‘this month […] is marked in black in my diary. The world filled me with loathing, but I loathed myself even more for what I was doing.’

Fallada did the minimum necessary to meet Goebbels’s demands. There is no detailed account of the rise of the Nazi Party or the nature of Party meetings, nor is there a celebration of the Party’s much-vaunted achievements. In fact, Party activities are reduced to folding leaflets and getting involved in street brawls. There is no discussion of Party policy apart from Heinz Hackendahl’s question about anti-Semitism, which is left unanswered.

In order to prepare the ground for first Heinz’s and then Gustav’s Party membership, Fallada added a small amount of material in Chapters Four, Five, Six and Seven in which he underscores the injustices suffered by Germany in the aftermath of the First World War and sharply criticizes the role of the Communists in the November Revolution. The first major addition is the insertion at the end of Chapter Seven of three new sections that explain Heinz’s reasons for joining the Nazi Party: his unemployment (which leads to difficulties in his marriage), his meeting with a former comrade of Otto’s (who is a Party member) and the feeling of comradeship and the sense of purpose that Party membership brings. As a member of the Party, Heinz ‘becomes a human being and a real man again’. The additions in Chapter Eight pave the way for Gustav to become a Nazi and the new Chapter Nine describes the death of Gustav’s wife, Heinz and his family moving into the Hackendahl family home and Gustav’s decision to join the Party. The final line of the new conclusion is Gustav’s declaration to Heinz and his comrades: ‘Well, then: let me join you!’

Heinz and Gustav do not join the Nazi Party because they are convinced by Nazi Party policy. Heinz finds a reason for living and a sense of belonging in his political work (which remains unspecified); Gustav’s reasons for joining are rather unclear.

Fallada, who later described these changes as ‘stupid tinkering around’, expected that they would not satisfy Goebbels. But to his surprise the Minister approved the Iron Gustav project and work started on the film. However, it all came to a halt in October 1938 when the Party’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), declared that Fallada was not the kind of author that a German state could support.

Given Rosenberg’s views and the fact that the novel did not constitute a paean to National Socialism, it is not surprising that when the novel appeared at the end of November 1938 it received very negative reviews and was withdrawn from display in bookshop windows.

Despite the outbreak of war, Fallada’s English publishers, Putnam, bought the rights to Iron Gustav and the first English translation appeared in 1940.

The 1940 English edition was considerably shorter than the one that had appeared in Germany in 1938. In the first place, it was based on Fallada’s original manuscript and did not include Chapter Nine, the new sections in Chapter Seven and the other material that he had included at Goebbels’s behest. Moreover, Putnam removed an additional eight sections and undertook wide-ranging cuts across the board. They clearly wanted a much shorter book.

Content that was considered repetitive or not central to the main narrative was simply excised. This affected primarily the portrayal of the Hackendahl children: the account of Sophie’s application to volunteer for nursing at the Front (Two, X), Erich’s visit to Dr Meier (Two, XIV), Otto’s experience of Lille (Three, VII) are all simply omitted. A further three sections relating to Heinz are also cut: his visit with Irma to Tutti and Eva (Four, IX), his row with Tutti (Six, XIII) and his visit to his former teacher and mentor, Professor Degener (Seven, XII). Even Chapter Two, section VIII, which describes Gustav’s walk with Heinz and the incident with the spies on the day he handed over his horses for the war effort, does not appear in the 1940 English translation.

Besides deleting whole sections, the editor removed much inner monologue and descriptions of characters’ thoughts and feelings, such as the account in Chapter Six, section IV of Gustav’s reaction on hearing that his grandsons, whom he has never met, prefer to play with coaches and horses rather than with cars. Key scenes that give particular insights into character motivation and plot development are also omitted. A good example is the conversation between Otto and his mother in Chapter One, section XII, in which they consider whether to release Erich from the cellar. Here Otto’s character is given depth and the reasons for the decision to break the locks on the cellar doors are provided – a decision that sets Erich on a path of criminality that ultimately leads to his being arrested for treason.

Putnam’s editor in 1940 had little time for Fallada’s detailed and often humorous accounts of everyday life, such as the conversations in the queue for rations (Three, II) or in the waiting room of the doctor’s surgery (Three, XV) during the First World War.

The cumulative effect of these changes was to produce characters that are much less complex and a novel that lacks the colour and vividness of Fallada’s original work.

The final set of cuts in the 1940 edition relates to passages dealing with the political and historical background to the events portrayed in the novel. Perhaps the editor took the view that English readers would not be interested in detailed descriptions of recent German history. However, it is likely that the context in which the novel was published also had a considerable bearing on these cuts. The decision to omit Chapter Five, section XVI, which deals with the Treaty of Versailles, and drastically to reduce the account of the occupation of the Ruhr in Chapter Six can be ascribed to the sensitivity of these issues in Britain at the time.

Indeed, Putnam’s decision to publish a contemporary German novel by an author still living in Germany in 1940 is unique in British publishing. It was, of course, Putnam that had arranged for Fallada and his family to leave Germany in the autumn of 1938 and it is possible that the original plan was to publish a new Fallada translation to coincide with the author’s arrival in London and to provide some financial support for his new life in exile. However, Fallada could not bring himself to leave Germany.