Hans Fallada „Wizzel Kien“, „Old Heart Goes A-Journeying“

• „Wizzel Kien“, 1935
• „Old Heart Goes A-Journeying “, 1936
• Rowohlt-Verlag
• book jacket Heinz Kiwitz

After the chastening official reactions to his novels “Who Once Eats Out of the Tin Bowl” and “Once We Had a Child,” severe hostility and the experience of being incarcerated by the SA for twelve years, the social critic Fallada initially went into internal emigration. Stories such as “Tales From a Town Chronicler who Fled to the Country” (1935), the fragment “Wizzel Kien – The Fool of Schalkemaren” or the novel “Old Heart Goes A-Journeying” are evidence of this. Fallada considered leaving Germany but could not bring himself to do it.

On 17^th June 1934 he wrote to his friend Johannes Kagelmacher: “[…] I cannot move abroad like other heroes and write literature there, I am so deeply rooted here in northern Germany that I cannot think of any other environment where I could work.”