This Sweeping Saga of Love in Dangerous Times---the 1923 collapse of the German economy, when food and money shortages led to rioting in the streets and unemployed soldiers marauding through the countryside---is deemed by many to be Hans Fallada's greatest work. His publisher was inspired by its 1938 publication to such levels of both fearfulness and fearlessness of Nazi retribution that he told Fallada, "If this book destroys us, then at least we'll be destroyed for something that's worth it."<BR><BR>The book appears here in its first unabridged translation into English, based on a contemporaneous translation by Philip Owens that has been revised and restored in full by Thorsten Carstensen and Nicholas Jacobs. Carstensen also provides an afterword that discusses why the original version of the book was so heavily edited, and what made it, in the end, so stirringly defiant.<BR><BR>"His most ambitious novel...deeply moving...he has evoked more than one can bear in comfort, but not more than it is necessary to learn, to keep and to understand."---Alfred Kazin, The New York Times<BR><BR>"What other living German novelist shares with Fallada the power to grip the reader on the first page and hold him unremittingly through 1.100 more?"---Bayard Q. Morgan, World Literature Today (1938)