But in all of the history of the written word, probably no one has topped the sheer insanity of ...

Fun fact: All writers are crazy, to some degree. There is a reason for it -- actually making it through a novel almost requires it. If you love to read, then you're continually benefitting from other people's craziness.

6 Writing a Coded Novel Mocking the Nazis (While in a Nazi Prison)

Getty

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Hans Fallada is the all-time poster boy for writers who just didn't give a shit. By the age of 50, he was a full-blown criminal lunatic, drifting in and out of prisons and insane asylums. He was a morphine addict, a womanizer and an alcoholic, all while being one of the most celebrated German authors of the 1930s and '40s. And true to his nature, while other artists were fleeing Germany at the outbreak of the war, Fallada stayed behind, despite openly despising the Nazis. How could he resist the urge to mess with one of the most murderous regimes in history?

felix-bloch-erben.de

"Is 'deutschebags' hyphenated?"

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

So, in 1944, Fallada was put in a Nazi prison/asylum for the criminally insane for the attempted murder of his ex-wife (classic Hans). To obtain writing materials and to survive an incarceration that was generally seen as a death sentence, Fallada told Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels that he wanted to write an anti-Semitic novel. However, Fallada had no intention of doing any such thing.

What he actually wrote, under the guards' watchful eyes and in constant fear of discovery, were three encrypted books in a single notebook so densely coded that they weren't deciphered until long after his death.

criticsatlarge.ca

"I plan ahead."

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

One of these books was the much acclaimed The Drinker, a dark semi-autobiographical novel depicting addiction, crime and homosexuality in a way not quite in line with Nazi literary policy. Another book was a collection of children's stories. Both books were written in tiny, condensed, almost indecipherable handwriting, but he kept the children's stories visible, to give the guards something simple and nonthreatening to see should they question what he was up to. But in between the lines of the short stories, upside down and backward from the end to the beginning, he wrote a frank, extremely anti-Nazi memoir of his life under National Socialist rule, entitled In Meinem Fremden Land.