This collective volume interprets the texts of Fallada as an expression of the “ideology of life” which was typical for thebeginnings of themodern period (c. 1890?1955) ? thus differentiating itself distinctly from common analysis practice: The extreme conditions of the protagonists between emphatic and reduced life or the repeated “changes of life” within a biological life can be explained by this narrative structure and no longer need the recourse to autobiography, although it is true that here someone seems to have lived according to the modern model of living? as if it were literature.