Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben

In the organizer's words:

"It is an atmosphere of unwashed feet. It's the stink of the small town, that broth of gossip, greed, ambition and political interests," wrote Kurt Tucholsky about BAUERN, BONZEN UND BOMBEN, the novel that made Fallada famous in 1931.

A farmer is broke, it's crisis time again. Before that there was a crisis, an inflation, and before that there was war. Many things would have changed, he would have had to defend himself against foreign competition other than with protective tariffs, he would have had to work more intensively. After all, he wanted to invest when he took over the farm from his father. But how? The savings were gone and the prices were in the basement, and his father is now in a home, and that has to be paid for. His oxen are to be seized. But the enforcement officers meet with fierce resistance from the rural population. When the leaders are arrested, a bomb explodes in front of the government headquarters and the farmers' demonstration is bloodily broken up by the police. The peasant leaders are put on trial and the peasants impose an economic boycott on the town.

In his novel, Fallada draws on the experiences and knowledge he had gathered as a journalist for a provincial newspaper and as a reporter on the "Landvolkprozess" in Neumünster in Holstein. In an artistically condensed way, he creates a panorama of a society that has become a playing field for individual political and economic interests.