Experienced, learned, and invented. As impressively open and suggestive as in no other literary text, Fallada tells of the constraints of a morphine addict: he knew the euphoria of the high and the disaster that followed from personal experience. More or less directly, he borrowed the themes of all eight stories in this book from his own biography: his time in prison and especially his experiences with his own children. "Everything in my life ends in a book." Hans Fallada.