Book description
I stare at the coffee I poured myself, and I think: caffeine is a
poison that stimulates the heart. There are plenty of instances of
people killing themselves with coffee, hundreds and thousands of them.
Caffeine is a deadly poison, maybe almost as deadly as morphine. Why
didn t it ever occur to me before: coffee is my friend! Drawing on Hans
Fallada s own history of addiction, these two stories and are written
with a remarkable, tough, spartan clarity. As a man desperately,
haplessly tries to get enough morphine to make it through the day and a
drunk embezzler struggles to get himself arrested, they are at one
second crushing, the next darkly comic. This book includes A Short
Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism and Three Years of Life. Hans
Fallada was one of the best-known German writers of the twentieth
century. Born on 21 July 1893 in Greifswald as Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf
Ditzen, he took his pen name from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. His most
famous works include the novels Alone in Berlin, Little Man, What Now?
and The Drinker. Fallada died from an overdose of morphine on 5 February
1947 in Berlin.
