Battersby on WIlliams on Fallada

Great piece in yesterday's Irish Times on how author Jenny Williams discovered Rudolf Ditzen/Hans Falada.
Williams has written a biography on Fallada, titled, 'More lives than One'.

In his last letter to his mother, Ditzen/Fallada wrote this. It is spectactularly fine: "Some part of me has never been completely finished, something is missing with the result that I'm not a proper man, only a human being who has aged, an old grammar school boy ... I know I'm weak, but not bad, never bad. But that's no excuse. it's poor enough at 53 to have become nothing more than a weak man, to have learned so little from my mistakes."

How accurate. And then one is forced to think of the pompous utterings of so many, all those politicians and priests.