Penknife

On April 8th, 1943 Otto and Elise Hampel, a working class couple from Berlin, are guillotined for leaving hundreds of postcards containing anti-Nazi messages in public places throughout the city. They, and their small everyday acts of futile resistance, are in many ways the opposite of Hans Fallada who continues to do just enough to appease the Nazi’s in order to survive under their regime. If anything he sees the Hampel’s deaths as proof that his capitulations to Nazi demands were the right course. But after the Third Reich falls and Fallada is forced to try to survive in bombed-out Berlin without money or food and with a new wife (who is also hopelessly addicted to morphine) it's the Hampels’ story that he turns to to write the first novel about domestic resistance to the Nazi’s. He writes the 550 page novel in 24 days. It’s an absolute masterpiece, and it kills him…

Fallada hunkers down on his farm where he plans to wait out the war writing and tending to his vegetable garden in sobriety. But the bomber jets buzzing overhead and the Nazi censors who only allow him to publish idyllic “memoirs” of his country life prove too much for him. He retreats to the bottle and descends into an alcoholic madness in which he brandishes a gun at his now ex-wife Suze.  The incident lands him in a Nazi psychiatric hospital which he chronicles in a  novel entitled The Drinker. He also writes a memoir about his life in the Third Reich with the belief that both the war and the nightmare he’s been living in since the Nazi’s took power will soon be over. He’s right about the first part, but not the second…  

In 1932 Hans Fallada releases his big hit, Little Man, What Now? a somewhat autobiographical novel about a young middle-class family trying to survive in an age of mass unemployment and hyperinflation. As The novel can be read as an indictment of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi’s spare it when they take power and begin mass book burnings in April 1933. But to stay in print Fallada agrees to change the novel’s highly unsympathetic Nazi character into a “footballer.” In his next novel, Once a Jailbird, he bends to pressure to write a forward saying that the inhumane justice system described in the novel is now, thankfully, a thing of the past - thanks to the Nazi’s. Doubly ironic because at the time he writes this forward, he’s already been a Nazi prisoner and will most definitely be one again…

After spending less than two years in a posh sanatorium as punishment for the death of his friend, Fallada is released. Though he has few skills apart from writing and a murder charge on his record, the beginning of WWI means that there’s plenty of work for those who stay home. Fallada gets a job in an agricultural estate where he becomes an expert at working with tubers. He also works hard to become an expert cognac drinker, solicitor of sex and morphine user. These things cost money and in order to finance his budding addictions he steals from the estate and ends up in jail. Then he gets out, steals again and goes back. The discipline and routine of prison is good for Hans and he spends his years of incarceration honing his writing skills…

Early morning October 17, 1911. Two teenagers climb a hill outside of Leipzig, Germany with the intention of killing each other in a duel. Rudolph Ditzen fires his gun and hits his mark but his friend Hans misses. Ditzen turns the gun on himself but survives and stumbles down the hill covered in blood. Years later Rudolph Ditzen will publish his first novel under the pseudonym Hans Fallada. By then he’d already killed a man, attempted to kill himself a number of times and been institutionalized nearly as many. His new name will go on to acquire just as much ignominy as the old one: multiple jail stints for theft and embezzlement, another attempted murder charge, and constant visits to sanatoriums for alcohol and morphine addiction. But Hans Fallada will also be responsible for publishing some of the greatest novels about life in Germany before, during and after the Second World War.   

In 2019 the Leicester City Council granted preliminary approval to place a statue of Joe Orton in the city’s cultural quarter. With the help of celebrities such as Ian McKellen, Stephen Fry and Alec Baldwin, the Joe Orton Statue Appeal raised over ₤100,000 in a short time. But in 2020 statues of problematic historical figures were toppled throughout England and Leicester found itself embroiled in a controversy over whether or not to remove a statue of accused racist, and sexual predator Mahatma Gandhi. The Gandhi statue was spared, but when word got out that Joe Orton was a sex tourist who made several trips to Morocco to sleep with pubescent boys, a debate erupted in the Leicester City Council. In this final episode of Season 2 we report what’s going on in Leicester and contemplate the question: Must one have been ethically pure to be publicly commemorated in metal or stone?

The story doesn’t end with Joe and Kenneth’s deaths. In fact, the most shocking part comes here: Joe Orton was a pederast. Despite the fact that Orton’s story has been told numerous times in a biography, documentaries and a biopic, and that the diaries are chockfull of what today would be called the sexual exploitation or assault of pubescent boys, this aspect of his life has always been obscured. Until now…Listener discretion is advised. 

Kenneth Halliwell’s mental health is deteriorating.  After he and Joe return from Tangier in July of 67, a producer friend of Joe’s calls Kenneth a “middle-aged nonentity” to his face. This stings particularly because after failing as an actor, a writer and finally as a collage artist, Kenneth can’t really deny it.  His value, he believes, is in his contributions to Joe’s career, but he’s felt for some time now that he’s losing Joe. And that’s not something he’ll be able to stand. On August 9th, 1967, in a desperate effort to ensure that Joe never leaves him, Kenneth uses a hammer to bludgeon Joe to death before swallowing a fistful of pills…

In December 1966, Joe Orton begins keeping a diary that he maintains for the final eight months of his life.  Along with plenty of cottaging in public lavatories the diaries chronicle the death of his mother, the success of Loot, and the writing of both a film for the Beatles and his final masterpiece, What the Butler Saw. They also cover his sex tourism trips to North Africa and the breakdown of his relationship with Kenneth Halliwell. At one point in while Tangier, feeling great about his fame, his pocketbook and his sex life, Orton worries that he and Kenneth will soon be struck down by some disaster because they are, perhaps, too happy… 

Beginning in 1964, conservative England is shocked and outraged by Joe Orton’s work.  In his radio play The Ruffian on the Stair and then in his stage plays Entertaining Mr. Sloane and Loot, Orton attacks church, state and family and taunts his enemies by putting sexual ambiguous characters on stage. For some of the first times ever, gays in the theater can’’t be stereotyped as effeminate queens or tragic cases. And while this brings Joe more hatred and censorship from the right, another group of people, namely those who’re putting the swing into swinging London and leading England through a cultural revolution, absolutely adore him. Orton sells the screen rights to Loot for a near record-breaking £100,000 and 1967 begins with Joe Orton on top of the world…