Fallada's penultimate work, Der Alpdruck (Nightmare in Berlin) appeared in the autumn of 1947 but the German publisher's (Aufbau) warm recommendation and sustained international lobbying elicited only a handful of foreign language editions - in French, Norwegian, Italian and Serbo-Croat - and not in English.

Sixty years later posterity has come to a very different conclusion, at least with regards to Fallada's last work, Jeder stirbt fur sich allein (Alone in Berlin). This has now been acknowledged as Fallada's biggest international success. Primo Levi called Alone in Berlin "the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis". Fallada finished writing it just weeks before his death in February, 1947.

Set in Berlin at the height of the Second World War, the novel speaks about a modest, working class couple, Otto and Anna Quangel. When their son is killed in action in France, the couple start dropping anonymous anti-Nazi messages on postcards around the city.

The novel is filled with vividly drawn, all-too-flawed characters - the snivelling workshy character who gets caught up in a Gestapo plot, the ambitious Hitler Youth recruit contemptuous of his own father, the hard-working widow keeping her shop going amid the ruins of the city. It is a masterpiece.

This book, Nightmare in Berlin, is the book Fallada wrote just before Alone in Berlin. Like Alone in Berlin it did not appear in English before 2016. This is the book that Fallada was working on in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Nazi Germany, from February to August 1946 (for some of that time as a patient in various sanatoriums and hospitals) and which by his own account he needed to "get out of the way" first before he could tackle the subject matter of his next book.

He had already started to study the Gestapo files from which he drew the material for Alone in Berlin, but it was only after writing Nightmare in Berlin that he was able to turn these shocking and extraordinary documents into another novel.

Nightmare in Berlin picks up chronologically after Alone in Berlin. It begins on the day the war ends.

The first part is set in a country town where Dr Doll, a writer in his 50s, is living with his wife, Alma, who is in her 20s.

The last SS unit has fled and the Russians are expected any time. The townspeople are apprehensive, except Doll, who looks forward to deliverance from the Nazis.

Made mayor by the Russians, Doll uncovers the duplicity of ordinary Germans who threw in their lot with the Nazis.

Eventually, Doll and his wife suffer breakdowns and decide to return to Berlin.

It is a city they can't remember. The novel becomes a tale of survival in the city of ruins, a grinding round of obtaining the right documents in a world of corrupt bureaucrats, black marketeers and cheating neighbours.

Doll sees Germany as a moral failure, and symptomatically, he and his wife slide into drug addiction.

Yet miraculously signs of recovery appear - Doll is rescued by a publisher and the novel's ending is positive. He comes to believe that Europe, too, would endure and rise again.

There is a lot of autobiography here. Fallada, whose real name was Rudolf Ditzen, was 52 when he married the 22-year-old Ursula Lotsch in 1945. They left Berlin for the safety of Carwitz and Fallada was made mayor by the occupying Red Army. He and his wife, who had a history of morphine addiction, broke down and returned to Berlin.

Fallada's great success had been his 1932 novel Little Man, What Now? He also worked as a bookkeeper and twice went to prison for fraud. He was also treated for drug addiction.

His position under the Nazis was ambiguous - sometimes his work was censored and he was even imprisoned. But he was also sent on propaganda tours and in 1943 was made a major in the Reich Labour Service.