A model prisoner’s release into society triggers an inevitable downfall in this novel by an influential twentieth-century German author. 
 
For Willi Kufult, prison life means staying out of trouble, keeping his cell clean, snagging a precious piece of tobacco, and dreaming of the day of his release.

Then he gets out.

As Willi tries to make a new life for himself in Hamburg, finding a job and even love, he still cannot escape his past. Gradually he becomes sucked into a world of drink, desperation, and deceit—and, with one terrible act, he is ensnared in a noose of his own making.
 
Hans Fallada, whose influential works include Alone in Berlin and The Drinker, brilliantly crafts a dark and moving story— describing a seedy criminal underworld of shabby lives and violent deeds, and showing how our actions always catch up with us. Yet Once a Jailbird remains a novel that is “lit by love, the love of truth and love of humanity; it has the courage to look things in the eye, and to sketch them exactly as they were” (Hermann Hesse).