Hans Fallada achieved fame in the Weimar Republic with his classic novel of petite bourgeois economic despair - Kleiner Mann, was nun? - which was made into a Hollywood feature film. He excelled at depicting the struggles and dreams of the "little man" - the shopkeepers, clerks, and beat cops who later formed the backbone of the the Nazi movement. With Jeder stirbt für sich allein (1947) Fallada shows what became of these people under the Hitler dictatorship, and it is a gripping, nightmarish thriller of a novel. English readers are indeed fortunate that one of our best translators of German fiction - Michael Hofmann - released the English version (Every Man Dies Alone) earlier this year.
Jeder stirbt für sich allein is the story of a middle-age, taciturn factory worker and his wife, Otto and Anna Quangel, who summon the courage to commit an act of civil disobediance against the Nazi regime in wartime Berlin. The couple had never been politically active, nor had they thought much about what was happening to Germany under Hitler. They simply wanted to live their lives and be left alone in a kind of proletarian inner emigration. Things change whey they receive word that their son has been killed fighting in the east and Anna lashes out at her husband for his passivity: "Das habt ihr angerichtet mit euerm elenden Krieg, du und dein Führer!" (You did this with your miserable war - you and your Führer!) Otto comes to the realization that if he continues to remain passive he would be, in fact, complicit in the crimiminal enterprise of the regime, so he dreams up a very simple act of subversion: together with Anna he writes postcards with anti-Nazi messages and leaves them around Berlin. He believes that whoever reads these messages will be forced to reflect on what is happening, and then themselves take some kind of subversive action.
Quangel's belief in the basic decency of his fellow Germans is sadly misplaced. Fallada does a masterful job of portraying Berlin of 1940 as a gigantic cauldron of fear and savagery. Most of the peripheral characters we encounter are either cowardly informants who would not hesitate to turn on thier own family members if it might benefit them somehow or they are part of the apparatus of terror, willing to commit even murder - not out of any belief in National Socialist ideals, but simply to remain in the good graces of their superiors. VIrtually all the hundreds of postcards the Quangels leave around Berlin are delivered immediately to the Gestapo; there is no reflection on what is happening in Germany (except in one very surprising instance). Still, this harmless and absurd act of subversion sets the entire Nazi apparatus of terror into motion. The perpetrators must be caught and hanged.
The question that Fallada asks in Jeder stirbt für sich allein is 'how can one live with integrity in a time of terror?' The operative German word for Fallada is anständig - decent, or respectable. Most of the characters in the novel are not anständig. The prevailing sentiment is expressed by one of the informants: "Wer klein war, der musste sich fügen" (The little guy has to find a way to go along.) Nevertheless, even in this nightmare of wartime Berlin Fallada does show the possibility of being anständig- of living a life of decency, even without the courage of an Otto Quangel. Eva Kluge, the letter carrier, learns that her son has joined the SS and has committed atrocities in Poland. She leaves the Nazi party and leaves Berlin to work on a farm where she is able to build a new life for herself.
Jeder stirbt für sich allein is based on a true story. Fallada was given the Gestapo file on the case and wrote the six hundred-page novel in less than one month. There are some irritating moments: the narrator sometimes intrudes to tell the readers what is going to happen. But suspense carries the reader along, and many of the chapters - such as the courtroom scenes, where we see Nazi justice in its surreal absurdity, are brilliant. The American CIA could learn something from the long interrogation scenes: Fallada shows how counterproductive the SS officers are when they brutally beat detainees, and how effective the experienced Gestapo agents are with their psychological interrogation techniques.
This was Fallada's last and best work - a brutally honest novel that shows the utter depravity but also the quiet courage of human beings in extremis.
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