Every Man Dies Alone by Hans
Fallada
Terrific Read!
The greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis.-
Primo Levi
This never-before-translated masterpiece-by a heroic best-selling writer
who saw his life crumble when he wouldnt join the Nazi Party-is based on
a true story.
It presents a richly detailed portrait of life in Berlin under the Nazis and tells
the sweeping saga of one working-class couple who decides to take a
stand when their only son is killed at the front. With nothing but their grief
and each other against the awesome power of the Reich, they launch a
simple, clandestine resistance campaign that soon has an enraged
Gestapo on their trail, and a world of terrified neighbors and cynical
snitches ready to turn them in.

In the end, its more than an edge-of-your-seat thriller, more than a moving
romance, even more than literature of the highest order-its a deeply stirring
story of two people standing up for whats right, and each other.
Hans Fallada was one of Germanys best-selling authors-ranking with
Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse-prior to the rise of the Nazis. But while
those writers fled Germany, Fallada stayed. Refusing to join the Nazi
Party, he suffered numerous difficulties, including incarceration in an
insane asylum. After the war, he wrote Every Man Dies Alone based on an
actual Gestapo file. He died just before its publication in 1947.
Personal Review: Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada
It is difficult to imagine the impact of Hans Fallada's novel on his German
contemporaries in 1947. In the years immediately following World War II,
hardly any fiction authors who had remained in the country throughout the
Nazi regime were even considering the raw topics of the very recent past
because they were more concerned with the shaping of the "new"
Germany. Yet Fallada, in his characteristic way of observing and writing
about the "little people" *), for which he had been widely read before the
war, was bursting with everyday stories of the struggles of working class
people of the early forties. For him, writing was like an addiction that
enabled him to pen the novel in a mere 24 days.
In the fall of 1945, the author came upon a thin Gestapo file on the case of
an elderly working class couple and their private futile attempt at stirring
resistance against the regime. To honour their memory and to ensure that
their suffering was not in vain, Fallada placed Anna and Otto Quangel, as
he called them, into the centre of his novel about the struggle for survival
of the "little people" during the early war years. He surrounded his heroes
with a small, yet diverse and representative group of Berliners, centred
around an apartment block in Berlin's working class north. Creating
believable characters and vivid scenarios, he conveyed a series of reality
snapshots of the social and political conditions of the time. There was the
misery of poverty and the constant fear of being denounced, conscripted to
the army or sent to a concentration camp for not obeying the orders that
controlled people's daily lives. Having experienced much of this himself,
Fallada also exposed the internal workings and competing forces within
the regular police force, the Gestapo and SS, the judiciary and the prison
system.
Fallada writes in the language of his characters using different levels of
Berliner dialect to reflect their social standing and level of education. While
this makes for a very lively dialogue, it can at times seem long winded and
cumbersome. Yet, it represents the spirit of the time exquisitely. With the
flow of the story's events, the reader is pulled into a combination of intense
action and drama alternating with detailed descriptions. At times it reads
like a thriller; at others it is a series quiet reflections by his main characters

or detached observations by the narrator. Fallada's depiction of the
evolving and deepening relationship between the couple, Anna and Otto,is
probably one of the most moving aspect of the story; the description of the
trial in contrast is the most disturbing.
While in prison Otto reflects that everyone, including himself, function as
the nuts and bolts of the brutal system, as the smaller or larger wheels that
make the machine work. Some just go with the flow; others try to benefit
and take advantage of it. Some are natural brutes or obsessed with power;
only a few are willing to risk acting like the grit that clogs the machine and
remain, despite the numerous pressures, "decent human beings".
More than sixty years later, Fallada's novel has not lost its relevance: it
opens a unique window on the living conditions of ordinary people during
the early 1940s. It is also an authentic record of the political and social
panorama of those brutal times. For me it has answered questions that
have lingered since my youth and I wish I had read the book decades ago.
I read the novel in German and while I admire Hoffman's outstanding in
translations in general, I believe it is close to impossible to convey the
nuances of language of this story in English or any other language. This
linguistic challenge notwithstanding the now translated work is an
important and fascinating historical record. [Friederike Knabe]
*) Little Man, What Now? being his best known novel.
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