Hans Fallada: Every Man Dies Alone

The other day we strolled on Columbus Avenue, rummaging through all the books at one of the street book dealers and my heart stopped when I saw the name of the author, Hans Fallada. Now this is a long time when I saw that name last, maybe I was 8 or 10 years old, when I read the book, "Kleiner Mann Was Nun?" (Little Man What Now?). I remember this book as one that I could not stop reading, but I don't remember where it came from, or who gave it to me (there were not many books around then!). I probably swapped it with somebody in school. Now here it was in English, I had no idea that his books were translated, no idea that he was a very reputed writer and all his book dealt with common people and Nazism. I also was not aware about his life. In a duel he had killed somebody very early in his life and went to prison for this, he became addicted to alcoholism and drugs. His father was a judge and his mother from a middle class background and they lived in Berlin. To get away from his addiction, Fallada worked as a farm hand in the country. Later married, he maintained a string of respectable jobs in journalism, working for newspapers and eventually for his publisher, Rowohlt. "Kleiner Mann..." was a huge success, a movie was made from it (1932) by Jewish producers,  it was translated into English and apparently became also a bestseller in the US.  Other famous books of his: Wolf Among Wolfes in 1937. But all was overshadowed by the rising of the Nazi Party. He was declared an "undesirable author", and wrote children stories and non-political stories to make money. Because of his love of  Germany he resisted from immigration. In 1943 his publisher Rowohlt fled the country and he again turned to alcohol and drugs among other things. Finding himself incarcerated in a Nazi insane asylum it was suggested that he writes an anti-Jewish novel. But he wrote The Drinker, a deeply critical autobiographical account of life under the Nazis, but he was not caught. He was released in December when the Nazi government began to crumble. He remarried again and shortly after the Soviets invaded he once again turned to drugs with his new wife  and when he died in 1947 the book Every Man Dies Alone had recently been completed, a true, anti-fascist novel of a German couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, who distributed anti-fascist  materials in Berlin and were executed.  Fallada died weeks before publication of this book. Altogether 10 Fallada noels have been translated into English. His pen name Fallada was taken from a Grimm's Fairy Tale Story. At the end there are several copies of the Gestapo files on which Fallada based his story in 1945. The book was completed in 24 days!


The story is of an ordinary German couple, quiet, cautious and middle-aged. Their small act of resistance begins after they learned of their son's death in the war. They decide to leave postcards in various locations around Berlin encouraging the German citizens to resist the German regime. Main characters are  Otto and Anna Quangel and the desperate Gestapo inspector charged with stopping them. It also shows how other ordinary citizens are dealing with the ethical issues of living in Nazi Germany during the war, and how some are taking advantage of the reign of fear and making a living as informants and blackmailers. It is the memory not only of the Quangel's protest, but also of many other protests which are perhaps not entirely in vain?

It is a horrifying immense story, impossible to put  down. The chapters are short, there are many different well defined and varied characters who all live in a building that also houses a timid Jewish grandmother, a bookish judge, a mail carrier, housekeepers, and a bestial Nazi family. The head line of each chapter is always short and descriptive, almost childish, a short line explaining the next chapter, for instance: Fear and Terror, or The First Card is Written, or Six Months Later: The Quangels. 


Part of what's so fascinating about Every Man Dies Alone is that this is not a story of Jews and Nazis, but of normal German citizens.  Of the writing and distribution of the 285 postcards and 8 letters dropped by Otto and Anna Quangel around Berlin, 267 of them found their way into the hands of the Gestapo quite quickly. They were almost all immediately turned over to the authorities by people too terrified by the Nazi regime to risk doing otherwise.