Every Man Dies Alone [Paperback]

 

 

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I took a chance on this book after seeing it mentioned in a recent Wall Street Journal Magazine I picked up by chance. The concept intrigued me and so I hunted it down. Initially I was a bit put off by the almost 600 pages in hardback form (I read when I travel and so I like my books to be portable!)

A few minutes reading the first couple of pages in the bookstore and I was hooked. Not only is the style so completely engaging, the pace - in which the various inter-weaving tales of ordinary Berliners is told over a backdrop of one of the most disturbing times in world history - made it hard to put the book down. As it happened, I read it from cover to cover in about 4 sessions over as many days while on vacation. It wasn't until I read the afterword and the other supplementary sections at the end of the main novel that I realized the story was based on the true lives of a "working-class couple living in Berlin" (Otto & Elise Hampel). They undertook a silent 3 year anti-Nazi propaganda campaign by writing simple statements urging civil disobedience and sabotage on postcards and leaving them in noticeable places around Berlin. Their efforts kept the Berlin police and Gestapo baffled and enraged the whole time.

"Every Man Dies Alone" turns out to be a masterpiece of a novel based on that true story, while also exploring the lives of many people - family, friends and strangers - that come into contact with the two protagonists over that 3 year period. It's a real roller-coaster read. I just couldn't help thinking that because this novel was written just over a year after the end of the war, the many examples of what life was like in wartime Berlin, and the way people behaved (treachery/loyalty, cowardice/bravery, cruelty/kindness, blackmail/generosity, suspicion/trust, etc.) all came from the mind of the author who lived there, then. It really came across to me that the detail in this novel didn't come from the vivid imagination of a "professional author", but the mind of someone who was describing what he knew about the way people thought and behaved at that time.

Hans Fallada (Rudolf Ditzen) achieved a most unimaginable feat to write this all in just 24 straight days! And a special "thank you" to Michael Hofmann - the translator - who most likely took more than 24 days to turn the original German into such a wonderful read in English!

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.

This is an extraordinary book. I always wondered what the daily life could have been in Nazi Germany during the war. This novel was written by a well known German writer who survived the Hitler regime and its collapse. It was written just after the end of the war and describes with chilling realism, but also with a deep sense of humanity, what life was like in Berlin during those years. The book tells the true story of an old German couple, the Quangels who, after the death of their son, try to resist the Nazis. They drop anti Nazi cards over Berlin until the Gestapo catches them and they meet their fate. But around this plot, all kinds of characters revolve: police and Gestapo officers, party thugs, small time crooks, and a few people who try to remain decent in a world of violence and fear.
This is a thriller but a lot more than a thriller; it is a description of a society dominated by violence where it required a lot of courage to remain human. I cannot understand why it took so long for this book to be translated in English. With Vassili Grossman's "Life and Fate" this is one of the very few great novels inspired by World War II. To quote Primo Levi: "The greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis".

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5.0 out of 5 stars True portraits of wartime bleakness and brutality
Not only is this novel based on the actions of a Berlin couple who naively dropped off self-authored anti-Nazi postcards in public building all over Berlin, but it is grounded in... Read more

Published 10 months ago by S Svendsen

2.0 out of 5 stars A good backstory does not a good novel make
Every Man Dies Alone comes in a new, and very good, translation by Michael Hoffman (disastrously retitled Alone In Berlin in Britain). Read more

Published 23 months ago by Philippe Ranger

5.0 out of 5 stars brilliant
Having been brought up in working class England during and after the war, it was refreshing to read a story portraying such courage and fortitude of ordinary German citizens... Read more

Published on Dec 10 2009 by jack baker

5.0 out of 5 stars A Story That Takes You Into The Minds Of The Characters
Hans Fallada has twisted knots and threads of paranoia together to portray the dense complexities of wartime Berlin. Read more

Published on Nov 13 2009 by J. Peters

5.0 out of 5 stars Every Man Dies Alone
This book gives a strong account of how life in Nazi Germany was, and how difficult it was to mount any counter offensive against the State and its objectives. Read more

Published on Sep 20 2009 by Mark Arneson

1.0 out of 5 stars Long-winded and lacks emotion
This negative review will probably not win any positve helpful votes (readers tend to indicate the review is not helpful if it is a negative one;) however, it is far more... Read more

Published on Sep 10 2009 by The Mad Hatter

5.0 out of 5 stars Two Small People One Giant Act
The reviewers have said that this book was 'one of the best novels about the Nazi resistance'. From that I expected it to be a book about resistance fighters, it was not. Read more

Published on May 26 2009 by Dave and Joe

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