At the end of the war, German author Hans Fallada was not
well. Throughout his life his mental state had been sketchy—as a youth he and a
friend had tried to commit suicide together by staging a duel with pistols—and
he had been locked up a number of times in jails and insane asylums for violence,
theft, and various addictions. The Nazi years and the war not did not improve
his mental health. When a Soviet cultural official found him in 1945, Fallada and
his wife had just been released from hospital, he for morphine addiction, she
for attempting suicide. Hoping to restore some purpose to Fallada’s life, the
official handed him a Gestapo file and suggested it might be turned into a
novel. The subjects were a middle-aged couple, the Hampels, simple working
people, the kind Fallada usually wrote about. For nearly two years they had
conducted an obscure campaign of protest against the Nazis, dropping postcards
in various places around Berlin with messages such as “Mother! The Führer has
murdered my son! Mother! The Führer will murder your sons, too, he will not
stop till he has brought sorrow to every home.” Fallada was not impressed; the
Hampels’ protest was so feeble, so ill-conceived, almost ridiculous in its
hopelessness. If the White Rose group from the university had not roused the
public with their vastly more articulate handbills, and if the elaborately
planned coup attempted by von Stauffenberg and other top army officers could
not succeed, what hope was there in the Hampels’ little postcards, with their
awkward penmanship and bad grammar, left in the stairwells of public buildings
in Berlin? Then for some reasaon Fallada had a change of heart, and he began
writing at break-neck speed, finishing the entire 500-page novel in 24 days. It
was, he told his family, “a truly great novel.”
On one level, Every
Man Dies Alone is a detective novel, a good one, with the fictional
Quangels trying to avoid capture by a Gestapo inspector assigned to catch them.
Initially they are motivated only by grief over the loss of their son in the
war, but their outrage soon expands until the postcards condemn the regime on
bigger issues, including the plight of the Jews. The Quangels may be
unsophisticated, but they are exceedingly cautious, so much so that their
ability to evade capture does not sit well with the Inspector’s superiors. The most
interesting character in the book is the Inspector, patiently and methodically
tracing their postcards with pins on a map, confident of finding the culprits
eventually and not much concerned with what his superiors think. Far from being
a Hollywood stereotype, he is simply a good cop, almost a gentleman,
kind-hearted up to a point, with no animus for the Quangels. In his mind he is working
as a professional, separate from politics. He doesn’t think much about what
goes on in the basement cells in Gestapo headquarters.
Fallada’s novels were usually about the German working
class. His Little Man, What Next? (1933),
about the struggles of a family during the Depression, had been a bestseller,
translated into English, made the Book of the Month in America, turned into a
Hollywood movie. So he had the skills to flesh out the Gestapo file with an
authentic milieu for the Quangels and interesting, lifelike secondary
characters. On a floor above the couple lives an old Jewish woman, nervously
awaiting her fate; her neighbours watch, split between those who would protect
her and those greedy for a chance to steal her possessions. (“The Jews still
have all their property,” thinks one, “They’re just hiding it from the Germans
they stole it from in the first place.”) On a floor below is a retired judge
pretending, but only pretending, to be an old scholar buried in his books. Also
in the building are a gambler and his prostitute wife, and a family of Nazis dominated,
because of his superior fanaticism, by the sixteen-year-old son. At the main doorway
is a snitch, stationed where he might overhear a word, a rumour, anything he
can peddle to the authorities. Especially memorable is the local letter carrier,
who imprudently resigns from the Nazi Party after seeing a photo of her son, an
SS officer on the Eastern front, holding a baby by the foot, about to smash it
against a car.
But it’s neither the characters nor the suspense story that
draws us to Every Man Dies Alone. We
turn to it to see what life was like for ordinary Germans under the Nazis, and
Fallada paints a chilling picture, a nightmare world of spies, denunciations,
betrayals, cruelty, an entire nation living in terror of its leaders.
Resistance, bravery, humanity are not extinguished, of course, but they flicker
briefly in the overwhelming gloom. Fallada knew what it was like to be
denounced by the Nazis; in 1935 he was officially declared an "undesirable
author," he was excoriated by the Nazi press, and his books were removed
from public libraries. But he was no hero and he also knew what it was like to
be frightened into silence, when he retreated for a time into writing harmless fairy
tales. And, sadly, he knew what it was like to be completely terrified and to
submit. When pressure was applied to him to add a pro-Nazi flourish to one of
his novels, he complied, because he’d been told of Goebbels’ remark that if
Fallada didn’t know what to think of the Nazi Party, then the Nazi Party would know
what to think of him. “The guilt of every line I wrote then still weighs on me
today,” he later wrote.
Yet the value of Every
Man Dies Alone goes beyond all this. In the midst of the detective story
and the social realism is something more impressive, an earnest meditation on
the question: When there is no hope of resisting evil, when it opposes you with
forces so overwhelming that you have no chance of success, is there any purpose
in standing against it? If so, what is that purpose? That’s what excited him
about the Gestapo file, and that’s what makes the novel so extraordinary.
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