Reviews

Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada

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paulgoodwin's review

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challenging dark sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated

3.5

flashbangaspire's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character

3.0

paola_mobileread's review against another edition

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5.0

This is a beautiful book painting the lives of common people living through the terrible years of Nazi Germany, written just after the war by somebody who actually lived in lived through those years.

Fallada introduces us to carpenter Otto Quangel and his stay at home wife Anna in the first chapter, and we stay with these main protagonists for the whole book - but all around them many diverse specimens of humanity help paint what it was like. None of these characters is flat or stereotypical: even for the more unidimensional among them we do get to see how they perceive themselves and justify their own actions.

Some of the chapters are painful to go through: the Gestapo interrogations (especially those by inspector Laub), the trials of the People's Court are torturing. Some of these descriptions seem out of proportion, then you think that Fallada himself experienced interrogations and prison, and it gets more blood curling. As one would expect, we see depicted the struggle between the pure evil of Nazism and the fundamental decency of those who could simply not debase themselves, that could not be satisfied with trying to get by since nobody can win on his own. A stubborness in dignity, summarised in an exchange between Quangel and and Sr. Richard:

Would you rather live for an unjust cause than die for a just one? There is no choice—not for you, nor for me either. It’s because we are as we are that we have to go this way

In spite of this I find myself disagreeing with Geoff Wilkes in the afterword, when he writes that "whereas Hanna Aredt's Eichmann in Jerusalem (1936) dissects and analyzes "the banality of evil", Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone comprehends and honors the banality of good". True, some of the actions of passive resistance (which often translated in a death sentence) are born of a set of accidental circumstances and then metamorphose in stronger acts of defiance almost on their own, as if extra cogs thrown into a mechanism were somehow slotted into place. And yes, once these ordinary people cross the path of the Gestapo, nothing much can help them (as is the case of Enno Kluge, Trudel and Karl). But these people, who lived in absolute terror of putting a foot wrong unwittingly, were very aware of the terrible consequences of even the meekest act of resistance: crossing knowingly the threshold of the 'unlawful' required a great deal of courage.

Having read this book without knowing anything about Fallada, couple of times I found him heavy handed, excessive somehow in uderscoring the point just made: for instance, after a prisoner commits suicide while in the care of a priest

In consequence of this suicide, it was the prison chaplain, Friedrich Lorenz, who was suspended from duty, rather than the drunken doctor. Charges were laid against the priest. Because it was a crime and the abetting of a crime to enable a prisoner to put an end to his own life: only the state and its servants were supposed to have that prerogative.

This is clear enough, then Fallada feels the need to add

If a detective pistol-whips a man so badly that his skull is fractured, and if a drunken doctor allows the injured man to die, both are an example of due process. Whereas if a priest fails to hinder a suicide, if he allows a prisoner to exercise his or her will—that will is supposed to have been taken away—then he has committed a crime and must be punished.

As a piece of literature, this second paragraph seems unnecessary. But considering this novel was written in about a month, just over one year and a half after the fall of Hitler, this is just raw rage from a survivor.

It is a beautifully written book, and one that will stay with me for a long time.