Reading Log: Every Man Dies Alone (Hans Fallada)

January 5, 2010

Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone crashed into my reading life like a bolt from the blue. I came across the book while randomly browsing through the thin selection of “literature” at our only locally owned bookstore (specified not to praise my local shopping emphasis, which is nearly non-existent, but to explain the odds of coming across the book in the first place). The title tinkled faint bells in my memory, confirmed by an entry in my wishlist. I don’t remember how Fallada’s final novel made its way onto my long list of books to read in the first place.

What a revelation! At the heart of Fallada’s novel are Otto and Anna Quangel, an older couple who have lost their only child on the German front lines, fighting what increasingly feels like a hopeless, useless war. Disillusioned but introverted– neither are the sort to join an active underground– the Quangels mount a quiet resistance to the irrational Nazi regime in one of the simplest ways possible: by anonymously dropping postcards with anti-Nazi and anti-Hitler messages all over Berlin. They drop hundreds of cards over a three year period from 1941-1943. The Quangels’ story is based on the story of Otto and Elise Hampel… reproductions of some of the cards they left– and the Gestapo files on them– are included in the book.

Intertwined within and around the story of the Quangels are stories of many other characters. There’s Inspector Escherich, assigned the task of tracking down the anonymous postcard author, who he’s nicknamed “the hobgoblin” and, through him, the entire, twisted mechanism of the Gestapo. In the Quangels’ own apartment building there’s another quiet resister, Judge Fromm, and the Persickes, a brutal family of Nazis, and Frau Rosenthal, one of the few remaining Jews, essentially trapped in her apartment with the remains of her former life. And there’s an assortment of petty thugs, postal workers, shop keepers, and factory workers, some good, some not. All of these together are the real main character in Fallada’s book– the character of a people in the midst of a brutal and increasingly irrational war, living together in a society of fear where anyone could be, and probably is, an informant, and where every bit of the baser nature of people who would in other circumstances be unremarkable have been drawn from them by the pressure of the totalitarian regime and the paranoia it instills in everyone.

Part of what’s fascinating about Every Man Dies Alone is what it is not. It’s not a story of Jews and Nazis, but of “normal” German citizens. Setting aside the philosophical import (or not) of Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil,” Fallada’s novel inevitably brings it to mind. But the actions of Otto and Anna Quangel– particularly as they are implicitly contrasted with the limited view of an ineffectual and confused active resistance– equally inspire thoughts of a “banality of good.” Much has been written about the question of ordinary German people being warped by the war, and they are amply represented here, but in Fallada’s novel we see ordinary people who are elevated in small ways by their circumstance without becoming heroes in any ordinary sense.

Every Man Dies Alone, reportedly written in a “white heat” and completed in just 24 days, isn’t flawless. In attempting to distill a byzantine and bewildering structure of events and array of people into a single novel (dozens of novels could be written based on just the significant characters and events brought into play), Fallada chooses to intertwine and connect them in ways that defy belief. There are times when the story is dulled a bit by Fallada’s brief philosophical interjections. There were times Fallada’s serial changes in tense and point-of-view confused me. A few scenes are melodramatic in the manner of bestselling thrillers or soap operas. But taken together these are inconsequential flaws in a terribly important novel.

SPOILERS BELOW – SERIOUSLY

Whether the Quangels’ resistance was “successful” has to be a central question in any reading of Every Man Dies Alone. Of the 285 postcards and 8 letters Otto and Anna dropped around Berlin, 267 of them found their way into the hands of the Gestapo quite quickly. Far from planting the seeds of rebellion or encouraging resistance, the postcards– as far as can be deduced from events in the novel– were in almost every case immediately turned over to authorities by people too terrified by the Nazi regime to risk doing otherwise. Otto is clearly shaken when he is told of these numbers, shocked that the cards didn’t take on the life of their own he and Anna had suspected. The Gestapo investigation into the cards– and information revealed by Anna in her interrogation– lead to death and misery for friends and family who are more or less innocent. And like their real life counterparts, Otto and Anna are captured by the Gestapo and their lives end in a Berlin prison well before the end of the war.

In the novel, at least, Fallada gives us a partial answer. If nothing else, the Quangels’ actions provide a contrast by which some of their Gestapo interrogators and captors are forced to realize their inferiority to this quiet couple who have the courage of their convictions. Escherich, in particular, is driven to self-destruction by Otto’s simple observation of Escherich’s work. But there is more. There is the example– thanks to Fallada’s fictionalization– of the novel itself, which we can learn from 60+ years later. But most of all there is the stark truth that in dying alone there is both tragedy and affirmation, that given a choice and simply choosing “not to participate” Otto and Anna Quangel were erased, but the marks of that erasure became permanent and revealing scars.

Tags: 101010 challenge, books, hans fallada, history, nazi, reading, reading log, wwii