Every Man Dies Alone [Hardcover]

Hans Fallada (Author), Michael Hofmann (Translator)

Book Description

Release date: March 3, 2009

This never-before-translated masterpiece—by a heroic best-selling writer who saw his life crumble when he wouldn’t join the Nazi Party—is based on a true story.

It presents a richly detailed portrait of life in Berlin under the Nazis and tells the sweeping saga of one working-class couple who decides to take a stand when their only son is killed at the front. With nothing but their grief and each other against the awesome power of the Reich, they launch a simple, clandestine resistance campaign that soon has an enraged Gestapo on their trail, and a world of terrified neighbors and cynical snitches ready to turn them in.

In the end, it’s more than an edge-of-your-seat thriller, more than a moving romance, even more than literature of the highest order—it’s a deeply stirring story of two people standing up for what’s right, and for each other.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This disturbing novel, written in 24 days by a German writer who died in 1947, is inspired by the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel, who scattered postcards advocating civil disobedience throughout war-time Nazi-controlled Berlin. Their fictional counterparts, Otto and Anna Quangel, distribute cards during the war bearing antifascist exhortations and daydream that their work is being passed from person to person, stirring rebellion, but, in fact, almost every card is immediately turned over to authorities. Fallada aptly depicts the paralyzing fear that dominated Hitler's Germany, when decisions that previously would have seemed insignificant—whether to utter a complaint or mourn one's deceased child publicly—can lead to torture and death at the hands of the Gestapo. From the Quangels to a postal worker who quits the Nazi party when she learns that her son committed atrocities and a prison chaplain who smuggles messages to inmates, resistance is measured in subtle but dangerous individual stands. This isn't a novel about bold cells of defiant guerrillas but about a world in which heroism is defined as personal refusal to be corrupted. (Mar.)
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From The New Yorker

Fallada wrote this novel in twenty-four days in 1947, the last year of his life; he was addicted to drugs and alcohol, and had just been released from a Nazi insane asylum. The story is based on that of an actual working-class Berlin couple who conducted a three-year resistance campaign against the Nazis, by leaving anonymous postcards at random locations around the city. The book has the suspense of a John le Carré novel, and offers a visceral, chilling portrait of the distrust that permeated everyday German life during the war. Especially interesting are the details that show how Nazi-run charities and labor organizations monitored and made public the degree to which individuals supported or eschewed their cause. The novel shows how acts that at the time might have seemed “ridiculously small,” “discreet,” and “out of the way” could have profound and lasting meaning.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: Melville House; 1 edition (March 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933633638
• ISBN-13: 978-1933633633
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.8 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (159 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #515,523 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Before WWII, German writer Hans Fallada's novels were international bestsellers, on a par with those of his countrymen Thoman Mann and Herman Hesse. In America, Hollywood even turned his first big novel, Little Man, What Now? into a major motion picture

Learning the movie was made by a Jewish producer, however, the Nazis blocked Fallada's work from foreign rights sales, and began to pay him closer attention. When he refused to join the Nazi party he was arrested by the Gestapo--who eventually released him, but thereafter regularly summoned him for "discussions" of his work.

However, unlike Mann, Hesse, and others, Fallada refused to flee to safety, even when his British publisher, George Putnam, sent a private boat to rescue him. The pressure took its toll on Fallada, and he resorted increasingly to drugs and alcohol for relief. Not long after Goebbels ordered him to write an anti-Semitic novel he snapped and found himself imprisoned in an asylum for the "criminally insane"--considered a death sentence under Nazi rule. To forestall the inevitable, he pretended to write the assignment for Goebbels, while actually composing three encrypted books--including his tour de force novel The Drinker--in such dense code that they were not deciphered until long after his death.

Fallada outlasted the Reich and was freed at war's end. But he was a shattered man. To help him recover by putting him to work, Fallada's publisher gave him the Gestapo file of a simple, working-class couple who had resisted the Nazis. Inspired, Fallada completed Every Man Dies Alone in just twenty-four days.

He died in February 1947, just weeks before the book's publication.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

211 of 219 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A brutal and compelling story May 1, 2009

By Gary Malone

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

More than sixty years have passed since World War II ended, and to me it sometimes seems that the very over-usage of the terms 'Hitler' and 'Nazism' have facilitated the reduction of these historical phenomena to mere talismans of turpitude. In other words, as an *emblem* of wickedness, the Third Reich is ever-present in our consciousness, whilst the everyday reality of the evils it perpetrated has perhaps receded. Hans Fallada's novel, therefore, is hugely important. As a snapshot of the quotidian reality of life in Nazi Germany - particularly the regime's impact on just a handful of ordinary people - it is a gut-wrenching reminder of just how awful the Third Reich was, even within its own borders.

"Every Man Dies Alone" tells the tale of Otto and Anna Quangel, a middle-aged, working-class couple living in Berlin who one day learn via telegram that their only son has been killed during the invasion of France. Their searing grief is infused with a sense of rage that the Nazi regime has destroyed their lives. Yet there is nothing a mere couple can do to resist the Reich. Or is there?

Otto and Anna begin to compose postcards with subversive messages which point to the mendacity of the Nazis and which call upon Germans to resist the regime. Carefully, painstakingly, they drop these cards - one at a time - in stairwells and public buildings. If they are caught, it means certain death. They are surrounded, after all, by a brutalized citizenry comprised of the venal and the weak, people ready to turn them in at any moment. Meanwhile, the Gestapo has intercepted the first of the postcards, and the hunt is on. How long can the Quangels hold out?...

Written in 1947 by an author who himself was oppressed by the Nazis, "Every Man Dies Alone" has - remarkably - only now been translated into English for the first time. Despite all cavils (yes, the characters are somewhat lacking in depth; yes, the prose seldom features any florid touches), this is still an awesome book. It is based on the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel, an uneducated couple living in Berlin who underwent a similar family tragedy and thereafter began a clandestine campaign of anti-Nazism. This edition of the novel features an appendix which reproduces both a sample of the Hampels' postcards and extracts from the Gestapo files on the couple following their arrest. This fascinating addendum helps to ground the story of their fictional analogues in a horrid reality.

And that reality is well-represented in every character: the penniless and self-serving informers who are a constant danger to their fellow citizens; the terrified elderly Jewess living on the top floor of the Quangels' apartment building who can hardly do anything but await her fate; the brutal and incurably indoctrinated Hitler Youth member downstairs; the kindly and sagacious retired Judge who does what little he can to help; the imprisoned orchestra conductor whose decency simply cannot be eroded; and of course the pitiless SS staff whose most base characteristics are given free rein throughout (the interrogation scenes are far more appalling for their psychological violence than their physical brutality).

Scarcely anything could prepare the reader for the scalding horrors of the book's long, drawn-out denouement. The first three parts of the novel are merely infused with tension: the fourth and final part plays out like an unending nightmare in slow motion, everything ineluctable and unbearable at once. This is truly an upsetting read, but it is all the more important to read it for that. This - after all - is a picture of what Nazi Germany must really have been like, written by an author who saw it all from the inside.

As Geoff Wilkes' illuminating afterword points out, Fallada himself thought that the real-life Hampels' postcards were illiterate and ineffective, particularly compared to the more famous efforts of Hans and Sophie Scholl. (Most of the Hampels' cards, far from being circulated, were promptly handed over to the Gestapo by a citizenry terrified by merely having come in contact with them.)

So the question must be asked. Was the Hampels' campaign against the Nazis a futile, wasted effort? At the risk of sounding anodyne, the answer is: not if you read this book. If the Hampels had never committed themselves to this campaign, Fallada would never have been able to novelise it, and we would never have been able to read of the awful world they inhabited. This book, therefore, is something of a cry from the grave. It is their memorial. Read more ›

109 of 114 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Life and death in the Third Reich May 27, 2009

By Blue in Washington TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Amazing saga of ordinary Germans during the early war years in Berlin. With a brilliant chronological narrative, author Hans Fallada tells the stories of heroic resistance to the Nazi state as well as stories of many less than admirable Germans who simply adapted or took advantage of the criminalization of the state.

Plenty has already been well said by earlier reviewers about this book. I can only add that it would be difficult to find any account of WWII that is more realistic or poignant than Fallada's tale of what can happen --good and bad--when citizens are terrorized by their own government. Wonderful writing and a story that keeps you thinking long after you've finished the book. Highly recommended.

65 of 68 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Criminals and other Germans July 31, 2009

By Friederike Knabe VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

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. Read more ›

57 of 69 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful and thought-provoking March 10, 2009

By Seven Kitties

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

The author's life story almost overshadows this book's own story, which I'm certain other reviewers have covered in depth, so I'll not bore you with a retread. Still, a man who survived the worst the Nazis could throw at him to write this book? He's probably got something important to say.

The story as a novel is compelling: characters are convincing, sympathetic (even a few of the bad guys!), the plot starts slow but ratchets up to a page-riffling pace (even though you really don't want to know how bad things are going to get!), and the setting, though thinly sketched, gives enough to anchor the reader in time and place. More than that, he describes the setting in such a way that you really feel what it might have been like to live in a place where every word, even a kind gesture or look, could be observed by your neighbors and used against you. I can't pin down how he creates that paranoiac atmosphere, but it's brilliantly done.

More than a compelling story with a great atmosphere, though, this novel asks us to question ourselves in many ways: how would we respond to a totalitarian government? What kind of civil disobedience or rebellion would be effective? How easily could any of our actions or lives stand up to scrutiny from a state determined to find us 'wrong'? How 'just' is justice in our world? What is the larger cost of our actions? How very few sadists does it take to control a 'civilized' population?

My general rule of a great novel is if I cry at the end. This was a multiple-kleenex deal. But more than a compelling story, this novel will make you look at Germany itself under the Third Reich in a new way (they weren't all sadistic Nazis) but will make you take a look at the modern world a new way.... It almost reads like a prophecy of a totalitarian regime as much as a history. Unmissable. Read more ›