Every Man Dies Alone (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Michael Hofmann (Translator)

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: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (63 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #7,422 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 45 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" (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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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.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Gary Malone (Australia) - See all my reviews

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.

44 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Seven Kitties "7kitties" (Blue Point, NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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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.