Customer Reviews

Every Man Dies Alone

5 star:		(86)
4 star:		(35)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is a translation of a book written in twenty-four days by a tortured writer who lived though Nazi Germany. Unlike many writers he didn't flee, he stayed and he wasn't appreciated. Fallada (a name the author took from Grimm's Fairy Tales) spent a lot of time incarcerated. He killed a man in a duel, terrorized his wife, embezzled and did morphine, not to mention the fact that he also spent time behind bars, courtesy of the Gestapo. Goebbels wanted him to write fiction with Nazis as good guys. Fallada had a different view.

Based on actual events, Fallada penned this in a frenzy of non-stop writing and I don't know if it's his prose or that of Michael Hoffman's translation, but I feel, really feel, that I've come across a long lost Hemingway novel. The novel has been long lost. It's good that it's finally out there. I know, way back than Mr. Rudolf Ditzen probably had his reasons for using a pseudonym, but he's been gone for over a half a century and a decade, so I wish his publishers would have used his real name. He deserves to be remembered, to be known. I know him now and I'll remember Rudolf Ditzen. Here's to you Rudy! Bravo! Well done!

In pre-Nazi Germany, Hans Fallada (the pseudonym of Rudolf Ditzen, derived from Brothers Grimm tales) was a best-selling author on a par with Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse. His 1932 novel, Little Man, What Now?, was even adapted by Hollywood. But, unlike several of his literary peers, Fallada refused to flee when Hitler took over. And while he did accommodate the demands of Josef Goebbels in some regards, he refused to edit Little Man to meet Nazi approval and ended up drinking his way into an asylum after a fight with his wife ended in gunfire. While there, he surreptitiously wrote a novel called The Drinker under cover of penning an anti-Semitic work for his captors.

By the end of the war he was a broken man and was periodically institutionalized with a morphine addiction. A friend sought to lift his spirits and provide him with interesting material by supplying him with the police files on a real-life couple who had resisted the Nazis. Elise and Otto Hampel created a furor by littering Berlin with postcards on which they'd written anti-Nazi messages. They managed to get away with their prankish resistance for several years before being caught and executed. Fallada took just 24 days to turn their story into a novel that he completed shortly before he died in 1947, of an overdose.

Anna and Otto Quangel begin their own card campaign after their son is killed in France, though they later learn that almost every one of the nearly 300 missives was immediately turned over to the authorities. Thus is even their minor resistance ultimately quite futile. However, what the book captures is just how difficult it was for even decent Germans to take such small steps, paralyzed, as they were, by fear of the regime. More than that, Fallada depicts the sense of self-loathing that the failure to do more engendered in people. The book flows from Fallada's own despair and makes for a very harrowing read, but it's remarkable the way the Quangel's smallish rebellion and the discrete kindnesses of others along the way take on an epic heroic quality.

This is a fast-paced fictional story concerning life under Nazi rule. While it shows us the ugly side of Nazism written by some one who lived at the time, and it is based on a true story, it is a fictionalized story, and so it must be judged as such.

On the good side, the story is so "smoothly" translated from the original German that one can not tell it is a translation. There are no strangely written sentences, incorrectly used words, or the like. It is a well-written story that pulls one in to the action. The book has no "slow" sections that one finds themselves skimming though. There are honorable characters attempting to fight back against an evil system.

On the bad side, there are many one-dimensional characters. There are several convenient but unlikely coincidences that have characters running into one another just when they need to so the story keeps flowing along. There are characters that really add little or nothing to the story. There are long stretches of the story that stray away from the main characters for unexplainable reasons. The author's efforts to make one group of Nazis (the inspectors looking for the "hobgoblin") appear un-intelligent goes so far as to make the characters almost silly and unbelievable.

Still, the book is interesting to read and clearly presents the paranoia and abuses of the Nazi system. But judged as simply a book of fiction, it is not a great one. Its value, though, lies not in its worth as a piece of literature, but in its presentation of the mindset of the writer who has lived through the Nazi years and has had his life destroyed by the Nazis. Additionally the story gives us a glimpse into the lives of people (though fictionalized) who stand up to the Nazis and suffer for it.

I am sure that many will thoroughly enjoy this book. I also believe many will be disappointed believing going in that this book is "The greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis." It isn't. It is a good book, but not a great one. However, the book is worth reading for the reasons I mentioned earlier and I am glad I read it.

Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970), the noted British author, mathematician and philosopher would say, "No." "I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong."

There is no such hesitation for Otto Quangel, however, the primary character and hero in Hans Fallada's "Every Man Dies Alone." Quangel, a rather mild-mannered, socially reticent carpentry supervisor in a factory, puts himself directly in harm's way in his simple resistance to civil terror in Hitler's 1940's Berlin, although history tells us that he and others achieved little actual success against the Nazi regime.

Shortly before his death in 1947, Rudolf Ditzen (Hans Fallada) wrote "Every Man Dies Alone" in 24 days - that's 22 pages per day! It was first published as "Jeder Stirbt Fuer Sich Allein." The novel is based on a true story.

This book is a literary classic and a clear masterpiece. It is as essential to one's understanding of war as is reading Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" or seeing the 1981 Peter Weir Australian movie, "Gallipoli." Alan Furst, the accomplished contemporary American writer of World War II novels set in Europe, heaps praise on this book.

Michael Hoffman's translation is simply sensational.

Some episodes in the story are gruesome, some are funny, some are heartwarming and most are riveting, thus creating an unusual page-turner. "Every Man Dies Alone" is one of the best Nazi-era thrillers you'll ever read, and in this sense, it is also a first-rate detective story, as the frustrated Gestapo attempts to identify the miscreant Quangel.

It doesn't take long for you to become aware that the end will be gloriously tragic for the few humane characters that populate the pages of this book and conversely triumphant for those representing the forces of evil. Just glancing at the table of contents reveals the ultimate outcome.

You don't really learn much about WWII, even as the bombs increasingly fall and destroy doomed Berlin in the background. But such education is beside the point. The point is resistance, one man living his beliefs about freedom with intelligent regard/disregard of the consequences -- within a context of overwhelming, disabling and absolute fear.

The hero, Otto Quangel (aided and abetted by his wife Anna), is a very ordinary man, a taciturn and weirdly private person who pig-headedly and uncharacteristically decides to quietly rebel against the Gestapo and Nazis. He succeeds in driving the authorities crazy in their often futile attempt to catch him. Nazi brutality increases with their frustration.

All of the characters are significantly flawed human beings, whose worst traits are magnified under the constancy of fear, terror and intimidation. Only 2 or 3 seem to improve as a result of their experience - Quangel among them. Everyone, however, is believable, realistic and distinct. Fallada created memorable characters, some of whom are shockingly mean, hopelessly desperate, and stupidly selfish.

In the end, "Every Man Dies Alone" is downbeat. You will simply put the book down when you're finished and reflect on the human condition. At its core, however, it is surprisingly upbeat - a brilliant statement of how one person (one couple) can actually make a difference in our often ghastly and inhumanly cruel world where "might is right."

This book will (or should) make you think about your own fears of authority, your own action priorities, and your own behavior in the face of "the inevitable." Would you die for your belief in freedom?

Of course it is a 5+.

It amazes me that this man cranked out this massive work in the dreary, doomed days after WWII in torn and tattered Germany no less--but in 24 days? I am not so sure I can believe that--maybe 124 days but not 24. It would be impossible--plus, this man was besotted by drugs, booze, Godknows what else.

Whatever propelled this man to write such a movable feast of a read about various German citizens good and evil, is truly amazing to me. I was entrenched in this book, nary taking a moment to pull away.

What truly shows through in this read is the sheer verisimilitude of one who honestly knew what it was like to be there. And yes, one who was German and actually living through those times as a dissenter against the Nazis. If you are tired of the same old lackluster fiction, this is one read worth your precious reading time.

First published in 1947, the first English translation of EVERY MAN DIES ALONE is part of three-book simultaneous publisher release together with LITTLE MAN, WHAT NOW? and THE DRINKER. Once bestsellers in America, the works of Hans Fallada now are relatively obscure due to Hitler's order that his books could no longer be sold outside Germany. Even after an arrest by the Gestapo for his refusal to join the Nazi Party, Hans Fallada stayed in Germany. Written after the fall of the Reich, Hans Fallada wrote EVERY MAN DIES ALONE based on the Gestapo file of a real couple who resisted the Nazis. Now available to a new generation of English speakers, EVERY MAN DIES ALONE stands as a haunting portrait of the life experienced under the Nazi rule and an even more chilling portrait of the dynamics within a society when the basic bonds of trust in institutions and one another are broken by a ruthless government. Against all this, Hans Fallada tells the story of one couple's determined resistance to speak out against the lies.

Foreman Otto Quangel and his wife Anna are law abiding citizens. Skeptical of the the value of many of the war-time organizations and the corruption that went along with the propaganda, they never joined the Nazi Party. Nevertheless, their son joined the military. No one would brand them traitors or even malcontents. When news of their son's death reaches them, one comment by Anna to her husband leads him to question his implicit support of Hitler. Determined to make some kind of stand, he bands together with his wife to counter the propaganda of the regime. Alongside their story, Hans Fallada depicts the lives of the Quangels' neighbors and countrymen, from an older woman desperate for love and the ever present snitches to the horrifying life of a Jewish woman and the man attempting to save her, from Inspector Escherich determined to catch the Quangels to the judge within the state-run court system. Hans Fallada gives readers an inside look at the life as it might have been experienced by a wide range of characters in Germany during World War II. Economic deprivation touches every aspect of life. Corruption, a thriving black market and a desperation to remain safe at all costs, even to the point of turning a blind eye to the horrors of a society turned against itself influence the decisions of the characters.

With a quote from Primo Levi describing this book as "the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis," what reader of resistance or WWII literature can resist EVERY MAN DIES ALONE? With these authors' personal history behind them and known to today's readers, this quote has a weight more intense than the author marketing blurbs across covers of current day bestsellers. For this reader, EVERY MAN DIES ALONE lived up to Primo Levi's estimation. Hans Fallada describes the very act of resistance on an intimate level, not only in the marriage of the Quangels, but its effects on all those lives connected to the Quangels. The grand success or failure of their resistance is less important than the very act of resistance and the surety that they must resist. Through the portrayal of Quangels, Hans Fallada strips away all the questions of effectiveness or results used as excuses for inaction to focus on the effects the resistance not only on the individuals as the resistance begins to define them rather than the lies, but also the rippling effect outward to others, often those one would least expect. Alongside the story of the Quangels' heroic decision to act, Hans Fallada tells a chilling tale of a regime so focused on rooting out dissension that not even its defenders are immune from scrutiny.

EVERY MAN DIES ALONE is a fast-paced read. Certainly, the desire to know the outcome hastens one's reading speed, but the prose itself has a directness and beautiful simplicity that draws the reader into the story. I carried this book with me everywhere until I made it to the last page and then quickly ordered another in the three-book simultaneous release. The non-heroic portrait of the Quangels, indeed their very ordinariness at the beginning of the story as well as their simple, small action makes this fictional story of resistance have an even greater impact than if he had portrayed them as more classically heroic figures. In some ways, the Quangels are like Everyman. EVERY MAN DIES ALONE will appeal to readers wanting to explore the horrors of the Nazi regime from within and its effects on the citizens and the society. In addition, EVERY MAN DIES ALONE will appeal to English speaking lovers of literary fiction, creating a fuller picture of the place of Hans Fallada in the pulse of historic German literature. While many authors escaped Nazi Germany, Hans Fallada did not. His fiction gives readers a look at German literature and society from the inside looking within.