Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada; trans. by Michael Hoffman

“There’s suspicion everywhere nowadays,” says a Nazi police inspector early in Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, when questioned by his superior about leads in a case. He continues:

“But there’s nothing informing it beyond pettishness against a neighbor, a bit of snooping, eagerness to come forward with an accusation.”

“And the people bringing them in? All beyond suspicion themselves?”

“Beyond suspicion?” Escherich twisted his mouth. “Good God, Obergruppenführer, no one is beyond suspicion these days.”

That’s the atmosphere that Hans Fallada recreates in his novel, which was published in German in 1947 to great success, but is only this month available in English for the first time. It’s a Germany in which every citizen has learned to worry about the slightest deviation from prescribed opinions and actions—for there is no way to know when an overheard snatch of conversation might be relayed to the Gestapo. As historian Richard J. Evans notes in his The Third Reich in Power,

It was the unpredictability of denunciation, rather than its frequency, that mattered. It caused people to believe that agents of the Gestapo, paid or unpaid, were everywhere, and that the police knew everything that was going on.

From the midst of that welter of fear, Fallada tells the story of the unlikeliest of secret agitators, middle-aged carpentry foreman Otto Quangel and his wife Anna. Angry at having lost their only son in the assault on France, they are at first unsure how to respond. Initially, Otto disdains the idea of subversion, erupting at his wife when she argues with his decision to cut ties with their son’s fiancée over her involvement in anti-Nazi circles:

“That’s right!” he interrupts. “I don’t want any funny business, and above all I don’t want to be dragged into other people’s funny business. If it’s to be my head on the block, I want to know what it’s doing there, and not that it’s some stupid things that other people have done.”

But Otto’s reluctance, we learn, is rooted at least as much in his own solitary nature as in the general distrust that prevails in Berlin, for soon he has hit upon a way in which, all alone—aside from the inevitable help of Anna—he can make his voice heard: this taciturn, non-bookish man begins writing anonymous postcards railing against the regime. Secretly dropping them in office buildings throughout Berlin, he imagines them striking subversive sparks in the breasts of ordinary Germans, little fires that just might, over time, become an anti-Nazi conflagration.

Instead, unbeknownst to Quangel, the postcards only add to the general climate of fear. Those discovering them panic, unsure what to do. Turning them in is dangerous, for the Gestapo may assume the discoverers were the writers. But not turning them in is surely more dangerous, for a roommate or coworker or even a friend might at any moment happen across the postcard—and turn it in with a full denunciation, hoping to earn favor from the Nazis. An actor finds one and brings it to his lawyer; together, they are too scared to drop it elsewhere, tear it up, or even burn it:

Pale-faced, they stared at each other. They were old friends, going back to school days, but now fear had come between them, and fear had brought mistrust with it. They eyed one another silently.

Ultimately, nearly all the postcards end up in the hands of the Gestapo, and the rest of the novel essentially plays out as a chase between a couple of Gestapo inspectors—who, fancying themselves a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Cesare Lombroso, use their deductive skills to assemble an entirely inaccurate psychological portrait of their foe—and the Quangels, who, with the faith and doggedness of prayer, simply keep writing postcards.

But that almost makes Every Man Dies Alone sound like a thriller, when it is far more than that. At times, it feels more Russian than German, a black comedy that shows how the brutality and resentment that the Nazi regime liberated—even venerated—trickled down to the most petty and reprehensible members of society. Doesn’t this passage, wherein a venal sad sack, some ill-gotten gains in his pocket, fruitlessly resolves to change, remind you of Dostoevsky?

And suddenly, from one moment to the next, Enno Kluge decides that from now on ahis life is going to be different: no more women, no more petty thieving, no more betting. He has forty-six marks in his pocket, enough to tide him over till next payday. Battered as he is, he’s going to give himself tomorrow off, but the day after he’ll start working again properly. They’ll soon see his worth, and not send him away to the Front again.

At the same time, Fallada presents what is almost a taxonomy of responses to totalitarianism and fear. Some people, like the judge who lives in the Quangels’ building, bide their time and take action when the opportunity presents itself. Others, like the Quangels’ late son’s fiancée, dive into family matters and ignore the atrocities around them. Others, like the aforementioned Enno Kluge, of whom a doctor muses—

He was so unequal to the complexities of these times he was already doomed. No help could reach him from the outside world, because there was no stability within him.

—simply race from opportunity to opportunity, always believing they are bettering themselves as they destroy strangers’ lives, never realizing that no system founded on fear and brutality can ever offer the security they seek.

As Fallada explores all these vagaries of personality, he maintains a distant, wry, even Olympian tone—almost as if, despite writing mere months after the fall of Hitler, he anticipates our current distance from the era and our desire to assume ourselves more humane than this reflection of our past. What fools those humans be, he seems at times to say. Yet with every glimmer of recognition of even the tiniest bit of our own pettiness, our own fear—and only fools and liars would fail to recognize any of their own self in these characters—we realize how powerfully effective a judgment Fallada’s detachment offers, and when he finally sheds his distance, to show us the true, perhaps not even futile, heroism of the Quangels in their last days, the effect is moving and unforgettable.

“Show me one that isn’t afraid!” barks a Brownshirt in Every Man Dies; by so convincingly showing us two who—though fully afraid—act from conscience rather than convenience, Fallada reminds us simultaneously of our weakness and of our duty, as humans, to overcome it.

Reviewed by Levi Stahl

Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada; trans. by Michael Hoffman
Melville House, 2009
Cloth, 544 pp, $27.00
ISBN-10: 1933633638