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Alone in Berlin

by Hans Fallada, Michael Hofmann (Translator)

4.12 of 5 stars 4.12 · rating details · 5,554 ratings · 1,075 reviews

Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm and the unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France. Sh...more

Paperback, 602 pages

Published 2009 by Penguin Classics (first published 1947)

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Mar 15, 2012 Elijah Kinch Spector rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

[Cross-posted on my blog, with some great pictures!]
Well holy fuck that was one of the best books I've ever read.

When I started Every Man Dies Alone, I had two fears: one, that it would be too dark and do too good a job of taking a depressing look at how terrible humans can be, and I wouldn't want to keep reading it; or two, that it would show the main characters' personal rebellion -- a series of postcards with anti-Nazi slogans dropped around Berlin -- as a regime-changing act of genius that...more

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Jan 08, 2010 brian rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

after losing their son to the war, berlin residents otta and anna quangel launch a mini-revolt against the reich and fuhrer in the form of postcards around the city which speak subversive messages directly to the people. read in the age of twitter and viral videos, this seems, at once, awfully quaint and particularly profound. there was a time, i gather, when words mattered; when there didn't exist a barrage of partisan wingnuts flooding the zeitgeist with nonsense. but lemme skip the cranky old...more after losing their son to the war, berlin residents otta and anna quangel launch a mini-revolt against the reich and fuhrer in the form of postcards around the city which speak subversive messages directly to the people. read in the age of twitter and viral videos, this seems, at once, awfully quaint and particularly profound. there was a time, i gather, when words mattered; when there didn't exist a barrage of partisan wingnuts flooding the zeitgeist with nonsense. but lemme skip the cranky old-man get-off-my-yard thing...

the portrait of two old people launching a mini-revolution interests me far more than dudes with guns and bombs and shit. so it pains me to slap this with two stars. but, wow. has there ever been a book more in need of an editor? it's plodding and lumbering and filled with so much unnecessary bullshit it makes the reader feel like a kid forced to plow through four servings of steamed broccoli to get to that half-portion of chocolate pudding. it reads as if fallada drew up a rigid outline and just wrote out the shit. um, part of writing is knowing what to leave out -- the 'leaving out' ups the mystery quotient. y'ever hear the phrase, 'get into a scene at the last possible moment and get out at the earliest possible moment?' -- goose the reader, hans. smack her around. you don't need to tell us everything. skip the walk to the apartment, just land us right there and force your reader to make sense of it as it happens. and if you whisk us out of a scene before it ends... you leave us wondering. remember when don quixote raises his sword to hack away at some guy and cervantes just ends the chapter with the sword in the air? genius, man, genius.

and coincidences? just stay away.
fallada has a character who pisses off a nurse and so to stick it to him she rats him out as the card dropper. the gestapo quickly realize the guy couldn't possibly be the card-dropper but, so as to prove to their superiors that they're following leads, they tail the guy. we, the reader, know that the guy's foreman at work is otto quangel, the actual card dropper. ugh. it wasn't necessary, hans. you didn't need to do this. there are better ways to draw connections, to make things come together, to have all lines diverge on a common point. and there's lots of this kinda shit going on. too much of it.

so... i made it 250 pgs deep. halfway. and dropped the book in frustration. and then i read that fallada wrote the book in 24 days. makes sense. given a few more months and a good editor this could've resembled the masterpiece they said it was. (less)

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Sep 19, 2011 Praj rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I should express thanks to Gudrun Burwitz, for if it was not for her ruthless news, I would not have found a brilliant book that stands for every belief which Ms. Burwitz expels from her very survival. Couple weeks ago, a news article describing Burwitz as the new “Nazi grandmother” made me explore further for its validity. Ms. Burwitz who at the ripe age of 81, still strives hard to support and nurture the most modern breed of Nazis ,keeping alive the malicious work and memory of her father Hei...more I should express thanks to Gudrun Burwitz, for if it was not for her ruthless news, I would not have found a brilliant book that stands for every belief which Ms. Burwitz expels from her very survival. Couple weeks ago, a news article describing Burwitz as the new “Nazi grandmother” made me explore further for its validity. Ms. Burwitz who at the ripe age of 81, still strives hard to support and nurture the most modern breed of Nazis ,keeping alive the malicious work and memory of her father Heinrich Himmler, the chief authority behind the Gestapo operations. “The princess of Nazism ", as one of the historian terms Gudrun, is a despicable bitch loathing the essence of humanity through her narrowed National Socialist mindset. I would not identify her as a cultured human being, let alone a decent citizen of a wonderful country. However, she would have been felicitated for her abhorrence during the Third Reich. In 1940’s Gudrun Burwitz would have been a decent German; the ideal daughter of Deutschland. Not, Otto Quangel, though. He was a traitor, a criminal who committed treason against the Fuhrer. Otto Quangel was the ‘Hogoblin’, whose righteous words were feared by anyone who touched or read them.

Otto and Anna Quangel was a working class couple. Like many other couples they were decent Germans. They obeyed their Fuhrer, you see. Their only son was serving in the army defending Hitler’s gruesome idea of legality of human race. They helplessly saw their neighbors being caught and shipped to concentration camps, while they silently sipped their watery coffee in sheer silence. They had to be tough in life. That was the common justification of every brutality the Gestapo police committed. Then one fine day, the death news of their only son arrived and Anna in a bursts of sorrow shrieked, “you and your Fuhrer!”. For Otto, a man of few words, Anna’s words weighed more than the misery of losing his child. The agony of guilt swelled up Otto’s moralistic integrity overwhelming his internal ethics. Otto proposed an obscure form of anti-Nazi warfare. He would write postcards with slogans against the ongoing atrocities.

“Mother! The Fuhrer has murdered my son! Mother! The Fuhrer will murder your sons too; he will not stop till he has brought sorrow to every home.”

Otto’s heroic resistance to the Nazi Regime magnified only through his personal tragedy. Did the death of his son made him courageous as now he had nothing to lose? Would Otto walk the mutinous path had his son arrived safely home?

Hans Fallada who suffered through his own personal war as Rudolf Ditzen, brings the laudable efforts of Elise and Otto Hampel (1931), a real life couple who wrote anonymous postcards and leaflets to educate people about the ongoing atrocities ,informing to not buying Nazi papers and resist from participating in the war. The writing is trouble-free and the plot predictable; nevertheless, throughout the fictional portrayals of the Quangels, Fallada beautifully enlightens the misery of ordinary Germans who struggled from their own moral battles. Like, Eva Kungel who curses the fact of her birthing children who would eventually end up becoming monsters. The investigation of the Hobgoblin case and the defenselessness of Inspector Escherich expose the disintegration of humanness in a society where the nobleness of a feeble endeavor to capture terror was misplaced.

Otto Quangel was the burning conscience of a guilt –ridden nation. He and Anna were among the few whom were “good corns” sown in the fields of weeds. Fallada signs off the book saying, “But we don’t want to end this book with death; dedicated as it is to life, life always triumphs over humiliation and tears, over misery and death”.

Otto and Anna’s death was inevitable and their efforts although ineffectual were not insignificant. The Quangels did the unattainable and unfortunately their voices were lost among timid tones and pigheaded establishment, contrasting Wael Ghonim the cyber hero whose efforts instigated a revolution finally overthrowing Hosni Mubarak from supremacy.
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Sep 11, 2012 Meaghan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: adult-novels, read-in-2009, favorites, worldwar2

This has got to be the best book I've read in months, at least. Certainly the best novel. I had been waiting for it for months (the library had only one copy and others were ahead of me), and it was worth it. I sat down and read the whole book in a single day.

The premise is excellent -- a perfectly ordinary, working-class German couple carries on their own private campaign of resistance by dropping postcards with anti-Nazi messages. I knew this was going to be a great story. But even more impres...more

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Dec 02, 2009 Whitaker rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary-fiction, germany, 2009-read

I read this while I was also reading Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation The Conquest of the Middle East . Bad idea. Very bad idea. Note to self: Reading two depressing books at the same time does not do good things to one's mood.

There has been a surge of interest in the German experience of World War II, particularly the experience of those who tried to resist the war mongering. This novel joins works like The Song Before It Is Sung A Novel , Valkyrie The Plot To Kill Hitler , and So...more I read this while I was also reading Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation The Conquest of the Middle East . Bad idea. Very bad idea. Note to self: Reading two depressing books at the same time does not do good things to one's mood.

There has been a surge of interest in the German experience of World War II, particularly the experience of those who tried to resist the war mongering. This novel joins works like The Song Before It Is Sung A Novel , Valkyrie The Plot To Kill Hitler , and Sophie Scholl The Real Story Behind German's Resistance Heroine . It was, however, written long before, in 1947 by Hans Fallada, and in that sense, can be regarded as almost a synchronous record. I am glad for this rehabilitation. It is always useful to remember that no group anywhere is a monolithic bloc and in this age of a resurgent right and rising Islamophobia, it is a lesson that is only too important to remember.

What makes this book, for me, less a four or five star effort was its treatment of its characters. Good or bad fell into more or less easily defined camps. The Nazis were brutal bullies; the resisters were good hearted but ineffectual.

I don't think life is that simple. The story touched on but did not delve into the fact that most people are just scared. Scared of being denounced, scared of dying, it's so much easier to just go along, to close your eyes to the horror around you. How many of us would do that? I'm pretty sure I would cave, especially if faced by torture and the deaths of my nearest and dearest.

Worse. How many of us would be immune to The Lucifer Effect , that infamous Berkeley experiment where ordinary men off the street turned into brutal thugs when placed in charge of another group of men off the street and told to treat them like prisoners? The craven eager willingness to give in to calls to invade Iraq gives me little hope: when even in the "land of the free and the brave" dissenting voices squelch their nagging doubts what are the chances that we'll be better than that?

What I liked about the book was its portrayal of ordinary people, holding fast to their beliefs. I'd like to believe that it's possible. I also liked how it raised the eternal question: what form should resistance take? Is it still necessary even if or even when it's utterly useless? This book says, and says resoundingly, "Yes!"

I want to believe that. I really do. Oh, but how easy it would be to rationalize collaboration, to say, "I can do more good subverting the system from within."
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Nov 20, 2012 Mark rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: bookclub-reads, war-works

After having started 2011 with a couple of disappointing novels this one blew me away. Written in 1947 but set in the middle years of the war it follows a number of different characters ranging from the noble and kind through the naive and tragic to the utterly loathsome making a few stops at the fairly disgusting. All emotions are here and this reader certainly experienced quite a few of them himself.

The hero and heroine,(Fallada speaks of people in their fifties or even late forties as being...more After having started 2011 with a couple of disappointing novels this one blew me away. Written in 1947 but set in the middle years of the war it follows a number of different characters ranging from the noble and kind through the naive and tragic to the utterly loathsome making a few stops at the fairly disgusting. All emotions are here and this reader certainly experienced quite a few of them himself.

The hero and heroine,(Fallada speaks of people in their fifties or even late forties as being old,... this is quite sobering for a man careering towards his 50's but because of the power of this book i'll let it pass !!)an older married couple, having initially been supporters or at least not opponents of the regime in Germany are thrust into a space by the death of their only Son which forces them to reconsider and so begins their simple rebellion of writing annonymous postcards against the Nazis and leaving them in public places.

The story is about their courage and struggles and the way their actions affect or involve others. There are side stories involving various other berliners, many of whom, without knowing it, live side by side with these unnoticed and unremembered rebels. The novel delves deep into the horror and injustice present I suppose in all oppressive and cruel dehumanizing regimes but Otto and Anna's refusal to be cowed is amazingly moving.

There is even humour; the chapters in the court room would be ridiculous and farcical if it wasn't for the verdicts at the end but the defendants' responses are magnificently powerful. There is an enormous number of brutal and cruel deaths here but nobody reading a book set in Germany in 1942 can be surprised at that and yet the surprise for me is the fact that I was left feeling positive.

There was horror, cruelty and monstrous injustice but the ability of love to overcome betrayal, rejection and seeming hopelessness are writ large here. The book revolves around relationships; the life giving sort of men and women in love, the positive affect that can be brought about in a life by the unconditional offering of acceptance, the renewal and recharging of hope because someone loves you and then on the negative side the opposite. How brutalized and rejected people can come to lose all human sympathy and begin to relate to others only as sources of income, entertainment or revenge.

The over riding relationship in the background is perhaps that of parent to child. We see good parents mourning the death of a son, we see a good parent being devestated by the realization of her child's brutality, we see a longed for child lost, we see a nigh on demonic relationship between a son and a father who appear to have lost all sense of humanity and we see a brutalized child escaping to new hope with a new parent. Looking back i have used 'brutal' a lot, I apologize for that lack of vocabulary but i suppose that is my over riding image of the book but underpinning it is that other recurring word, love. Do read this book. it's extraordinary.(less)

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May 04, 2012 Tony rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: german, wwii, top-10-2012

Loved this.

But first, some context:

Hans Fallada is the pen name of Rudolf Ditzen. At the age of 18, Ditzen and a friend went out in the countryside and, in the manner of duellists, fired guns at each other over some adolescent sexual rutting. The friend missed, but Ditzen's aim was true. Taking his friend's gun, Ditzen shot himself in the chest, but survived. For the first of many times, Ditzen was committed to a sanatorium for the mentally ill. Released, Ditzen turned to alcohol and narcotics....more

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May 23, 2010 kit rated it 4 of 5 stars

A wonderful, absorbing book detailing the small, personal rebellions and resistances against Nazi Germany by a handful of its citizens, at the forefront Otto Quangel and his wife Anna. One of the reasons I enjoyed Alone in Berlin is that Fallada does not attempt to elevate the Quangels' resistance to an importance it does not deserve - while Otto is hopeful that his postcards are having an effect, it is later revealed his efforts have been largely futile. In this way, the novel is largely unforg...more

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Mar 10, 2011 Sophie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: not-owned, fiction

A really powerful novel set in Berlin during the Third Reich, based on a true story. It's the story of an elderly couple who, after the death of their son, realize the true horror and wrongness of the Nazi regime, and as a consequence they become resistance fighters. Their resistance is a small one; there are no planned assassinations or big events. Rather, they write postcards that detail the wrongs of the regime, in order to make other people realize that what is going on is wrong. They leave...more A really powerful novel set in Berlin during the Third Reich, based on a true story. It's the story of an elderly couple who, after the death of their son, realize the true horror and wrongness of the Nazi regime, and as a consequence they become resistance fighters. Their resistance is a small one; there are no planned assassinations or big events. Rather, they write postcards that detail the wrongs of the regime, in order to make other people realize that what is going on is wrong. They leave the postcards in the staircases of houses across Berlin. Most people, however, turn the cards in to the police, and soon the Gestapo is trying to hunt them down.

This book first came to my attention because of the amount of press it received in England and the US last year - it's always strange to see a book by a German author celebrated there, and especially when it's a book that was published more than 60 years ago. So when the new German edition ('new' as in the original edition as it was probably intended by the author) arrived at our store, I was curious and picked it up. And couldn't stop.

For me, it was almost impossible to put down, much more impossible than with a thriller or a crime novel. Even though you know how it all must turn out (there weren't that many happy endings during that time, after all), you can't help holding your breath for the Quangels, hoping against hope that the Gestapo won't catch them.

One thing this book does very well is explain the importance of resistance, no matter how small it may be. Because if the choice is to live for an unjust cause or to die for a just one, there can only be once choice. And even if what you do has not much of an effect on anybody, it does have an effect on you.

Fallada also has a very good eye for people and their behavior in general, and the loss of their humanity during that time in particular. This book is about "ordinary" people, where ordinary people means people of no particular importance to history in general. The way they act is often horrific, but in some cases it's also admirable. Overall this is a very depressing book, but Fallada manages to still weave in a thread of hope, somehow. Because people like the Quangels did exist and do exist.(less)

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Aug 19, 2011 Cara rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: holiday-read, eccleston-reading-group, read-2011

If I could have given this six stars, I would have.

Maybe it was because I read it in a day, or maybe because it was based on a true story, I know I will not forget this book for a long time.

Much WW2 literature is written from the view point of the English during the blitz, the French heading up the Resistence or the Nazi's wreaking evil. I think there is only Alone in Berlin and The Book Thief that I have read, which has given an insight into the dire situation that the ordinary Germans lived t...more

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Feb 24, 2013 Piperitapitta rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: autori-tedeschi, letteratura-tedesca, shoah, romanzo

«Ma per lo meno sono rimasto onesto - disse. - Non sono stato loro complice»

Diceva Karl Marx che la storia si ripete sempre due volte: la prima volta come tragedia, la seconda come farsa.
In questo romanzo di Hans Fallada, che trae spunto da una vicenda realmente avvenuta nella Germania nazista in cui si narrano le vicende dei coniugi Otto e Anna Quangel (Otto e Elise Hampel nella realtà, e forse nella realtà meno convinti e meno eroici dei loro epigoni letterari) e della loro decisione di opporr...more

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Aug 24, 2010 Lorraine rated it 5 of 5 stars

Alone in Berlin is based on the real life events of Otto and Elise Hampel, individual resistance fighters against the Nazi reign. The characters of Otto and Anna are based on Otto and Elise and whilst the story is fictional, many of the elements you find out from the afterword are based on real happenings.

I was struck by how psychological the book was - the fear, paranoia and constant vigilance of everyday German citizens is felt strongly with the introduction and viewpoint of each character. I'...more Alone in Berlin is based on the real life events of Otto and Elise Hampel, individual resistance fighters against the Nazi reign. The characters of Otto and Anna are based on Otto and Elise and whilst the story is fictional, many of the elements you find out from the afterword are based on real happenings.

I was struck by how psychological the book was - the fear, paranoia and constant vigilance of everyday German citizens is felt strongly with the introduction and viewpoint of each character. I've read other books about life in Germany in WWII, but this book made me realise that I'd forgotten how life wasn't smooth under the Nazi reign in Germany for the German citizens. It was interesting to see another take on life in Berlin, but it chilled me quite a lot.

Although the nature of the SS and Nazi police sectors is known to me through history lessons and other books, there was something still quite shocking reading the way they liked to play about with their suspects and prisoners - many of which were the characters in this book incidentally. Their suspects didn't stand a chance under questionning and couldn't win either way - they were either forced to admit what they knew or forced to sign incorrect confessions.

The courage of Otto and Anna during all of this was remarkable, and their act of resistance was commendable but frightening - every time a new postcard was dropped, you felt the panic of the character to hope they hadn't been seen. As a two person unit they stood up for their beliefs and morals and it was refreshing to see that not all German people believed the word of the Fuhrer and his ideologies.

The plot also involves acts of kindness from other characters, which warms the book and restores some faith in how bad life had got. But at the same time other acts of desperation from characters such as Emil Borkhausen and Enno Kluge changes your view again. There's so much happening in the book with different plots (which all come together) that you go through different emotions and reflections.

This was translated from the original German text, but is still incredibly well written. The short chapters marking new viewpoints and timescales work well, and it's clear what is happening at each point in the story.

The book was a gripping read - I didn't want to put the book down as I wanted to know what happened next to the characters I'd become attached to. I had a version with the Afterword and original documents for Otto and Elise in the back, both are worth a read. If anything it makes it harder to believe that any of this can be "real" in the modern world.(less)

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Jan 17, 2013 Ian rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: a-kindle, war, historical-fiction, a-to-z-2013

I was looking forward to reading this much vaunted novel, written by Hans Fallada just after the Second World War ended, the author having lived in Nazi Germany throughout that era. I assumed that it would be a devastatingly real portrayal of life under Hitler's yoke and at times it did feel like that. However, I just didn't get a sense of realism from far too many of the characters and this detracted immensely from my enjoyment. The main story of the Quangels efforts to revolt in their small, u...more

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Oct 23, 2010 Mrgmmk rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Fantastic book, loosely based on a true story in Berlin during WW2. A middle-aged,working class couple lose their only son in the war in France and decide to wage their own war on the Reich.

Beautifully written characters, some (very dark) comedy and a sense of the horror living through those years. It's very unusual to read a book from this perspective, it's written from inside a hidden world (to us) and instead of the sometimes caricature portrayls of nazi germany you hear the voices of actual...more

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Mar 14, 2009 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Hans Fallada is the pen name of German writer Rudolf Ditzen. Starting his writing career in the 1920s, Fallada continued to write through the fall of the Weimar Republic, the Great Depression, and the rise of the Nazi Party to its rule of Germany. He stayed in Germany after the Nazis took power and managed to survive the war becoming an author of some note in Soviet-occupied Germany after the war.

Every Man Dies Alone looks at one couple's small act of resistance to the Nazis during the war. At t...more Hans Fallada is the pen name of German writer Rudolf Ditzen. Starting his writing career in the 1920s, Fallada continued to write through the fall of the Weimar Republic, the Great Depression, and the rise of the Nazi Party to its rule of Germany. He stayed in Germany after the Nazis took power and managed to survive the war becoming an author of some note in Soviet-occupied Germany after the war.

Every Man Dies Alone looks at one couple's small act of resistance to the Nazis during the war. At the same time, Fallada creates a detailed depiction of life in Berlin in the early 40s and at the time of the most success of the Third Reich. Every Man Dies Alone is based on the true story of Elise and Otto Hampel, a normal, working class couple who wrote and left numerous anonymous anti-Nazi cards and letters around Berlin. For this small act of resistance, they were hunted by the Berlin Police and the Gestapo. After their capture and "trial" before the infamous Judge Roland Freisler, President of the Volksgericht and representative of the Ministry of Justice at the Wahnsee Konferenz, they were executed for treason. Fallada takes this history and tells the story of his characters, Anna and Otto Quangel, who, after the death of their only son combat in France, take up a similar campaign of resistance. There are numerous other well-drawn character such as Inspector Escherich, the Gestapo detective who lead the hunt for the Quangels and who himself is brutalized by the Gestapo and the SS for his failure to quickly bring the case to a successful conclusion. There are a number of other characters who resist the Nazi regime in their own small, and largely unsuccessful ways. Fallada portrays the brutality of the Nazi regime and its members in detail, showing how the Party worked to dehumanize its members to lead lives of unthinking, fearful obedience.

In the face of this, the small acts of resistance seem almost senseless given that they could have no chance of a meaningful effect on overturning or even significantly disrupting the systems created by the Nazis or the war effort itself.

But Every Man Dies Alone is not a book about that. It is a book about how an individual maintains his own humanity and character in the face of such a regime. The answer it gives is that you maintain by just resisting, by not cooperating. One of the most important lines in the book, I think, is this. After being told that by her husband that his plot is to just leave anonymous, subversive postcards around Berlin, Anna Quangel is disappointed that the scheme, for which they're likely to be executed is not grander or more remarkable. She then comes to this realization:

He might be right: whether their act was big or small, no one could risk more than his life. Each according to his strength and abilities, but the main thing was, you fought back.

This is a powerful line of thought.(less)

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Andrew An outstandingly thorough and thoughtful review. Thank you. One niggling query, though. Are you sure Roland Freisler ("Our Vishnevsky," as Hitler repo...more
Oct 04, 2010 09:08pm

Michael Thanks, Andrew. I doublechecked regarding Roland Freisler. The German website for the House of the Wannsee Conference notes him to be a participant in...more
Oct 05, 2010 06:52am

Apr 22, 2013 Stein rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels-historical

==True portraits of wartime bleakness and brutality==
Not only is this novel based on the actions of a Berlin couple who naively dropped off self-authored anti-Nazi postcards in public building all over Berlin, but it is grounded in the author's own experiences living under the heel of Hitler's divisively oppressive regime. This is fiction steeped in legitimate historical relevance.

By means of the third person narrative each character's thought process, fears, delusions and motivations are expos...more

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Apr 08, 2013 Stacie Nishimoto rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

From the afterword:
"Fallada goes to considerable lengths to create a large number of anti-Nazi dissidents who in practical terms fail almost completely. It is the sound not just of the Quangel's protest, but of many other protests, which dies away unheard, to repeat Fallada's phrase [...] However, after using that phrase Fallada wrote that the couple
sacrificed their lives in a purposeless battle, apparently
in vain. But perhaps not entirely purposeless, after
all? Perhaps not entirely in vain, af...more

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Apr 03, 2013 Will rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"It was as though a spell had caused a whole world of dirt, blood, and tears to fade away, and she was back in a time when Jews were still respected people, not fugitive vermin facing extermination.

Unconsciously, she stroked her hair, and her face softened. So there was still peace in the world, even in Berlin.

'I am very grateful to you, Judge,' she said. Her voice sounded different, more certain.

He quickly looked up from his book. 'Please drink your tea while it's hot, and eat your bread. We ha...more

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Mar 30, 2013 Tony Pedley rated it 5 of 5 stars

I bought this book as an impulse buy being interested in that historical period. I thought it was a recent book written by a English speaking author. I had not realised it was written by a German living in Berlin through the Nazi era, just after the 2nd world war. That fact makes the book so much more powerful and relevant.

The story describes how it feels living in a totalitarian state in a way that is so much vivid than any book or film I have seen. It describes how the evil and petty minded ri...more

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Mar 28, 2013 Joseph rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Every Man Dies Alone is a novel that isn't afraid of spoilers. Chapter titles herald the death of characters, section headings hint at where the story is going and characters talk openly about the inevitability of their capture. The setting is Nazi Berlin at the height of WWII, a city where the Gestapo rule by fear and 'it seams like half the population is working to imprison the other half.' Hans Fallada has every reason to warn you about the tragedies that are to come, for Nazi Berlin is a tra...more Every Man Dies Alone is a novel that isn't afraid of spoilers. Chapter titles herald the death of characters, section headings hint at where the story is going and characters talk openly about the inevitability of their capture. The setting is Nazi Berlin at the height of WWII, a city where the Gestapo rule by fear and 'it seams like half the population is working to imprison the other half.' Hans Fallada has every reason to warn you about the tragedies that are to come, for Nazi Berlin is a tragic place.

Our heroic protagonists are an older married couple, the Quangels, who have just lost their son to the invasion of France. Their personal tragedy spurs the quiet couple into a crusade of resistance, a simple postcard based anti-nazi propaganda campaign that's small in scope but large in courage. If they are caught, they are doomed and with every postcard they drop, their doom draws closer. Their personal growth in the face of their country going to hell is among the most triumphant stories I've ever read.

But the Quangels are not the only heroes, and the Gestapo are not the only villains. Fallada populates his Berlin with an eclectic cast that is at turns hilarious and sad, exasperating and sympathetic. Written 60 years ago about a place half a world away, you will recognize all of these people, heroes and villains alike.

For in Fallada's world, the primary source of villainy is not ideology, ignorance, fear or even greed, but pettiness. A conman lords his cleverness over a child after cheating him out of a few bucks, a Hitler-youth condemns his father to a brutal fate in an asylum because the older man didn't grovel properly, a brilliant Gestapo inspector is thrown in prison because he acted too elitist around his superiors. Even as the villains hold all the cards, Fallada shows us how small they are.

I normally consider a book worthwhile if it contains three or four powerful moments of human insight, Every Man Dies Alone has closer to twenty. This is a novel that bursts with humanity. I could talk to you for hours about the events of this book without revealing all its secrets. Every Man Dies Alone is right to not fear spoilers; it's spoiler-proof.(less)

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Mar 16, 2013 Denerick rated it 5 of 5 stars

One of my all time favourite books.

I could quibble and say that the writing is a bit flabby at times, but Fallada probably gets away with that a bit as I read the translated version.

Overall, the book is very strong and intensely emotionally involving. In fact, I haven't read a book that has played with my emotions in such a way since 'Crime and Punishment'. Like Dostoevsky, Fallada does use some Christian imagery and symbolism throughout the novel, and its strange now that I think about it the...more

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Mar 10, 2013 Brenda K. rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: readers who are interested in WWII and literary fiction

The following review is from my Books That Matter blog. Please feel free to comment or to visit my blog for other reviews!

When Borders closed its doors in Ann Arbor I was among the jackals feeding off the corpse, buying up dozens of books at bargain prices. Some of the books I bought fell into the category of “Books That I Know I Ought To Read.” Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone (first published in Germany in 1947) was on that list, and sure enough, it looked heftily important sitting there on...more The following review is from my Books That Matter blog. Please feel free to comment or to visit my blog for other reviews!

When Borders closed its doors in Ann Arbor I was among the jackals feeding off the corpse, buying up dozens of books at bargain prices. Some of the books I bought fell into the category of “Books That I Know I Ought To Read.” Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone (first published in Germany in 1947) was on that list, and sure enough, it looked heftily important sitting there on my bookshelf for almost two years.

The copy on the dust jacket had me girding my loins for a difficult, if meaningful, read when I recently pulled it off the shelf. I wasn’t wrong, but I was right for the wrong reasons. The prose itself (translated by Michael Hoffman) is very simple. This 500-page novel was, after all, written in 24 days, and that generally leads to a certain zippiness in presentation, to an uncomplicated, linear structure.
The difficulty is in learning again, and again, about the power of fear. It is not the language and not the plot (based on a true story about a nondescript working-class couple who begin an anti-war, anti-Hitler, postcard-writing campaign following the death of their son at the front) that rivet, but the steady accumulation of terror and suspicion that we watch seep into a populace, making the unthinkable not so much ordinary as a component of self-preservation. This is not a story of the banality of evil, as we understand it from Hannah Arendt, in which the unspeakable becomes normalized in a society; rather, this is a story from within the community of those who remained aware of the moral and physical degradation of their state. And that is partly why this is such a difficult book. Because it is not a fantasy filled with heroes who rewrite the past for us. There is no happy ending available. Every Man Dies Alone is a story of ineffectual and piecemeal resistance that changed absolutely nothing. It is a story of the unknown, the forgettable, the everyday German citizens who were not pro-Nazi, who were not informers, who were not necessarily cowards, but who were always afraid, and thus, generally complicit.
I am not a scholar of WWII, of Germany (or France) during the Nazi era, or of Fallada’s work, and so my reading is necessarily superficial, but as I was reading this novel I was thinking that it might be a good companion piece for readers to Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise, which portrays the mass exodus from Paris as German forces prepared to invade. Fallada wrote Everyman Dies Alone soon after the end of WWII; Nemirovsky was writing of the war as she was living within it. What she had perceived as a five-part novel ends after the first two parts. Arrested as “a stateless person of Jewish descent,” she died in Auschwitz. I suggest that these books might be usefully read together not simply because both were written by authors who were living within the maelstrom of Nazi Germany and Occupied France, but because both are dedicated to working on the level of the individual. These are not sweeping sagas of battles, or of heroes and villains (although there are some of the former and plenty of the latter), but of an everyday reality defined by the unthinkable.

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Feb 17, 2013 Elsie Heyrman rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history-biography, fiction

A fascinating book with an even more fascinating history behind it. Hans Falluda wrote this book shortly after the end of WW II. He promptly died. The book is based closely on the experiences of one elderly, German couple who lost their only son it to the World War (1940s) In response to that loss and other pressures, the husband devises his own uniquely personal way of resisting the forces of evil that he feels are pressing against him and the people he loves. His wife assists. Unfortunately, t...more

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Jan 31, 2013 Stevedutch rated it 4 of 5 stars

This story is a fictionalised account of the ‘crimes’ committed against the Nazi state by the ordinary, ‘unlettered’, working class couple, Otto and Elise Hampel. Through their fictional counterparts, Otto and Anna Quangel, Fallada shows us the lives of ordinary Berliners at the height of Nazis power and illustrates the climate of suspicion and mistrust within which they had to try to survive. By the end it has deftly illustrated, not only, examples of the worst excesses of which human beings, s...more

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Nov 29, 2012 Manfred rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Fallada paints about as unflattering a portrait of his wartime nation as possible - an entire country of people apparently indifferent to war and in terror and worship of their Fuhrer, a country of people who shift easily from manufacturing weapons crates (when the war is going well) to coffins (when it isn't.) A country of people who seek to betray their neighbors and curry favor with the Party and communicate in terrified whispers and prefer to live for an unjust cause than die for a just one....more

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Nov 21, 2012 Rick Skwiot rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

To get an idea what daily life under the Nazis might have been like in World War II Berlin, read Hans Fallada’s “Every Man Dies Alone.” The novel gives a gritty, intimate portrait of working-class home life, police scrutiny and the Hitlerian version of political correctness, where party membership and obeisance often made the difference between prosperity and poverty, “freedom” and incarceration, or life and death.

Called “the greatest book ever written about the German resistance to the Nazis” b...more

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Nov 17, 2012 Lana rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In many of his books, Fallad explores how people stuggle with the world around them and are destroyed by it, or assert themselves in some meaningful way. He based this novel on a true story of a couple who resisted the Nazi regime, showing his character's growth from just being quiet and trying to preserve his own life to trying to stand up and do something about the evil around him.

Having been charged with treason for his very minor actions, Otto Quangel lamented to his cellmate how little suc...more

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Sep 20, 2012 Gordon rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical-fiction

Hans Fallada was a troubled individual, but a very successful German author of the 20s and 30s. He began working with the Nazis when they came to power, but eventually ran afoul of them, and spent most of WWII in a Nazi insane asylum. Most people didn't survive such an experience. A year after the war ended, his publisher came to him with the story of a couple who had resisted the Nazis by writing anti-Hitler postcards, for which they were executed. Fallada turned the Gestapo documentation of th...more

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Sep 11, 2012 Darren Jones rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Every so often a book arrives which has a fascinating story behind it that only deepens your reading experience. In "Every Man Dies Alone" by Hans Fallada you get three such fascinating stories.

"Every Man Dies Alone" is the story of a humble German couple who chose to stand up to the horrors of Nazi Germany by posting cards around Berlin in the hopes of starting a grassroots revolution. They are motivated both by the destruction of the Germany they knew and loved and by the death of their son,...more

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Aug 29, 2012 Sophia rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012, germany, world-war-ii

Every Man Dies Alone is a thoughtful meditation on the age-old “if a tree falls in the forest” question during wartime Nazi Germany. Rudolph Ditzen, writing as Hans Fallada, chose to retreat as an “internal immigrant” rather than flee Germany when the Nazis rose to power. Wrestling with maintaining artistic integrity throughout their rule, he wrote this story in three months when given a Gestapo file soon after the end of the war.

The fictionalized working-class couple Otto and Anna Quangel began...more

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About Hans Fallada

Hans Fallada (21 July 1893 - 5 February 1947), born Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen in Greifswald, was one of the most famous German writers of the 20th century. His novel, Little Man, What Now? is generally considered his most famous work and is a classic of German literature. Fallada's pseudoynm derives from a combination of characters found in the Grimm fairy tales: The protagonist of Lucky Hans an...more Hans Fallada (21 July 1893 - 5 February 1947), born Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen in Greifswald, was one of the most famous German writers of the 20th century. His novel, Little Man, What Now? is generally considered his most famous work and is a classic of German literature. Fallada's pseudoynm derives from a combination of characters found in the Grimm fairy tales: The protagonist of Lucky Hans and a horse named Falada in The Goose Girl.
He was the child of a magistrate on his way to becoming a supreme court judge and a mother from a middle-class background, both of whom shared an enthusiasm for music and to a lesser extent, literature. Jenny Williams notes in her biography, More Lives than One that Fallada's father would often read aloud to his children works authors including Shakespeare and Schiller (Williams, 5).

In 1899 at the age of 6, Fallada's father relocated the family to Berlin following the first of several promotions he would receive. Fallada had a very difficult time upon first entering school in 1901. As a result, he immersed himself in books, eschewing literature more in line with his age for authors including Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Dickens. In 1909 the family again relocated to Leipzig following his father's appointment to the Imperial Supreme Court.

A rather severe road accident in 1909 (he was run over by a horse-drawn cart, then kicked in the face by the horse) and the contraction of typhoid in 1910 seem to mark a turning point in Fallada's life and the end of his relatively care-free youth. His adolescent years were characterized by increasing isolation and self-doubt, compounded by the lingering effects of these health ailments. There is, as well, that his life-long drug problems were born of the pain-killing medications he was taking as the result of his injuries. These issues manifested themselves in multiple suicide attempts. In 1911 he made a pact with his close friend, Hanns Dietrich, to stage a duel to mask their suicides, feeling that the duel would be seen as more honorable. Because of both boys' inexperience with weapons, it was a bungled affair. Dietrich missed Fallada, but Fallada did not miss Dietrich, killing him. Fallada was so distraught that he picked up Dietrich's gun and shot himself in the chest, but miraculously survived. Nonetheless, the death of his friend ensured his status as an outcast from society. Although he was found innocent of murder by way of insanity, from this point on he would serve multiple stints in mental institutions. At one of these institutions, he was assigned to work in a farmyard, thus beginning his lifelong affinity for farm culture.

While in a sanatorium Fallada took to translation and poetry, albeit unsuccessfully, before finally breaking ground as a novelist in 1920 with the publication of his first book Young Goedeschal. During this period he also struggled with morphine addiction, and the death of his younger brother in the first World War.

In the wake of the war, Fallada worked several farmhand and other agricultural jobs in order to support himself and finance his growing drug addictions. While before the war Fallada relied on his father for financial support while writing, after the German defeat he was no longer able, nor willing, to depend on his father's assistance. Shortly after the publication of Anton and Gerda Fallada reported to prison in Greiswald to serve a 6-month sentence for stealing grain from his employer and selling it to support his drug habit. Less than 3 years later in 1926 Fallada again found himself imprisoned as a result of a drug and alcohol-fueled string of thefts from employers. In February 1928 he finally emerged free of addiction.

Fallada married Suse Issel in 1929 and maintained a string of respectable jobs in journalism, working for newspapers and eventually for the publisher of his novels, Rowahlt. It is around this time that his novels became noticeably political and started to comment on the social and (less)

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“Not that she's a political animal, she's just an ordinary woman, but as a woman she's of the view that you don't bring children into the world to have them shot.” — 33 people liked it

“As it was, we all acted alone, we were caught alone, and every one of us will have to die alone. But that doesn’t mean that we are alone.” — 22 people liked it

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