Inside World War II Berlin
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” by Primo Levi, it was first published in 1947 just after the author died of a morphine overdose and first translated and published in English in 2009. Though lengthy (some 500 pages—I estimated about 200,000 words—which Fallada was said to have written in a mere 24 days!) it is a page-turner in an odd way—not to find out who done it (the Gestapo and the SS, of course)—but to see the compelling human drama played out to its end.
Based on the case of an actual Berlin couple, the novel argues for personal integrity and resistance to corruption.
Called “the greatest book ever written about the German resistance to the Nazis” by Primo Levi, it was first published in 1947 just after the author died of a morphine overdose and first translated and published in English in 2009. Though lengthy (some 500 pages—I estimated about 200,000 words—which Fallada was said to have written in a mere 24 days!) it is a page-turner in an odd way—not to find out who done it (the Gestapo and the SS, of course)—but to see the compelling human drama played out to its end.
Based on the case of an actual Berlin couple, the novel argues for personal integrity and resistance to corruption.
No comments have been added yet.
