A tie-in edition of Fallada's best-selling WW2 novel, to accompany the major new film starring Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson. Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. When unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel receive the news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France, they are shocked out of their quiet existence and begin a silent campaign of defiance. A deadly game of cat and mouse develops between the Quangels and the ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich in Fallada's desperately tense and heartbreaking exploration of resistance in impossible circumstances.
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Hans Fallada wrote this book based on recovered Gestapo files in twenty-four days while slowly dying in 1946 Berlin. He had remained in Germany during the war, unlike other authors, and had been confined by the Nazis in a mental asylum, often akin to a death sentence itself ... although he had spent time in such institutions before. His title for his work 'Jeder stirbt für sich allein' translated better to ‘Everyone Dies [for one-self] Alone’, and has a more suitable mood and sense of theme than ‘Alone in Berlin’, which generalises the alone-ness, makes the geography too particular, and removes the all important reference to death. The inclusion of the ‘für sich‘ [for one-self] also emphasises a sense of abandonment in that death.
But quibbles about the English title are ... well, quibbles. Fallada manages to take ordinary working people, some of whom are doing some very ordinary essentially pointless and ineffective political agitating, and create a magnificent tragic drama, full of absurdities and weakness, courage and heroism; while remaining true to the milieu he lived through and a sense of Down and Out in Berlin.
He effortlessly moves from person to person, from angle to angle ... the central protagonists all but disappear for the middle third of the book, and you don’t miss them at all. He takes criminal scoundrels and puts them up against Nazi scoundrels and puts them up against Nazi less-scoundrels and non-Nazi do-nothings ... and even communist scoundrels. It is dark work, but where he lets the light through is all the more bright and astonishing. The systems of savagery and how the work, up and down various scales, create some very grim humour, as well as unexpected sympathies. This kind of writing is brilliance.
Death features heavily, slow and sudden, ridiculous and meticulous, undeserving and deserved. And we all now how it’s going to end. The freshness of Fallada’s writing in relation to the closeness to the death/defeat of the Nazi Reich is also one of its strengths. He is writing before the discourse around the war has been set in stone. He has more room for movement and savage playfulness. And his own death/defeat is so consciously close to him. There is a manic freshness to the style, even while it so magnificently lingers in the naturalist style. You never get a sense of hurry. You get a sense of terrible inevitability of the end. And the end. And despite this, too, it sometimes has the quality of a fairy tale, particularly with the glib chapter titles making light of the most horrible things.
There is a kind of solidarity in being alone. There is the idea of the planted anti-Nazi postcards being not so much targeted propaganda but a way in which the words of ordinary Germans can surface ... and terrorise all of those who hold the ideas in their hearts and minds, but are too fearful to say them. Early on, Eva Kluge is worried about Germany winning the war and the Nazis ruling supreme:
'To have the likes of them as masters and always have to mind your p‘s and q‘s.'
Enno, little Enno, flawed and horrible, opportunistic layabout philanderer ... still sticks with you. Is he is bad as some? No. Is he bad. Yes. Does he deserve his life? No. And yes. Does he deserve his death? Yes. And no. And the marvellous women that Fallada invents shine out. They are certainly not ‘kick-arse’ or ‘bad-arse’ ... but they are tragically real; heroic, according to their strengths and weaknesses; and flawed horribly too. And one of them—one of them—Fallada actually cuts a break to. The most deserving? No. And yes.
In the jail yard, facing the guillotine, the doctor asks Otto Quangel how he feels.
‘Just at the moment my heart’s going a bit, but I expect it’ll settle down in a minute or two.’
Das ist Galgenhumor. - Jeremy (QBD)
Guest, 23/04/2017
