A Fulcrum Book Review: Alone in Berlin

A Fulcrum Book Review

by James Mercer

‘Alone in Berlin’ by Hans Fallada

Alone in Berlin is the intriguing, dark, tense and yet surprisingly redemptive story of an ordinary Berlin couple’s small act of resistance to the all-pervading Nazi regime during the Second World War. It draws its inspiration from real life events.

On learning that their son has been killed during the invasion of France, Otto and Anna Quangel experience an epiphany through which they recognize, with immediate clarity, the everyday reality of the appalling violence and life destroying futility that has descended upon their family, workplace, city and nation. They embark upon a profoundly dangerous campaign of placing postcards prominently in locations around Berlin, encouraging the people to subvert the nihilistic brutality of the state. The first card reads:

‘Mother! The Fuhrer will murder your sons too, he will not stop until he has brought sorrow to every home in the world’

Although Anna protests that the initiative is ‘a bit small’, Otto points out that ‘if they get wind of it, it’ll cost us our lives’. Anna reflects that ‘no one could risk more than his life’. A fearful citizenry hands most of the postcards, when found, to the police. The Gestapo meticulously document the location where each postcard is discovered, over a period of several years.

The Quangel’s betrayal and capture are horribly inevitable. But the desperate Gestapo inspector, Escherich, charged with arresting the improbable dissenters, is forced to confront his complicity as an agent of the state’s violence. With Otto’s eventual capture, he can no longer convince himself that he is merely a faithful and impartial servant of government. Otto’s challenge reveals the truth:

‘You’re working in the employ of a murderer, delivering ever new victims to him. You do it for money; perhaps you don’t even believe in the man. No, I’m certain you don’t believe in him. Just for money, then…’

As Escherich pulls the trigger to take his own life, he reflects that he is, incongruously, Otto’s sole disciple.

The novel explores how other ordinary citizens dealt with the ethical issues of living in Nazi Germany. Some take advantage of the reign of fear and make a living as informants and blackmailers. Most seek to survive by passive conformity. The majority of the few who resist suffer sanctions, many incarceration and death. However, the maintenance of human dignity in the face of violence, humiliation and saturating fear is a key motif of those who refuse to conform to the systematic, yet often casual, brutality of the usurped state.

Reichart, a Christian pastor in an incongruous state sanctioned chaplaincy within the jail in which Otto is finally incarcerated, also refuses to conform to the dictates of the callous administration. Through guile and brazen defiance, he succeeds in bringing glimpses of true humanity both to the doomed prisoners and the brutalized captors. He pays with his life.

The implicit hope within the narrative insists that despite the dissidents’ near inevitable fate, nonetheless they will have proved to be amongst the ‘righteous few’ who one day will be seen as those who redeemed the nation.

In Reichart’s evaluation of his and the Quangels’ and the others’ resistance he reflects:

‘Well, it will have helped us to feel that we behaved decently till the end. And much more, it will help people everywhere, who will be saved for the righteous few among them, as it says in the Bible.’

In confronting tyranny, Otto and Anna, late in life, find their true identities and love for one another. Under the long black shade of death, they discover their genuine humanity and, paradoxically, life.

The novel was written just after the war. The author’s own faith remains ambiguous. His experiences of war-time Berlin are woven into the fabric story. Fallada died in 1947. Alone in Berlin was translated by Michael Hoffmann and published by Penguin in 2009.

Primo Levi claims this to be ‘the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis’