For the past two weeks, courtesy of Hans Fallada, I have been experiencing a nightmare. Fallada, the pen-name of Rudolf Ditzen, is the author of Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Every Man Dies Alone*), a novel that first appeared in 1947. The proximity of publication to the end of the war is remarkable because it deals with the disintegration of morality and ethics under the Third Reich in a way that was not really attempted in German society until the ’68 generation began to ask their amnesiac parents and grandparents about what they did during the war. It’s arguable that Fallada’s unflinching act of witness remains nonpareil.

Although the novel is pitiless in exposing how values are inverted under a totalitarian system, it is even more concerned with illustrating how humane qualities can stubbornly endure in the face of the Nazis’ binary logic—either you’re one of us or you’re nothing. The backbone of the narrative is the “campaign” waged against the state by a middle-aged couple, Otto and Anna Quangel (Fallada’s drew on the Gestapo files on a real-life Berlin couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, for his story). The Quangels’ fateful shift from passivity to action is initiated when their son, nicknamed Ottochen, is killed during the German invasion of France. In the first shock of grief, Anna berates her husband over the death of her son in the “wretched war” started by “you and that Führer of yours.”

Stung by this careless accusation and determined to show his wife that he’s far from being Hitler’s accomplice, Otto Quangel decides to rebel. His tactic seems ostensibly pathetic: each Sunday he and Anna meticulously write out in block capitals on a postcard a resistance slogan (“Mother! The Fuhrer has murdered my son,” reads the first); the next day the card is left in the hallway of an arbitrarily chosen building to be picked up by a random Berliner.

This central story—and the investigation undertaken by the Gestapo to catch the card writer—largely unfolds in a Berlin milieu that encompasses the erudite figure of a Judge Fromm (a widowed neighbour) through the besieged artisanal respectability of the Quangels themselves down to the demimonde of thieves, shirkers, and informers that are both victims and occasional instruments of the Nazi power. Fallada’s narrative style isn’t subtle—apparently written in a 24-day rush (which makes Stendhal’s legendary 52-day composition of The Charterhouse of Parma seem almost dilatory), the book is content to depict its principals in chiaroscuro rather than naturalistic shades of grey. For example, the family of SS fanatics who occupy a flat in the Quangels’ block, the Persickes (even their name has a certain oleaginous nastiness to it), are brutish, violent, and short tempered. Similarly, the forces of law and order, as represented by the twin aberrations of the Gestapo and the People’s Court, are populated by screaming archetypes of culpability rather than humans struggling to accommodate themselves to circumstances. (Then again, footage of Roland Freisler, the model for the judge in the novel, confirms that Fallada was not exaggerating the hysterical viciousness with which defendants were treated.)

Perhaps the sole example for which the reader is encouraged to mingle contempt with sympathy is the figure of Inspector Escherich, the Gestapo officer charged with tracking down the “hobgoblin” responsible for dropping treasonous postcards across the city. Disdaining the brutal methods advocated and practiced by his superiors, Escherich believes cool ratiocination and patience will eventually snare his prey. Unfortunately for Escherich he does not work for an organization that values rationality and waiting for results—his delay in catching the postcard writer, along with some supercilious remarks addressed to a superior, results in a beating from his SS “colleagues” and incarceration in the cells into which he formally unthinkingly flung suspects. The shock of arbitrary imprisonment, compounded by guilt over a murder carried out to buy time for his investigation, causes Escherich to suffer a breakdown. It is triggered by a black epiphany:

Escherich once felt very secure. He once thought nothing could happen to him. He worked on the assumption that he was completely different from everyone else. And Escherich has had to give up these little self-deceptions. It happened basically in the few seconds after SS man Dobat smashed him in the face and he became acquainted with fear. In the space of a very few days, Escherich became so thoroughly acquainted with fear that now there is no chance of him forgetting it for as long as he lives. He knows it doesn’t matter how he looks, what he does, what honours and praise he receives—he knows he is nothing.

The unpolished facets of Fallada’s novel do not distract from its power. Indeed, the occasional awkwardness of its approach mirrors the obdurate integrity of Otto and Anna Quangel. The novelist’s straightforward dramatization of good confronting evil is reinforced by the Quangels’ uncompromising interpretation of their situation: Standing trial in the People’s Court, Otto underlines the system’s complete degeneracy by observing that the accused is the only innocent man in the room.

Above all, the book’s evocation of the nauseating fear that hangs over its characters drives home the truth embedded in the etymology of the term “totalitarian”: the regime demands total obedience, seeking access to every crevice of its subjects’ existences. After the Nazis corrupted German society through a rolling process known as Gleichschaltung, autonomous private life—on terms outside those defined by Party’s—became not so much prohibited as inconceivable. This is why the Quangels’ postcard campaign, superficially so ineffectual, infuriates the powers-that-be to the extent of punishing their own for failing to halt it. First, the postcards’ existence presupposes that there are one or more individuals in the Reich who are thinking along lines different from the Party’s. Second, there is the fear that the people who come across the postcards will be lured into “thought crime,” even if they go to the authorities immediately. This is because finders could realize the extent of their private misgivings about the regime by having them startlingly echoed and amplified by a public statement. The solipsism of the inner exile—the mind behind the chanting face—may be breached by nothing grander than a postcard.

Every Man Dies Alone reaches out beyond its specific historical context to raise always-germane questions about the relationship between oppression and choice. When Jean-Paul Sartre made the wilfully provocative observation that the French had never been freer than under the German Occupation, he was suggesting that people recognize their commitment to a principle only when they are taking grave risks for it. Today it’s easy in France or Germany to manifest one’s devotion to freedom and democracy. Less so in, say, Iran—however, for that very reason it’s arguable that democracy is most alive in Tehran at present because that is where one is sure of finding people who, in the spirit of Otto Quangel, are willing to pay the price for remaining decent.

*The title that Penguin UK chose for the novel, Alone in Berlin, tests to breaking point the latitude given to translators in devising translations that reflect the spirit if not the literal meaning of original texts. Perhaps I was already influenced by some of the quibbles raised in the Complete Review’s piece, but I did find the contemporary (i.e. 21st-century) usages in the English translation sometimes jarred with the era described. Aside from the expletives, which would have unlikely to have been as coarse in a late 1940s novel, I was stopped cold by the term “tracksuit bottoms,” which, for me, conjures up teenagers mooching in a shopping centre atrium rather than hard-pressed Berliners in the 1940s.

The occasional “Words” feature on this blog aims to illuminate some of the more esoteric terms the common reader might encounter in fairly mainstream publications. This week’s phrase is contango:

Contango is

A) the pidgin form of English spoken by stevedores working in the Nigerian city of Port Harcourt

B) the period during which young men in certain sub-Saharan tribes undergo rites of passage

C) the situation in which the current or spot price for a commodity is lower than its forward price

D) the maximum number of shipping containers a cargo ship can carry

Highlight the text in the quote box below to discover the correct answer.

It’s option C. Contango is often used in reference to oil markets because petroleum is a non-perishable good that can be stored indefinitely while owners wait for future contracts to mature. Contango is the reason why, for example, eight supertankers—each of which can transport up to two million barrels of crude oil—remain anchored less than a hour’s travel from the Dutch port of Rotterdam. These huge vessels are serving as floating storage as the facilities in Rotterdam are already at capacity. The information is taken from a report in NRC Handelsblad, “The world is swimming in oil,” which attempts to clarify the economics underpinning this stalled armada:
“It is what we call a contango,” says Pieter Kulsen, who has been working in the oil trade for thirty years. Traders buy cheap oil on the spot market and later sell it for much more on the futures market. The price difference is more than enough to pay for the cost of floating storage, especially since the tariffs on land are higher because of the capacity problems. Lots of people are taking advantage of this situation.

We have enough problems with linear narrative and true memory–from Dr. Grene’s Commonplace Book

It is grimly apropos that I finally got around to reading Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture while the nation bobbed about in toxic wake left by the publication of Ryan/Laffoy Report. The Ryan Commission provided the most comprehensive factual account so far of how the institutions of Church and State worked hand-in-glove to facilitate the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of the Irish state’s “untermenschen.” And Barry’s novel undertakes the imaginative project of illustrating how forces of oppression could be applied in a particular setting, to particular people.

For much of her 100-year tenure on the planet, Roseanne McNulty née Clear, has been the object of these forces. Attempting at last to become the subject of her story, the ancient patient of the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital begins writing “Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself,” in which she undertakes to clarify the course of events that led to her committal. Superficially belonging to that populous fictional cohort of “unreliable narrators,” Roseanne is not so much a duplicitous chronicler as one who is reluctant to face the enormity of the injustice that has been inflicted upon her. Passages in Barry’s novel unexpectedly recall Kazuo Ishiguro’s wonderful 2005 work, Never Let Me Go. The narrator in Ishiguro’s book adopts a cunctatory approach to her tale—by dallying fetishistically over humdrum details of boarding-school life, she allows her ultimate revelation to loom larger and larger in the background. Similarly, there is a sense that Roseanne’s reminiscences of her time working in the local cafe, her cinema trips to see Fred Astaire, and, most touchingly of all, the scattered childhood moments spent with her father, are all vain efforts to damn the floodtide of misfortune that have swept her old life away. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, as Eliot would have it.

Interleaved among Roseanne’s account is the Commonplace Book kept by her medical supervisor, the institution’s senior psychiatrist, Dr William Grene. Grene is also using his journal as a refuge and as a tool—to come to terms with his failures as a carer and a husband.

It could be argued that it requires a willed credulousness to accept that both documents, putatively intended for the writers’ eyes only, are crafted with a shared level of novelistic precision. But the acceptance of implausibly articulate storytellers is typically part of the reader’s side of the contract with the writer. The compensation for accepting that deal is a remarkable prose style, which employs a conversational, storyteller’s tone to smuggle a heightened language into the reader’s consciousness. The following passage, from Dr Grene’s journal, illustrates for me how this rich text narrowly avoids becoming clotted by the density of allusions it contains (note how often the word “like” modestly slips in yet another simile into the cascade of comparisons).

[Grene has entered his dead wife's bedroom, and has begun reading from her extensive library on rose cultivation.] I lay down on my own bed and continued reading, long into the night. It was as if I were reading a letter from her, or was privileged to enter a subject that probably lined her mind like wallpaper. Rosa Gallica, a plain little rose like the one you see carved on medieval buildings as Rosa Mundi, was the first. The late roses are the huge tea roses that look in gardens like dancers’ bottoms in frilly knickers. What a creature we are, bring a simple bloom to that over the centuries, and turning those mangy scavenging animals at the edge of our ancient camp fires into Borzois and poodles. The thing itself, the first thing, will never do us alone, we must be elaborating, improving, poeticising.

The previous post described how a correction, even a quasi-erroneous one, can leave a lasting imprint on writing style. But a split infinitive is a mirthless solecism compared to the mockery—a cruelly effective pedagogical tool—the dangling modifier is supposed to engender. Again, given my education, which eschewed the stuffy business of teaching of “correct” usage, I became aware of the jeopardy posed by stranded participles only after an offender was brought to task. In this case, the offender was fictional.

In John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick, a member of his suburban coven, Sukie Rougemont, has produced a gossip piece for the local rag. The reaction from her friends is less than rapturous:

“Well, honey, it had color, but you do run on a bit and honestly—now don’t be offended—you must watch your participles. They dangle all over the place.”

Indeed, Sukie’s infelicitous prose (did Updike wince slightly while sabotaging his usual flawless style?) does showcase a classic example of a dangling participle inadvertently conveying a ridiculous image:

Constructed circa 1895 in a brick English style, with a symmetrical façade and massive chimneys at either end, the new proprietor hopes to convert his acquisition to multiple usages…

Of course, the new proprietor was not constructed in a brick English style. A sentence such this falls in line with the comical botches usage guides have typically trotted out to buttress their arguments. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Usage goes as far to speculate that “funny examples have apparently been invented for the purpose of illustration. Actual dangling modifiers are more often of such a nature as to excite little mirth; indeed, they may hardly be noticeable except to practising rhetorician or usage expert.”

Case in point is a line from a recent Economist article on Ireland’s upcoming poll on the Lisbon referendum: “What of the second referendum on Lisbon this autumn? Looking at the polls, a Yes vote is widely expected.”

Reading this sentence according to the “rules,” we could quibble that a Yes vote would be unlikely to look at a poll. But that underrated tool for interpreting text—a degree of sanity—allows us to overlook the supposedly inappropriate modifier. If the result does not, for example, imply that a man was built from brick in the late 19th-century, it seems that a dangler can be easily swallowed, even by readers who can recognize one. Despite this commonsense approach, some of us still chaperone our participles with paranoid vigilance: we either struggle to parachute in phantom subjects (“Looking at the polls, most observers expect a Yes vote”) or groan in shame when discovering outbreaks in our own writing.