Wish You Weren’t Here

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.