Alone in Berlin: Hans Fal­lada's great book

Born in Greifswald in NE Germany, Rudolf Ditzen (1893–1947) was the son of a law­yer and a very educated moth­er. In 1909 the family rel­ocat­ed south to Leipzig, following dad's app­ointment to the Imp­erial Supreme Court. A road accident and typhoid led to a life of pain-killing medications. At 18 the lad killed his boyfriend in a mutual-suicide duel, and spent years in psych­iatric hospit­als and drug clinics, or in prison for robberies. In bet­ween, the re-named Hans Fal­lada worked on the land, wrote a few nov­els and did jobs on newspapers.

It was a chaotic life. At the same time as his youngest broth­er was killed in WW1, Hans was struggling with morph­ine add­ict­­­ion. His alcohol-fuelled crimes and sub­sequent gaol sentences only ended when Fallada married in 1929

His 1932 novel, Kleiner Mann, did well at home and overseas, and was made into a film. Under Nazi censorship, Fallada wrote and pub­lished a series of tough novels that Germans called neue Sachlichkeit i.e New Objectivity.

Fallada planned to leave Germany. His British publisher had arranged to send a private boat to get the family out of Germ­any in late 1938. But Fallada stayed, fearing he could ne­v­­­er write in another lang­uage, nor live elsewhere.

Fallada's book cover

this edition was published in French

In late 1943, the author lost his long-term German pub­lisher who escaped overseas. So Hans again turned to alcohol and random sex, to deal with his collapsing marriage. In 1944 he shot at his (first) wife in anger and was again certified.

Fallada remained deeply depressed by the impossible task of er­adic­ating Fascism that was so deeply ingrained in German society. He resumed his old morphine habit with his second wife, and both ended up in hospital.

Yet at the end of the war, Fallada was welcomed by the new East German literary authorit­ies. In 1947 he published Alone in Berl­in with Aufbau-Verlag, the first novel by a German author to consider local resistance to the National Soc­ialists. How am­azing that Hans wrote his best no­v­el during Sept-Nov 1946, just months before dying from a morphine over­dose in Feb 1947. No wonder he became one of the best-known German writers of the early-mid C20th.

The 1946 book: Alone in Berlin
The characters Otto and Anna Quangel were based on the real working family of Otto and Elise Hampel. It was 1940, France had surrend­ered, Nazism seemed unassailable and citizens was endangered. Diss­ent brought arrest and prison. Be­lin was filled with fear.

The novel’s main characters lived in 55 Jablonski Strasse, a house divided into grimy flats. Residents tried to live under Nazi rule in their dif­ferent ways: the Persickes were nasty Hitler loyal­ists; the very decent retired Judge Fromm was preparing a shelter to protect eld­erly Jewish Frau Ros­enthal; Eva Kluge, the kind post­­woman, resigned from work and The Party, and left her thuggish husband.

In the same block of flats the Quangel couple was plodding, tight with money, unsociable and not hostile to Nat­ional Social­ist propag­anda. So how did this unlikely family de­cide to defy tyr­ann­ic­al Nazi rule? In 1940 their be­loved only son Ottochen was kill­ed while fight­­ing in France. Horrified out of their normally comp­liant ex­ist­ence, the couple began a silent campaign of defiance.

Otto, a nearly illiterate foreman making furniture, chang­ed. He wrote anon­ym­ous and diss­ident postcards against the reg­ime, dropping them in building stairwells around their suburb, Berlin-Wedding. His first card said: "Moth­ers, Hitler Will Kill Your Son Too". Then “Work as slowly as you can!” And “Put sand in the mach­ines!” 276 postcards and 8 letters were deposited by the Quangels in 1.5 years.

Despite Otto’s fears, his quiet wife Anna insisted in join­ing Otto’s anti-Nazi campaign. For years the couple's marriage had become lonely. But being unable to console each other for their son’s death, it was suggested that their shared risky project brought them back closer, perhaps in love again.

A scary game developed bet­ween the Quangels and the pol­ice. Ges­tapo Inspector Escherich was the policeman resp­on­sible for sourcing the postcards, out of professional duty rather than Nazi ideol­ogy. During his meticulous search­ for clues about the mysterious post­card writer, Escherich devel­oped a sneaky respect for his criminal.

The postcards irritated the authorities. Failure to solve the case compromised Escherich’s career, the Inspector who was beat­en up by his impatient SS bosses. Clearly the Quangels could never ultimately escape the relentless savagery of the regime; a betrayal would eventually en­sn­are them.

Otto Quangel was caught when post­cards falling out of his pock­et, betrayed by a workmate. The two of them were arrested in Oct 1942, but Otto remained calm about his inevitable ex­ecution. And he did everything to save Anna. But they were both sentenced to death by the People's Court. Did Otto and Anna at least had some moment of moral triumph during the court case?

The film version of Alone in Berlin, 2016

They were executed in Plötzensee prison. After the executions, Gestapo Inspector Escherich was alone in his off­ice. He gath­ered up all of the hund­reds of subversive postcards, scatt­er­ed them out of the police headquarters windows and shot himself dead.

The ten­sion that the author maintained, despite the foregone conclusion, was unnerving. And like daily life in Berlin, the language was harsh and full of misery. Some readers found Alone in Berlin to be morally powerful, while others were just plain exhaust­ed. I liked the reviewer who said that resist­ance to evil was rarely straightforward, mostly futile and generally doomed.

The book did very well and was fil­med for television in both East and West Germany, and then again for the cinema in the west in 1975 with Hildegard Knef and Carl Raddatz.

The 2016 film: Alone in Berlin The 2016 war drama film, based on Hans Fallada’s 1947 book, was directed by Vincent Pér­ez and starred Emma Thompson, Bren­dan Gleeson and Daniel Brühl. It was made in Ber­lin and shown at Berlin’s International Film Festival. The film ended with the image of the postcards swirling in the wind, falling down on the Berlin streets and picked up by pas­sers by. It gave the film's characters an understated posthumous moral victory.