A brutal take on a good German

FICTION: Alone in Berlin, By Hans Fallada, translated by Michael Hofmann, Penguin, 568pp, £20.00

OTTO QUANGEL doesn’t say much, never did. His wife, Anna, is the emotional one. It is she who frets for their only son, fighting for the Fatherland. When news arrives that he has fallen, killed in battle, it is she who grieves. Her taciturn husband never really knew the boy and wasn’t all that interested in him.

Still the news of that death, combined with the fact of the war and what it is doing to ordinary Germans like Quangel, finally sparks off a reaction in the quiet, aging man. He begins a rebellion that helps him establish some level of relationship with his loving wife.

There are echoes of the great Joseph Roth at work through this terrific literary find; the first English translation of this fast-moving, important and astutely deadpan thriller not only fills in more of the story about ordinary life in wartime Germany, it will alert readers to yet another European classic now available to a wider readership.

Hans Fallada who is best known for Kleiner Mann – was nun? (1932) which was translated into an English abridged version within a year as Little Man – What Now?,with the first English translation of the complete book finally appearing in 1996, was himself the stuff of fiction. That earlier novel concentrated on the life of an Everyman figure, a modest young clerical worker who struggles to make a life for his wife and child against the background of growing wartime economic chaos.

Alone in Berlinwhich was first published in 1947, the same year that Fallada died at 54 of a morphine overdose, is different; it is a tougher, more ironic book and a characteristically adroit translation by poet Michael Hofmann conveys all that irony.

There are several viewpoints as the narrative follows a large cast of developed characters, few of them saints. What links most of them however is a unifying hatred of the Nazi regime. The party divides society and even among the tenants of 55 Jablonski Strasse there are tensions as the brutal Persicke clan is loyal to Hitler and hostile to pretty much everything else. The building is also home to the Quangels, an old Jewish widow and Judge Fromm.

Fallada manages his characters very well. Their various relationships are convincingly established. They are all exhausted; life has changed for the worse and everyone is suspicious. There are also some comic flourishes largely confined to the antics of the postwoman Eva Kluge’s estranged husband, Enno, a no-good who slithers from woman to woman.

It is a pithy narrative drawn most effectively in shades of grey: “Foreman Quangel has emerged onto the Jablonski Strasse, and run into Emil Borkhausen on the doorstep. That seems to be Emil Borkhausen’s one and only calling in life, to be always standing around where there’s something to gawp at or overhear. The war hasn’t done anything to change that, for all its call on patriots to do their duty on the home front: Emil Borkhausen has just continued to stand around.”

The scenes with Eva and her husband pit her resolve against his vicious cunning. Fallada carefully establishes all the characters before moving on to the main plot.

Otto Quangel prepares to write postcards. They are not harmless greetings. They are dangerous anti-government communications. He begins by warning mothers what will happen to their sons and increasingly addresses them to the evils of the Führer.

The postcards are left by him in public places, they are quickly noticed and the Gestapo sets out to track down the postcard writer. Meanwhile the postcard campaign brings the Quangels together. It becomes a thriller as the shift moves to one of will the Quangels be caught? Fallada never misses a beat and never imposes himself on a narrative which obviously has polemical intent.

It is a dramatic book; brutal and candid. Fallada presents the Nazis as vicious and cruel even to each other. All the while lives drag on and change and are ended. The innocent are caught because no one is allowed to be innocent, no one is allowed to think. Although a long book, the narrative moves so quickly that is seems short, not a word is wasted. The wonder is why it has not been made into a movie. But then questions invariably surround Hans Fallada, a character too crazy to inhabit any novel.

Born Rudolf Ditzen in 1893, he was the son of a Prussian high court judge and was raised in Berlin and Dresden. By all accounts little Rudolf was difficult. He ran away from home, tried to kill himself a couple of times and was accused of writing obscene letters to the daughter of one of his father’s legal colleagues. Worse would follow as he failed to honour a suicide pact in which he shot and killed a friend. He escaped trial on the grounds of insanity. This also helped him avoid military duty. He spent the war years becoming a morphine addict.

Throughout all of this he revealed a spectacular flair for survival and became a successful farmer and draws on this in the closing sections of Alone in Berlin.

All the while he was writing, and when he was imprisoned for theft related to his drug habit, writing, in the form of a publisher, rescued him.

Peasants, Bosses and Bombswas published in 1930 and it gave an accurate account of a 1920's farming protest. Taking his pen name from the horse that is beheaded in a Grimm's fairytale yet continues to tell the truth, Hans Fallada, a witness with a flair for survival as well as one for self destructon, did precisely that as writer who missed very little.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of

The Irish Times