I’m back. What with the non-stop writing in November sucking up most of my free time, I got a little behind on my reading. And then I chose to read a huge book right after, hence the delay in posting. Anyway, I’m back on track with my reading.
I’d read about Every Man Dies Alone*, by Hans Fallada, in one of the many book review magazines I read for work. Unlike the two rediscovered novels by Irene Nemirovsky, this one sounded like there was some action in it. This book is based on the lives of Otto and Elise Hempel, who started a campaign of sending out letters and postcards with anti-fascist messages on them. They got away with it for almost three years before they were caught. After the war, Fallada was recruited by a German author who’d spent most of the war in Russia. He actually had his hands on the actual Gestapo file for the couple. According to the rather brilliant afterword, Fallada wasn’t really interested in writing the story, because the Hempels never really accomplished much with their campaign–just like their fictional counterparts (520**).
Be warned. Spoilers follow.
Geoff Wilkes, who wrote that afterword, goes on to draw the parallel that Fallada is writing about the “banality of good,” like Arendt did for evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem (527). But even though the characters lead small lives, Fallada does a lot to show the moral dilemma of the average German. Do you support Hitler? Or do you not? If you do not, what can you go about it. This novel is set in 1940 and 1942-43. By that time, according to the author, Germany had reached a fever pitch of paranoia and denounciations, almost comparable to Russia during the Great Terror. You couldn’t talk politics with anyone but trusted family members (if then). You couldn’t talk about the war to anyone. Ending up in a rehab clinic or mental institution was often as dangerous as been sent to prison or the concentration camps. If you weren’t the Party (the National Social Party, because all other political parties were illegal), you had few opportunities and faced suspicion from the police and other Party members. Von Stauffenberg‘s and the White Rose‘s plans was a spectacular exception to the norm. Because everyday Germans were be spied on by other everyday Germans all the time, and because no one wanted to be implicated in anything, it was extremely hard to start anything without getting caught right away. It was so much easier to just keep your head down and pay at least lip service to the regime.
What starts Anna and Otto Quangel (the fictional version of the Hempels) on their small campaign is a letter delivered by local postwoman Eva Kluge informing them that their only son has died in battle in France. Otto, a very quiet man, get the idea first. Oddly, it’s not so much that his son has died as that Otto has realized that he can’t sit by and say nothing anymore. His idea is to write a postcard a week, sometimes two, and leave them in office and apartment buildings all over Berlin. He imagines that people will pick them up and, out of fear of being caught with them, pass them on to new buildings to start the cycle all over. He believes that he is saying out loud what the majority of people are thinking.
Along the way, we meet a bunch of other characters by chance: Eva’s estranged husband and perennial wastrel Enno; the bitter, failed criminal in the basement of the Quangel’s building, Borkhausen; the apparatchiks downstairs, the Persickes; and the Quangel’s erstwhile daughter-in-law, Trudel. Between an incident involving an elderly Jewish woman upstairs and the postcards, everyone gets swept into the Gestapo’s net over the course of the book. Fallada has everyone play a role, no matter how small, and we stay with those characters until the end of the book or their deaths (whichever comes first). Even though, in the scheme of things, no one seems to accomplish much that anyone outside of their small circles of aquaintance notices, it feels like a big story. As events played out, I got more and more worried about the Quangels and Eva Kluge and Trudel. And when they are eventually caught, it’s just heartbreaking.
The way that Fallada chose to write this story is pretty damn close to genius. Not only do the characters–in a very natural and believable way–show how ordinary Germans dealt with the ethics and morals of living in an evil regime, but they also show how–given enough scrutiny in this environment–everyone is guilty of something. Once the Gestapo starts looking, they find whatever it is that you want to hide. They can arrest just about anyone on any pretense (again, Party members are protected, as the Persicke plot line illustrates), even being “politically unreliable.” In a sense, suspicion is like a virus. Everyone who is even remotely involved gets infected. People who were unlucky enough to be in the building where a card was found are infected. Once the characters are pulled in by the Gestapo, there’s no way to get rid of the virus either. In fact, once they get a character in their clutches, they force them to name names and even more people are drawn into the conspiracy, whether they actually knew about it or not.
Books like this one inevitable lead you to wondering what you would have done if you’d lived in German under the Reich. It’s easy to condemn ordinary Germans now, almost seventy years after the start of World War II, because we know what Hitler was really up to. What we don’t know is what life was like for the people who actually lived it. Fallada’s book helps fill that gap and, like any real ethical question, it makes the situation a muddy gray rather than black and white. According to the afterword, showing ordinary people dealing with major events in the world and trying to “stay decent” is a major theme in Fallada’s work (513, 523-524). How do you stick to what you know is right and wrong when everything is being twisted, when the world is changing those definitions to fit its own ends? And this is why Fallada wrote about ordinary people who got sick of staying quiet, who spoke their minds, who tried to carry on their lives like they had before, and failed.
While the novel does end with the capture, trial, and deaths of the Quangels, Trudel, and her husband, Fallada did make an attempt to end the book with a note of hope:
But we don’t want to end this book with death, dedicated as it is to life, invincible life, life always triumphing over humiliation and tears, over misery and death. (506)
The last chapter takes place in 1946, with a family starting to build a life as Germany gets back on its feet. A boy named Kuno is driving home in a wagon when a figure from his past–Borkhausen, who might be his biological father and who drew the boy into a scheme to track down Enno Kluge during the hunt for the postcard writer–begs him for a ride. When Borkhausen finds out who the kid is, he begs and threatens until Kuno throws him out of the wagon and threatens him to the point where Borkhausen slinks off into the woods. It’s not an overly hopeful scene, but it is sympolic of Germany’s attempts to move on from its terrible, terrible past.
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* Granted I don’t know all that much about translating German idioms, but the full German title Jeder stirbt fuer sich allein I would translate as Everyone dies for themselves alone. Given the death row conversations the characters have, I think this translation fits better.
** From the hardback edition by Melville House. All citations come from this edition of the book.