It has been shown through psychological and historical research that large numbers of people are capable of acting with brutality and callousness towards other human beings. Equally, a smaller number of people are able to hold to humanitarian values at whatever cost to themselves. In looking at Nazi Germany, it is tempting to say that "it could never have happened here", that there must have been some terrible flaw in the German psyche which led to its wholesale adoption of the Nazi philosophy of death. However, it is all too apparent that in the right (wrong?) circumstances, national madness can in fact break out anywhere, leading to torture and genocide on an almost incoceivable scale.
I find myself fascinated by the question of what it was actually like to be German in the 1930s, when Nazism came into the ascendancy and ordinary people were faced with the terrible choice of either adapting to life under the regime (and thereby being complicit in its crimes), or else facing terrible persecution.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German theologian of the era believed that the choice was simple. Obedience to truth inevitably resulted in rejection of the regime, that the only choice was complicity or protest, the former leading to a moral death, the latter leading to self-sacrifice but with a clear conscience. Alone in Belin complements this belief by illustrating the out-working of the moral choices that ordinary people were faced with in those years and it is fascinating to read this "ground-level" description of life among factory workers, post office officials, minor criminals and others. Fallada focuses on those who were on the cutting edge of these choices, some taking the route of complicity, while others resisted, but at great cost to themselves.
The novel opens in a house in Berlin, 55 Jablonski Strasse, a multi-occupancy building where an elderly Jewish woman lives on the top floor, a Nazi loyalist family below her, and on the ground floor Judge Fromm, a retired and resisting judge who seeks to honour the rule of law. Above the judge live the main characters in the book, Otto and Anna Quangel a quiet and self-contained couple. Otto Quangel is noted for his stern, taciturn manner and in the factory where he works as supervisor he has no friends but is respected for his ability to get things done. His wife is obedient and respectful of her husband, a classic Haus Frau. However, when the Quangel's learn that their only son has been killed in the war they are are unable to sustain their grudging acceptance of the political situation.
The death of their son slowly enrages the Quangels and although they have lived a mildly reclusive life until now, refusing to join the Nazi Party and keeping themselves to themselves, they begin a campaign of resistance by writing postcards which Otto drops in various locations around the city, hoping that these will foment a wider revolt against the Party.
The book is populated by a wide range of other characters. The low-life criminal Emil Borkhausen and his pathetic accomplice Enno Kluge, the Nazi Persicke family, the brave Trudel Baumann, fiancée of the Quangel's dead son, and many others. For this is a book which attempts to give a picture of the wide-ranging responses to the regime, from total loyalty through to heroic resistance passing through the usual criminals and corrupt police officers who would survive whatever the circumstances.
Although the book is mainly concerned with the Quangels and their rebellious postcard enterprise, the cast of characters enables the author to provide many dramatic narratives which inter-weave throughout the book providing a fascinating picture of life in this sector of Berlin. The police hunt to find the writer of the postcards provides a comic back-drop to the unfolding human crises and tragedies. Fallada was a great story teller, and at times this book is a glorious soap-opera of domestic dramas while the bigger picture of Nazi brutality continues in the background.
However, the story keeps returning to the ill-fated Quangels, where their shared enterprise in some ways renews their marriage and enables them to act in concert in their acts of minor defiance. Their story reaches its inevitable conclusion, and Fallada gives us a terrible picture of what happens to those who try to undermine the regime in however petty a way. By the end of the book this reader realised that the humour and amusement in many of the pages is actually a vehicle for a very serious set of messages which may have been too much to take on their own.
We read that Hans Fallada led "a very tortured life: an alcoholic and morphine addict, who spent roughly a seventh of his life in prison". The Wikipedia entry on the author reveals that Fallada wrote this novel in 24 days and died just weeks before its publication. Certainly the urgency of the writing comes across strongly in the novel, and occasionally its lack of polish can be seen, but in a way which implies passion rather than carelessness. I am convinced that this book is rightly categorised as a classic. This excellent translation by Michael Hofman will surely bring it a wider audience who can only affirm its significance as a classic of 20th century world fiction.
