Alone in Berlin (Penguin Modern Classics)

Afterword

Early on the morning of 17 October 1911, eighteen-year-old Rudolf Ditzen and his friend Hanns Dietrich von Necker armed themselves, walked out into the countryside around the Thuringian town of Rudolstadt (where they were attending school), and fired on each other in the manner of duellists. Like many other young men in imperial Germany, Ditzen and von Necker had struggled to reconcile their developing sexuality with the prevailing social conventions, and were seeking escape in a suicide pact, but they staged it as a duel (purportedly to uphold the honour of a young woman) to protect the reputations of their families. Von Necker missed, but was fatally wounded by Ditzen, who then used his friend’s revolver to shoot himself in the chest. Miraculously, Ditzen survived, and he was charged with von Necker’s murder. However, Ditzen was declared unfit for trial on psychological grounds, and committed to a private sanatorium for the mentally ill in February 1912. Although Ditzen had been studying for his university-entrance exams in Rudolstadt, upon his release from the sanatorium in September 1913 his parents and doctors decided that he should pursue an agricultural career, and he spent the next several years working mainly on farms and for farming organizations. These years were also characterized by the intermittent dependence on various drugs against which Ditzen struggled for all of his adult life. No single factor or incident can be isolated as the immediate cause of his addictions, which at different times encompassed alcohol, sleeping drugs, cocaine and morphine – though Ditzen often relied simply on whatever was most readily available: for example, he was sometimes prescribed sleeping drugs for insomnia and nervous complaints, and morphine was particularly accessible during and immediately after the two World Wars.

But neither his legal problems, nor the abandonment of his formal education, nor his recurrent substance abuse could extinguish the interest in writing which Ditzen first showed during his schooldays, and in 1920 the Ernst Rowohlt publishing house issued his debut novel, Young Goedeschal, which deals with the sexual and psychological tribulations of the eponymous male protagonist. Rudolf Ditzen’s father Wilhelm, a retired justice of the German Supreme Court, had urged him to publish Young Goedeschal under a pseudonym, to avoid reviving public memories of how he had killed von Necker. So Rudolf chose the nom de plume ‘Hans Fallada’, and adhered to it throughout his literary career. The name was inspired by two Grimm fairy tales, ‘Hans in Luck’ and ‘The Goose Girl’. In the first tale, Hans retains his naïve optimism while losing the wages of seven years’ labour in a series of bartering deals with smooth-tongued strangers: he starts with a lump of gold, and ends with two stones, which he lets fall into a well before continuing happily on his way. In the second tale, a talking horse called Falada saves a dispossessed princess from her lowly work tending geese by testifying to her true identity. Rudolf Ditzen’s choice of a literary pseudonym in 1920 reflected both his protracted struggle to come to grips with the realities of the world around him, and his defiant conviction that he would still somehow succeed in asserting himself against it. That struggle and that conviction persisted for the remainder of his life, and were embodied in many of the characters he created.

Neither Young Goedeschal nor its successor Anton and Gerda (1923), which also deals with adolescent sexuality, attracted much critical or popular attention, and Hans Fallada – as I shall now call him – continued his agricultural career. He was twice convicted of embezzling from employers, serving prison sentences in 1924 and 1926–8, and after the second sentence he settled in the north German town of Neumünster, where he worked on a local newspaper and married Anna Issel, a woman of working-class background from Hamburg. In 1930 Fallada took a clerical position with his publisher Rowohlt in Berlin, where he also completed a novel about provincial politics which was based on his experiences in Neumünster, and appeared in 1931 under the title Farmers, Functionaries and Fireworks. Although this third novel was a modest literary and financial success, the Rowohlt firm was placed in receivership a few months after it was published, and employees were then asked to continue working at reduced salaries. Fallada refused, and instead negotiated a contract that guaranteed five modest monthly payments which were to support him while he wrote his next novel, and to be treated as advances against his earnings from it.

That novel was Little Man, What Now? (1932), the story of how the sales clerk Pinneberg struggles to provide for his wife and their baby during the Great Depression, though finally he joins the ranks of the long-term unemployed. Little Man, What Now? was a major hit, and restored the Rowohlt firm’s finances. Forty-eight thousand copies were issued before the end of the year, serializations were printed in dozens of newspapers, translation rights were sold in numerous languages, a film version was made in Germany, and a stage version was performed in Denmark. In the US, the novel was published by Simon & Schuster (with Richard Simon describing it as ‘perilously close to a masterpiece’ in a letter to Fallada on 2 March 1933), and selected as the Book of the Month Club’s choice for June 1933. It was also filmed by Universal Pictures, with Douglass Montgomery and Margaret Sullavan in the lead roles, premiering in New York on 31 May 1934. The reviews of Little Man, What Now? were mostly positive, and scores of readers wrote fan letters to Fallada. On the evidence of the reviews and fan letters, the novel’s success was based not on its intermittent and unsystematic attempts to analyse the Pinnebergs’ predicament in economic or political terms, but on its emotional affirmation of their family life as a refuge from their material difficulties. This is the aforementioned combination of struggle and self-assertion that recurs often in Fallada’s works. The Pinnebergs do not so much resolve their problems as defy them, so that in the last paragraphs of the novel, even after months of poverty and humiliation, the despairing Pinneberg is consoled by his wife’s insistence that ‘You’re with me, we’re together’, and they feel elevated ‘higher and higher, from the tarnished earth to the stars’.

Although the Nazis’ accession to power in January 1933 prompted many authors to leave Germany, Fallada remained, partly because – as he told his parents in a letter on 6 March 1933 – his next novel would be ‘a quite unpolitical book which can’t give offence’. He was also preoccupied by more immediate personal problems, because among other things he had resumed his habit of heavy drinking. Fallada sought refuge from political and personal hazards in what he hoped was the obscurity and tranquillity of the countryside by buying a house in Berkenbrück, on the outskirts of Berlin. However, at Easter 1933 Fallada was denounced as an anti-Nazi conspirator by the previous owner of the house, who hoped to regain possession of it, and he was arrested by a local stormtrooper unit, and spent several days in prison. The denunciation was of course spurious, and Fallada gained his release in a similarly irregular manner, after Ernst Rowohlt engaged a prominent lawyer with connections in the German National People’s Party (which had long collaborated with the Nazi Party) that he exploited on Fallada’s behalf. Several months later – in what seemed to have been an effort at ‘out of sight, out of mind’, as well as to escape the recurrence of his heavy drinking after the success of Little Man, What Now? – Fallada acquired a smallholding in the village of Carwitz, about fifty miles north of Berlin, where he lived for most of the next twelve years. But Carwitz was not immune from Nazism either, as was exemplified by its virulently pro-Hitler schoolteacher. Fallada’s experiences in Berkenbrück and Carwitz have obvious echoes in Alone in Berlin. When Trudel Baumann and Karl Hergesell move just outside Berlin to start their life together after their resistance cell is disbanded, they make ‘the painful discovery that recrimination, eavesdropping, and informing were ten times worse in the small towns than in the big city’ (p. 305). And when Eva Kluge settles in a village after leaving her post-office job and the Nazi Party, she finds that the local schoolteacher is ‘a rampant Nazi, a cowardly little yapper and denouncer’ (p. 371), though he is later drafted, and replaced by the humane Kienschaper.

The political hostility which Fallada encountered in Nazi Germany was not confined to his everyday life, but extended to his literary work. His fifth and supposedly ‘quite unpolitical’ novel, The World Outside (which he began before 1933 but did not complete and publish until 1934), was viciously attacked by Nazi critics for its comparatively sympathetic portrayal of convicts. Fallada’s literary career in the decade following The World Outside developed a remarkable diversity, as he searched for genres in which he could avoid political controversy, retain his artistic integrity, and earn a sufficient income. More than anything else, he wrote light novels with non-contemporary settings, often designed partly for magazine serializations, and sometimes commissioned by film studios. But he also produced short stories for children, fictionalized autobiographies about his childhood and his life in Carwitz, the first part of a projected medieval mock epic (which was not published until 1995), and translations of Clarence Day’s Life With Father and Life With Mother. And he planned books based on journeys to France, Spain and the Czech town of Mimoň which had been sponsored by the Reich Labour Service, and on a financial scandal of the 1920s which had involved Jewish stockbrokers, but no manuscripts of these have survived.

By the time of the Nazi defeat, Fallada had completed only one work that stands comparison with the novels about contemporary society which he published in the early 1930s. This is Wolf Among Wolves (1937), an intricately detailed but tightly plotted panorama of life in Berlin and the countryside during the hyperinflation of 1923. The main characters, Wolfgang Pagel and Petra Ledig, echo the Pinnebergs by adhering defiantly to their own conceptions of love and morality while the ever-deepening financial crisis threatens the social contract no less than the economic foundations of post-war Germany. Fallada’s next novel, Iron Gustav (1938), is the most notorious of his Nazi-era works. It was commissioned as the basis for a major film featuring star actor Emil Jannings, and traces the fortunes of the Berlin-based Hackendahl family from shortly before the Great War. Fallada’s original manuscript ended the Hackendahls’ story in the late 1920s, but he was induced – partly, he claimed later, by Joseph Goebbels’ reported comment that if Fallada still didn’t know what he thought of the Nazi Party, then the Nazi Party would know what it thought of Fallada – to continue the action into the 1930s. The novel was then published in this extended form, with the final section showing first one of Hackendahl’s sons as a stormtrooper, then Hackendahl himself – hesitantly, at first, then firmly – accepting the extended hand of his son’s senior officer in the book’s last lines. However, the film was abandoned. In a letter to his friend Nico Rost on 19 September 1946, Fallada wrote candidly that he had agreed to revise Iron Gustav in fear of the concentration camp, though ‘nevertheless the guilt of every line I wrote then still weighs on me today’. In a letter to Ernst Rowohlt on 20 March the same year, he had said somewhat less candidly that: ‘Apart from the ending of Iron Gustav, I can be accused of nothing at all.’ Fallada’s opinion of Jannings can perhaps be inferred from his portrayal in Chapter 19 of Alone in Berlin of the film actor Harteisen, who is obsessed by regaining the friendship which Goebbels has capriciously granted and then capriciously withdrawn.

The constant threats to Fallada’s individual liberty and artistic integrity after 1933 prompted him to reconsider his decision to remain in Germany, but not to reverse it. According to an account which Anna gave decades afterwards, in late 1938 the Putnam publishing firm arranged transport to England for the couple and their children, and the family had literally packed their bags and were about to set off when Fallada decided to take a farewell walk to one of the lakes around Carwitz, and declared when he returned that he could not leave. The restrictions on Fallada’s literary creativity adversely affected his personal life, in his recurring abuse of alcohol and sleeping drugs, and in a growing deterioration of his relationship with Anna, from whom he was divorced in July 1944, although the exigencies of wartime meant that they both continued living on the smallholding. On 28 August 1944, Fallada threatened Anna with a gun. She disarmed him easily, hit him over the head with the gun, then called the local doctor. The doctor in turn called the police, who committed Fallada to a psychiatric hospital in nearby Alt-Strelitz for observation; a court document confirming the committal stated that he had drunk twelve bottles of wine from 26 to 28 August. On 28 November Fallada was sentenced to three months and two weeks in prison, but he remained in the psychiatric hospital until that sentence expired on 13 December.

It was during his incarceration in Alt-Strelitz that Fallada, having secured permission to work on his novel about the financial scandal, wrote a deliberately almost illegible manuscript – writing in a very small hand, and first filling the pages, then writing upside down in the spaces between the lines, then writing in any remaining spaces, so that the manuscript was not deciphered until some years after his death, when it was found to consist of several different texts. In addition to some uncontroversial short stories, it contained both his politically sensitive account of his clashes with the Nazi authorities, and his novel The Drinker, which was not deciphered and published until 1950. The Drinker describes how a provincial merchant called Sommer succumbs to alcoholism, is confined to an asylum, and finally tries to commit suicide by infecting himself with tuberculosis in the asylum’s infirmary. Thus in one sense the novel reverses the pattern which I have identified in some of Fallada’s works by showing how Sommer – in contrast to figures like the Pinnebergs or Pagel or Petra – is resoundingly defeated by his problems. But in an autobiographical sense The Drinker shows Fallada’s characteristic defiance, not simply by thematizing and criticizing his own substance abuse, but also by daring to do so in Nazi Germany, where eugenic and cultural policy encompassed extreme sanctions (including physical abuse or sterilization or death) both for alcoholics and for authors who wrote about them (whether privately or for publication) with any degree of empathy.

There is no simple concept which adequately describes Fallada’s career in Nazi Germany: he was neither an eager collaborator nor a resistance fighter. In his life as an author, Fallada cooperated with the Nazi regime, most obviously by accepting officially sanctioned commissions and writing or revising with the official ideology in mind, but he also challenged the regime, among other things by reasserting his humane values in a novel such as Wolf Among Wolves and attempting anti-Nazi allegory in ostensibly light fiction like Old Heart Goes A-Journeying (1936). In his life as a citizen, Fallada complied with most of the Nazi system’s demands, for example by enrolling his oldest son in the Hitler Youth, but he also gave financial and legal support to some of the system’s outcasts, particularly authors and publishers’ employees who suffered discrimination on political or racial grounds. And there were contradictions in the way the Nazis treated Fallada, sometimes promoting his work and sometimes censoring it, sometimes sending him on propaganda tours and sometimes imprisoning him. It is not overly generous to point out, however, that what resistance he made put him in actual, deadly jeopardy, and what compromises he made were in the same context.

While the debate about the justifications for emigrating from or remaining in Nazi Germany which has not ceased since 1933 is too complex to recapitulate here, it is worth noting that the conflicting currents in Fallada’s story are not untypical of the stories of those who remained: collaboration was not necessarily prompt, uncoerced or unconditional, and resistance was not always immediate, impassioned or uncompromising. The only certainty for Fallada, as for all those who remained, was that even moderate acts of resistance carried the threat of imprisonment or death.

In February 1945 Fallada married Ursula Losch, a widow of working-class background whose first husband had been a wealthy businessman. However, neither Fallada’s new marriage nor the Nazi defeat a few months later significantly reduced the personal and political pressures on him. Ursula had weaknesses for alcohol and morphine which matched, and encouraged, Fallada’s own. And in May 1945 the Soviet military authorities appointed him mayor of the district around Carwitz, evidently because he was a nationally known figure who had demonstrated some independence from the Nazi regime. Fallada then faced such daunting tasks as securing food and medical supplies for the local population, assisting the flood of refugees from hitherto German-occupied areas further east, dealing with demands that alleged Nazis be handed over to the Soviet secret police, and curbing the numerous Red Army soldiers who were literally raping and pillaging their way across Germany. He proved unequal to the job, perhaps partly because – as he later claimed in a letter to Johannes R. Becher on 15 October 1945 – the local Soviet commandant deliberately overworked him with the aim of ‘destroying me, in order to get his hands on my 24-year-old wife’. In August, after Fallada had resumed his morphine habit and Ursula had attempted suicide, they were admitted to hospital in nearby Neustrelitz, and when they were discharged in early September they moved to Berlin, where Ursula owned a badly damaged apartment in what was now the US sector of the city.

It was in Berlin that Fallada met Johannes R. Becher, a German author of his own generation who had returned from a decade of exile in the USSR and was now a leading figure in the Soviet military administration. Among other things, Becher was president of the Cultural Association for the Democratic Renewal of Germany, in which he was attempting – in accordance with the USSR’s overall political policy immediately after the war – to create a wide-ranging alliance of intellectuals who were committed to revitalizing culture in Germany on a broadly antifascist basis. Becher provided Fallada with a comparatively comfortable house in the Soviet sector of Berlin, procured him additional rations of food and fuel, arranged for him to make some public speeches and radio broadcasts, and put him in contact with the newspaper founded by the Soviet administration, the Daily Survey, in which Fallada began publishing a variety of short pieces.

Becher also encouraged Fallada to write novels again, suggesting that he fictionalize the story of Otto and Elise Hampel, a middle-aged couple who began leaving handwritten anti-Nazi missives in buildings around Berlin after Elise’s brother was killed during the invasion of France, and who were arrested in October 1942, tried in January 1943, and executed eleven weeks later. Fallada examined some of the documents in the Hampels’ case, and in October 1945 he signed a contract for a novel about it with the Reconstruction publishing firm, which had recently been established by the Soviet authorities, and which was to reissue The World Outside in March 1946. Although Fallada wrote a short and largely factual account of the Hampels’ story which appeared in a Soviet-sponsored magazine (also called Reconstruction) in November 1945, he did not then start work on the book, which he had undertaken to deliver by 1 January 1946. He spent much of the first seven months in 1946 undergoing hospital treatment for substance abuse and failing general health, but by September he had completed The Nightmare (1947), a novel in which an author called Doll struggles both to acknowledge his complicity in the Nazi regime and to overcome his dependence on morphine and sleeping drugs, but ultimately – and with the assistance of the Soviet administration – rededicates his literary career to helping build a new antifascist Germany. Fallada returned to the Hampels’ case in late September 1946, and finished the first draft of the novel before the end of October, and the final revisions before the end of November. In early December he was admitted to the Charité hospital, where he wrote various letters which expressed his satisfaction with Alone in Berlin, sometimes comparing it to his last major published work, Wolf Among Wolves. He described Alone in Berlin to his mother on 22 December as ‘a truly great novel’; he repeated to his sister Margarete on 27 December that it was ‘a real one… a great novel… somewhat along the lines of my Wolf’; and he also told his sister Elisabeth on the same day that he had produced ‘a great novel… You could say that, after Wolf, at last I’ve got one right.’

Fallada was transferred to another hospital in early January 1947, and died there on 5 February, before Alone in Berlin could be published.

There was substantial and heroic resistance to the Nazi regime at all levels of German society, from aristocratic officers in the army to brutalized inmates of concentration camps. But all this resistance was unsuccessful, in the sense that the regime was destroyed by the foreign armies which conquered it rather than by internal rebels who overthrew it. Otto and Elise Hampel’s resistance was particularly unsuccessful, in that (as the files in their case indicate) almost all the subversive materials which they distributed were handed to the Nazi authorities. I mean no disrespect to the Hampels’ memory in adding that their resistance was unspectacular and unsophisticated if their localized propaganda effort is compared to (say) von Stauffenberg and his associates’ attempted coup d’état in July 1944, or if their sometimes ungrammatical and inarticulate missives are compared to (say) the literate and cultivated leaflets written by the university-educated dissidents of the ‘White Rose’ group in 1942–3. Fallada knew that the German resistance was ineffectual before he even learned of the Hampels’ existence as, for example, Anna Seghers could not know when she described the Communist underground in The Seventh Cross (1942), or as Klaus Mann could not know when he invoked a Communist uprising in the final pages of Mephisto (1936). And when Fallada read about the Hampels’ resistance, he found their story uninspiring. In the article published in Reconstruction he described the couple as ‘two insignificant individuals… without particular skills’, noted that they were ‘faithful supporters of the Führer’ until 1940, commented that their postcard propaganda was ‘poorly spelt’ and ‘clumsily expressed’, speculated that such few cards as were not taken to the police were ‘read hastily and fearfully and destroyed immediately’, and emphasized that ‘the sound of their protest died away unheard’.

Fallada transfers this almost bathetic characterization of the Hampels to their counterparts in Alone in Berlin, Otto and Anna Quangel. The fictional couple initially approve of the Nazi regime, believing after the failure of Otto’s business during the Great Depression that ‘Hitler was the one who had pulled their chestnuts out of the fire’ (p. 15). Although the Quangels subsequently feel some reservations about the regime, their active rebellion against it originates in the purely personal grief of their son’s death in 1940, and only develops a broader ethical dimension – for example in a postcard decrying ‘the persecution of the Jews’ (p. 166) – as it continues. The couple’s eventual capture is pronounced inevitable not only by Inspector Escherich, with the authority of his professional experience, but also by Otto, who feels that chance must defeat them sooner or later. When the Quangels are arrested, Otto accepts Escherich’s statement that the Gestapo ‘never heard anything from the public at large that leads us to think they [the postcards] had the least effect’ (p. 417), and Anna incautiously draws an interrogator’s attention to her son’s former fiancée, Trudel Baumann, who is then arrested and later commits suicide in prison.

The Quangels’ lack of intellectual sophistication and political impact is paralleled by the numerous other dissidents in Alone in Berlin, who sometimes act from idiosyncratic motives, and almost always fail to thwart or damage the regime. Karl Hergesell joins the resistance cell in his factory primarily as a pretext to spend time with Trudel, the cell disbands after Trudel reveals its existence to Otto, and it subsequently emerges that the authorities had the group under observation in any case. Hetty Haberle is not really ‘interested in politics’ (p. 231), but rather is sheltering Enno Kluge from the Gestapo because they persecuted her husband, and she is unable to prevent Enno’s death. Of the four Communist dissidents, Walter Haberle is murdered in a concentration camp, his associate Anna Schonlein is arrested for helping Hetty and Enno, Grigoleit – the third member of Karl and Trudel’s cell – is eventually presumed to have ‘gone AWOL’ (p. 440), and Jensch – the fourth member – is described very fleetingly and vaguely as ‘carrying on’ (p. 313) after the cell breaks up. Among those who challenge the Nazis on ethical grounds, the retired Judge Fromm invokes his lifelong commitment to ‘Justice’ (p. 76) when giving refuge to his Jewish neighbor Frau Rosenthal, only for her to reject his stringent safety precautions and immediately fall victim to the Gestapo (while Fromm himself later dies in an air raid); Trudel also decides to hide a Jewish woman, but Karl determines to stop her, and the couple are arrested before she can act on her resolve; and the orchestral conductor Reichhardt makes repeated public statements about ‘how disastrous the course was that the German people were taking under their Führer’ (p. 470), for which he is imprisoned and condemned to death. With the possible minor exceptions of Grigoleit and Jensch, the only dissident who is neither incarcerated nor dead by the end of Alone in Berlin is Eva Kluge, and even this is essentially a matter of chance, in that the Nazi state – which Eva defies openly by resigning from the Party and her government job – decides on lesser sanctions:

Thus Fallada goes to considerable lengths to create a large number of anti-Nazi dissidents who in practical terms fail almost completely. It is the sound not just of the Quangels’ protest, but of many other protests, which dies away unheard, to repeat Fallada’s phrase from the article about the Hampels which I quoted above. However, after using that phrase Fallada wrote that the couple

And when the novel was written, it did suggest that the dissidents had not lived or died in vain. The fact that they achieve very little material success against the Nazi regime is portrayed as secondary to the idea that they defeat the regime in ideal and even metaphysical terms, by preserving their moral integrity both as individuals, and as representatives of a better Germany who justify the nation’s survival. This means that Alone in Berlin examines for one final time the recurring tension in Fallada’s works between how people struggle with – or, as in The Drinker, are destroyed by – the world around them, and how they still assert themselves against it in some meaningful way.

That the Quangels’ objectively largely ineffectual resistance nevertheless has an ethical significance is emphasized when Otto first tells Anna that he intends to write the postcards. She protests that this initiative is ‘a bit small’, but he points out that ‘if they get wind of it, it’ll cost us our lives’, prompting her to reflect that ‘no one could risk more than his life’, and that ‘the main thing was, you fought back’ (p. 140). Later the couple promise each other that they will stand by their criticisms of the regime even under threat of death, so that – as Otto says – they will ‘be able to die properly, without moaning and whimpering’ (p. 324). Like the Quangels, Eva recognizes that she is planning an individual and dangerous rebellion, but goes ahead in the conviction that through it ‘she will keep her self-respect. Then that will have been her attainment in life, keeping her self-respect’ (p. 43). And Reichhardt assures Otto that even though their and others’ resistance will have no concrete result, ‘it will have helped us to feel that we behaved decently till the end’ (p. 476). I should perhaps note here that in the German text of the novel, Otto’s ‘properly’, Eva’s ‘self-respect’ and Reichhardt’s ‘decently’ are all expressed by the adjective-cum-adverb ‘anständig’, which refers primarily to what is ‘decent’ or done ‘decently’ in a moral sense, and moreover that ‘anständig’ and its related forms are key words in many of Fallada’s novels. Little Man, What Now?, in particular, can be understood partly as an examination of the strains which the Great Depression imposes on human decency.

Fallada reinforces the significance of the Quangels’ moral integrity through Escherich. Initially the Inspector regards himself simply as a police detective, a servant of the state, whose work pursuing dissidents for the Gestapo has no more complex ethical implications than a clerk’s work selling stamps for the post office. However, the brutality of his superior Prall gradually shows Escherich that he has assimilated to a corrupt system. Under pressure from Prall to demonstrate progress towards catching ‘the hobgoblin’, Escherich first falsely incriminates Enno Kluge and then murders him to conceal the deception, an action for which ‘he will never be able to exonerate himself’ (p. 283). When Prall later has Escherich himself arrested and mistreated, the Inspector becomes ‘thoroughly acquainted with fear’ (p. 390), and realizes that it is the driving principle of the regime. And when Escherich (who is eventually released) finally captures the Quangels, he concedes that their resistance was legitimate and that he has forfeited his integrity, returning no answer when Otto takes responsibility for his own actions and challenges the Inspector to accept responsibility for his:

Escherich shoots himself that night, reflecting as he pulls the trigger that he is Otto’s ‘only disciple’ (p. 422). While Escherich’s suicide is unlikely to damage the Gestapo substantially, Otto clearly and literally gains a moral victory. Incidentally, there is nothing in the extant files in the Hampels’ case which indicates that either Otto or Elise exercised any particular influence on the chief investigating officer, Willy Püschel, and Manfred Kuhnke’s masterly study of the continuities and discontinuities between the Hampels’ and the Quangels’ stories has demonstrated that Püschel survived until at least 1947. That Fallada creates a more complex relationship between Otto Quangel and Inspector Escherich, which culminates in the latter’s dramatic acknowledgement of his own inhumanity, highlights the emphasis that the novel places on the Quangels’ steadfast decency.

Alone in Berlin characterizes the dissidents not only in ethical terms, as upholding profound ideals, but also in more metaphysical terms, as the conscience of the nation. This idea is introduced when Trudel tells Otto that the members of her factory cell see themselves as being ‘like good seeds in a field of weeds. If it wasn’t for the good seeds, the whole field would be nothing but weeds’ (p. 29). The motif is repeated when Eva clears a potato paddock which is ‘choked with weeds’ (p. 370), and varied when Otto must ‘sort batches of dried peas and pick out the wormy ones, the broken ones, stray seeds of this or that’ (p. 527) while on death row. These references recall the biblical parable of the wheat and the tares (Matt. 13: 24–30 and 36–43), suggesting that those who oppose the Nazis embody Christian virtues which will ensure Germany’s eventual salvation from the regime. This suggestion becomes stronger when Anna and Trudel are reunited in prison, and Anna says that ‘I still believe in God’ (p. 425), and it becomes explicit in Reichhardt’s evaluation of his and the Quangels’ and others’ resistance, which I quoted in part above:

Reichhardt is invoking Genesis 18: 26–32, which begins: ‘And the Lord said, If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes.’

The dissidents’ significance as ‘the righteous few’ who redeem the nation is reinforced by the association between their rebellion and their children, who symbolize the nation’s future. The Quangels of course begin writing their postcards when their only son is killed during the invasion of France. Eva’s revolt is triggered by the news that one of her sons has murdered Jewish children in Poland. And Trudel forms her plan of sheltering the Jewish woman after she becomes pregnant, and starts thinking about how her son would grow up in the Nazi system. That Fallada is particularly concerned to establish the dissidents as the metaphorical parents of a better Germany born after 1945 is underlined by the fact that the Quangels’ and Trudel’s and Eva’s children are all his own invention. For the Hampels turned against the regime when Elise’s brother died in France, and had no children of their own, while Fallada’s acquaintance Alfred Schmidt – who was executed in April 1943 for possessing duplicating machines which had been used for anti-Nazi propaganda, and who probably influenced Trudel and Karl’s story – had no children either, and no one involved in the Hampels’ case or known to Fallada personally was an obvious counterpart to the fictional Eva or either of her children. It is perhaps also worth noting that Trudel’s miscarriage in the fifth month of her pregnancy and her renewed (if unfulfilled) commitment to opposing Nazism can be interpreted as repudiating the Pinnebergs’ belief, in Little Man, What Now?, that their love for each other and for their son provides a safe haven from the deeply flawed society around them.

All the elements which invest the dissidents’ actions with ideal and transcendent meanings are combined in the brief final chapter of Alone in Berlin. The opening sentence replaces the third-person narration which has preceded it with an authorial ‘we’ in order to emphasize that the novel has shown the dissidents’ moral victory:

The chapter then moves forward to summer 1946, and describes how Eva remained in the countryside, married Kienschaper, civilized and adopted the delinquent teenager Kuno (without realizing that he was the son of her dead husband’s criminal associate Emil Borkhausen), and is now building up a smallholding. The redemptive quality of Eva’s – and by extension of the other dissidents’ – actions is highlighted by the baptismal imagery in Kuno’s recollection of how Eva ‘put me in the water and washed the dirt off me with her own hands’ (p. 568) when she first took him into her home, as well as by a final invocation of the parable of the wheat and the tares in the novel’s closing sentence: ‘Because it is written that you reap what you sow, and the boy had sown good corn.’ (p. 568; see also Gal. 6: 7–10) And Eva’s and the others’ metaphorical status as the parents of a humane post-Nazi Germany is underlined literally by Eva’s formal adoption of Kuno, and more figuratively both by her quasi-baptismal washing of him and by his rejection of his unreformed ex-convict father Emil, who reappears unexpectedly and tries to claim or extort a share of Kuno’s comparative prosperity: ‘ “I’ve got no father!” shouted the boy, wild with anger. “I’ve got a mother, and I’m starting afresh.” ’ (p. 567)

It could be argued that Fallada’s affirmative portrayal of the anti-Nazi resistance in Alone in Berlin is somewhat unconvincing, especially in his use of Christian symbolism. Some of the religious references which I have noted are contested elsewhere in the narrative. For example, when Anna tells Trudel that she still has faith in God, she goes on to say that Otto thinks ‘everything comes to an end after this life’ (p. 452), and minutes before his execution Otto insists to the prison chaplain that: ‘I don’t believe in any Almighty’ (p. 551). The narrative then seems to challenge Otto’s unbelief as the guillotine blade falls – ‘the rushing had become a piercing scream that must be audible up in the stars, to the throne of God…’ (p. 561) – but the subsequent description of Anna’s death in an air raid concludes more equivocally: ‘She is… reunited with him. She is where he is. Wherever that may be’ (p. 563). This uncertain treatment of Christian motifs is entirely congruent with Fallada’s previous career. And Fallada’s personal relationship to Christianity may be judged from the letter to the Rowohlt firm on 15 January 1934, in which he mentioned a biblical quotation that might serve as an epigraph to The World Outside, and sought advice about ‘where it is in the Bible (I don’t own one to look in)’. Thus it is arguable that in seeking – as foreshadowed by his article in Reconstruction – to demonstrate that the dissidents had not lived or died in vain, Fallada adopts a metaphysical framework with which he is rather uncomfortable and unfamiliar. Similarly, the opening of the final chapter (‘But we don’t want to end this book with death…’) can be read as suggesting that the author is still trying to convince himself that the resistance’s failures were nevertheless meaningful. And that chapter’s comment about how the Kienschapers ‘were given’ their smallholding ‘the previous year’ (p. 565) – which refers to the Soviet military administration’s program of expropriating large agricultural properties – is also interesting in possibly indicating that Fallada is unduly eager to establish continuities between the dissidents and the postwar promises of a better Germany. But even assuming that Fallada does not entirely establish his case for the resistance’s ultimate historical significance, these minor hesitations and exaggerations are hardly surprising in a novel written barely eighteen months after the Nazi defeat, and by a man who had struggled to survive artistically and psychologically under the Nazi regime, as he had struggled to survive in German society all his life. They are unlikely to obscure the novel’s particular achievement, which is perhaps best characterized by a comparison with a later, purely factual and more celebrated examination of Nazi oppression: whereas Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) dissects and analyses ‘the banality of evil’, Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin comprehends and honours the banality of good.

All quotations from Little Man, What Now? are from the Melville House edition (New York, 2009).

All quotations from Fallada’s letters are from the copies held by the Hans Fallada Archive in Carwitz. All translations are my own.

All quotations from Fallada’s essay about the Hampels are from Fallada, ‘Über den doch vorhandenen Widerstand der Deutschen gegen den Hitlerterror’ in Wir haben nicht nur das Chaos, sondern wir stehen an einem Beginn: Hans Fallada 1945–1947, ed. Sabine Lange (Neubrandenburg: Literaturzentrum Neubrandenburg, 1988) pp. 45–56. All translations are my own.

All references to the Bible are to the King James Version.

The extant files in the cases of the Hampels and Alfred Schmidt are held by the ‘Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR’ of the Federal Archive in Lichterfelde, Berlin. The files on the Hampels are NJ36/2, NJ36/3, NJ36/4, and ZC12614; the files on Schmidt are NJ1705/1, NJ1705/2, NJ1705/4 and NJ5110/1.

Manfred Kuhnke’s study of the factual Hampels and the fictional Quangels is Die Hampels und die Quangels: Authentisches und Erfundenes in Hans Falladas letztem Roman (Neubrandenburg: Literaturzentrum Neubrandenburg, 2001).

Geoff Wilkes

University of Queensland

Brisbane, Australia