Book Review: Every Man Dies Alone

Picture yourself standing in the stairwell of an apartment house at 55 Jablonski Strasse in Berlin in 1940. A mail carrier climbs the stairs with a letter for the couple on the third floor. She rings the doorbell and a man answers. "He takes the letter from her without a word and pushes the door shut in her face, as if she were a thief, someone you had to be on your guard against," writes Hans Fallada as he begins the compulsively readable saga of Otto and Anna Quangel, first published in Germany in 1947 and only now available in a superb English translation by Michael Hofmann. The novel is based on an actual case.

Otto and Anna are simple people. He is a master carpenter whose factory is now producing bomb crates for the war effort; she is a housewife and mother. The letter, which announces the death of their only son in battle, shatters their fragile reality and leaves them alone with each other. Just as Rainer Maria Fassbinder did in his films, Fallada's novel observes Otto and Anna in their grief with unnerving clarity: the reticent, parsimonious Otto withdraws and the long-suffering Anna spirals into feelings of hopelessness and abandonment. When Otto comes up with a scheme to create and distribute anonymous postcards to foment dissent against the Nazis, Otto and Anna begin to share a renewed purpose. The knowledge that they are on a dangerous course does not deter them. Their first postcard dropped in a deserted stairwell proclaims: "Mother! The Führer has murdered my son."

The Quangels hope that the postcard will be read and passed around so that others will rise up. Although they know that the Nazis will be looking for them, they press on with their subversive project. Fallada, who suffered at the hands of the Nazis himself, trains his cold, satirical eye on the Gestapo investigation of the Postcard War to astonishing effect. As he tells it, if the Gestapo weren't so deadly, they and their bumbling techniques would be darkly funny. Nobody, however, would find their interrogation methods funny: "they will ask you questions, one man will take over from another, but no one will take over from you, however exhausted you get. Then when you fall from exhaustion, they'll rouse you with kicks and blows, and they'll give you salt water to drink, and when none of that does any good, they will dislocate every bone in your hand one by one. They will pour acid on the soles of your feet."

We expect to find sadistic goons in the Gestapo, but Fallada presents the trial court for the Quangels with equal disdain. Germany had gone mad, one character explains, with half the country arresting the other half. Otto and Anna Quangel were only two of many arrested, tortured and executed during those years, but we come to know them intimately in Fallada's unblinking, brilliant report from a living Hell.--John McFarland

Shelf Talker: Fans of the novels of Alan Furst and Irene Némirovsky will love the gritty "you are there" feel of this harrowing saga of a German couple fighting for their dignity in the face of unrelenting Nazi oppression and sadism.