Monday 15 August 2022

Fallada, Hans "Every Man Dies Alone"

Fallada, Hans "Every Man Dies Alone" aka "Alone in Berlin" (German: Jeder stirbt für sich allein) - 1947

A remarkable tome. A remarkable story. A remarkable narrator.

Hans Fallada learned about the life and death of the married couple Elise and Otto Hampel and retold their life story. He immortalized them as Anna and Otto Quangel and thus created a monument not only to them but also to all the other little resistance fighters. All those who didn't want to just watch society go to the dogs. Who didn't want to be accused later of not having done anything.

Yes, they did exist, the Annas or Elises and Ottos. They tried desperately to wake up those close to them, perhaps to persuade one or the other not to just accept everything or - even worse - to think it was good.

To this day I still can't really understand how people could just watch. My parents told me different stories, about their parents trying not to get carried away and still offer their children a future. Today I see how many things are repeated. How people believe any story just because they hear it often enough.

Get Hans Fallada and other writers like him back into schools. Let children share in all the things that can go wrong. Otherwise we'll be back very quickly where we've been before and where we never, ever wanted to go again.


From the back cover:

"This never-before-translated masterpiece - by a heroic best-selling writer who saw his life crumble when he wouldn’t join the Nazi Party - is based on a true story.

It presents a richly detailed portrait of life in Berlin under the Nazis and tells the sweeping saga of one working-class couple who decides to take a stand when their only son is killed at the front. With nothing but their grief and each other against the awesome power of the Reich, they launch a simple, clandestine resistance campaign that soon has an enraged Gestapo on their trail, and a world of terrified neighbours and cynical snitches ready to turn them in.

In the end, it’s more than an edge-of-your-seat thriller, more than a moving romance, even more than literature of the highest order - it’s a deeply stirring story of two people standing up for what’s right, and for each other.
"

8 comments:

  1. A most *excellent* book. I read it back in 2015 and had never read anything quite like it. Although the approach is often low-key the overall effect is very powerful. Like you say, this should be on everyone's reading list so we never have to live through those terrible times again.

    My review is here: https://cyberkittenspot.blogspot.com/2015/10/just-finished-reading-alone-in-berlin.html

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    1. Thank you, Kitten. I'm not surprised you agree with me there. Yes, a brilliant book about the darkest time out country has been going through. They make you feel nothing but admiration for those people but also with the desperate hope that it will never happen again.

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  2. I knew nothing about these people, thanks for sharing!

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    1. You're welcome, Emma. I didn't know about this couple though I knew there were many people like them. They just don't often appear in books about WWII, unfortunately. One reason people still dislike all Germans, even people like the Hampels, even if they know nothing about them.

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  3. wow. This sounds like an amazing story. And definitely one we should all read!

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    1. Definitely, Lark. We might all be in a position like that one day and I hope I would behave like the protagonists in the story.

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  4. I read it some years ago in my then book club. Excellent book, so interesting and you can really feel the desperation of the parents.

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    1. So true, Lisbeth. It just makes me feel sick to see that people had to live (or die) like that and that this is still going on in many parts of the world.

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