Book Review
Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada – Penguin Modern Classics.
It is Holocaust Memorial Day as I begin writing this review, an appropriate day to discuss a novel set in Berlin between 1940 and 1945. The book tells the story of an elderly, poorly educated working class couple who passively, even hopefully, go along with the rise of Hitler and the policies of the Nazis, until their only son is killed on the western front. They then begin to see the disaster that Germany is being led into and start writing and distributing postcards around Berlin, critical of Hitler and calling for others to resist too.
Fallada wrote the book in the last months of 1946, shortly before he died, and based it on the real case of Elise and Otto Hampel, changing some of the names and relationships of those involved. Fallada had been given the Hampel’s Gestapo file by a friend who had become a minister in the Soviet government set up in Eastern Germany immediately post-war. The friend suggested it might make the basis for a novel, hoping in this way to encourage Fallada to write again after he had barely survived the war, having been in and out of a Nazi insane asylum and struggling with drugs and alcohol. It is written in a curiously flat, journalistic style, and details the dreadful conditions in Berlin, with all our ideas of civil society, the law, justice, and government stood on their head. According to Fallada civilian life under the Nazis involves trying to keep your head down, or actively supporting the regime’s barbarities, lest one becomes another victim of the psychopathic thugs who rule the roost. A few brave folk do resist, and Fallada spares the reader few details of their almost inevitable fate. But there is humour amidst the grimness too, and by the end Fallada seems to be saying that those who resist and fail still have the moral victory. ‘Redemptive’ is a term that crops up frequently in descriptions of the book. Primo Levi said it is “the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis.”
However Fallada’s book is not without its critics. In particular the historian of the Holocaust, the late Professor David Cesarani, was scathing in his review:
