Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin begins in Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with
fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi
rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired
judge Fromm and the unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the
news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France. Shocked out of their quiet
existence, they begin a silent campaign of defiance, and a deadly game of cat and mouse
develops between the Quangels and the ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich. When petty
criminals Kluge and Borkhausen also become involved, deception, betrayal and murder ensue,
tightening the noose around the Quangels' necks …
Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin is also available as an eBook.
How many of the great Classics have you read? View all our bestselling Penguin
Classics.
Imogen Ashfield, Edinburgh University student and ex-Spinebreaker [www.spinebreakers.co.uk], reviews Alone in Berlin.
Walking up the stairs of an old apartment building. A postcard is on the stairs. It reads, in clumsy hand-written capitals: “MOTHER! THE FÜHRER WILL MURDER YOUR SONS TOO, HE WILL NOT STOP TILL HE HAS BROUGHT SORROW TO EVERY HOME IN THE WORLD.” Your blood runs cold. You fear for your life. What is the point of this postcard? You know it all anyway. Who has seen you? You put it back and hope never to hear of it again.
Alone in Berlin does not place its attention on the dates, figures and events of political history during the Second World War but on the lives of ordinary citizens and their tribulations and hardships living under the Nazi regime in Berlin. Particular focus is on the interplay of characters surrounding one small but defiant campaign. Following their son’s death at the front, Otto and Anna Quangel wrote hundreds of postcards declaring their disgust and protest against the horror going on around them and against a state operating through surveillance, interrogation and, often, false confession. Their postcards led to an agitated response from the Gestapo that involved ruthless investigation, in which everyone was a suspect and innocents were tragically pursued.
Hans Fallada strikingly portrays this harrowing environment with its fearful, sometimes vicious paranoia; a place where ‘half the population is set on locking up the other half’. Within this state, the looming oppression is also of a kind which can be unseen. Otto Quangel describes danger as ‘somewhere else but I can’t think where’ and goes on to say: ‘We’ll wake up one day and know it was always there, but we never saw it. And then it’ll be too late.’
Fear is the primary instinct pulsating throughout the book. Fallada writes in an honest, clear and gripping manner, unfolding a chase through horror within a grim, often visceral atmosphere. It is the afterword which jolts you into recognition of the fact that this story is not far from the truth. Alone in Berlin was written in 1946 just after Nazi defeat. Fallada was given the file of a working class couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, whose story became the basis of Quangel’s actions in the book.
However, this book is not completely despairing. If Alone in Berlin stands by a principle, it is to honour your own moral values. In an oppressive state where protest is deemed absolutely inexcusable, any seemingly ‘small’ defiant act is colossal in comparison to the rules that ‘the regime’ has put in place. The lives of these few characters captured so vividly in Alone in Berlin help to highlight and commemorate all those who protested and died from daring to resist the Nazi regime. The testimony of this book provides a painful but positive reminder that their efforts were not in vain. Hopefully the message of this book can also be used to open eyes and raise awareness about the continuing atrocities and oppression of tyrannical regimes across the modern world.
If you would like to comment on this review or join in the discussion of this book, then head over to the Reader's Forum to get involved.
Chapter 1
Some Bad News
The postwoman Eva Kluge slowly climbs the steps of 55 Jablonski Strasse. She’s tired from her round, but she also has one of those letters in her bag that she hates to deliver, and is about to have to deliver, to the Quangels, on the second floor.
Before that, she has a Party circular for the Persickes on the floor below. Persicke is some political functionary or other – Eva Kluge always gets the titles mixed up. At any rate, she has to remember to call out “Heil Hitler!” at the Persickes’ and watch her lip. Which she needs to do anyway, there’s not many people to whom Eva Kluge can say what she thinks. Not that she’s a political animal, she’s just an ordinary woman, but as a woman she’s of the view that you don’t bring children into the world to have them shot. Also, that a home without a man is no good, and for the time being she’s got nothing: not her two boys, not a man, not a proper home. So, she has to keep her lip buttoned and deliver horrible letters from the front that aren’t written but typed, and are signed Regimental Adjutant.
She rings the Persickes’ bell, says “Heil Hitler!” and hands the old drunk his circular. He has his Party badge on his lapel, and he asks, “Well, what’s new?”
She replies, “Haven’t you heard the bulletin? France has capitulated.”
Persicke’s not content with that. “Come on, Fraulein, of course, I knew that, but to hear you say it, it’s like you were selling stale rolls. Say it like it means something! It’s your job to tell everyone who doesn’t have a radio, and convince the last of the moaners. The second Blitzkrieg is in the bag; it’s England now! In another three months, the Tommies will be finished, and then we’ll see what the Fuhrer has in store for us. Then it’ll be the turn of the others to bleed, and we’ll be the masters. Come on in, and have a schnapps with us. Amalie, Erna, August, Adolf, Baldur – come in here. Today we’re celebrating; we’re not working today. Today we’ll toast the news, and in the afternoon we’ll go and pay a call on the Jewish lady on the fourth floor, and see if she won’t treat us to coffee and cake! I tell you, there’ll be no mercy for that bitch anymore!”
Leaving Herr Persicke ringed by his family, hitting the schnapps and launching into increasingly wild vituperation, the postie climbs the next flight of stairs and rings the Quangels’ bell. She’s already holding the letter out, ready to run off the second she’s handed it over. And she’s in luck: it’s not the woman who answers the door – the etched, birdlike face, the thin lips, and the cold eyes. 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.
Eva Kluge shrugs her shoulders and turns to go back downstairs. Some people are like that; in all the time she’s delivered mail in Jablonski Strasse, that man has yet to say a single world to her. Well, let him be, she can’t change him, she couldn’t even change the man she’s married to, who wastes his money sitting in bars and betting on horses, and only ever shows his face at home when he’s broke.
At the Persickes’ they’ve left the apartment door open; she can hear the clinking glass and rowdy celebration. The postwoman gently pulls the door shut and carries on downstairs. She thinks the speedy victory over France might actually be good news, because it will have brought the end of the war nearer. And then she’ll have her two boys back.
The only fly in the ointment is the uncomfortable realization that people like the Persickes will come out on top. To have the likes of them as masters and always have to mind your p’s and q’s, that doesn’t strike her as right either.
Briefly, she thinks of the man with the bird face who she gave the letter from the front to, and she thinks of old Frau Rosenthal up on the fourth floor, whose husband the Gestapo took away two weeks ago. You had to feel sorry for someone like that. The Rosenthals used to have a little haberdashery shop on Prenzlauer Allee that was aryanized, and now the man has disappeared, and he can’t be far short of seventy. Those two old people can’t have done any harm to anyone, they always allowed credit – they did it for Eva Kluge when she couldn’t afford new clothes for the kids – and the goods were certainly no dearer or worse in quality than elsewhere. No, Eva Kluge can’t get it into her head that a man like Rosenthal is any worse than the Persickes, just by virtue of him being a Jew. And now the old woman is sitting in her flat all alone and doesn’t dare go outside. It’s only after dark that she goes and does her shopping, wearing her yellow star; probably she’s hungry. No, thinks Eva Kluge, even if we defeat France ten times over, it doesn’t mean there’s any justice here at home….
