Every Man Dies Alone
By Hans Fallada, translated by Michael Hofmann. 544 pp. Melville House, 2009. $29.95.
The full range of human behavior—opportunism, brutality, compassion, and, above all, courage that verges on the suicidal—is on display in this outstanding first English edition of Hans Fallada’s epic novel. Set in Germany during the war, Every Man Dies Alone is the final work by that country’s most popular prewar writer. Fallada had tried to skirt politics in his earlier novels and in daily life, refusing to join the Nazi Party but also refusing to flee—which meant that he had to compromise with Hitler’s regime on numerous occasions.
But with Every Man Dies Alone, written in a frenzied 24-day period in 1947 shortly before his death, he unflinchingly focuses on a broad range of characters and their political and personal decisions in a time of terror and mayhem.
While Fallada’s cast includes shysters, cynics, and sadists, his main protagonists are modeled on Otto and Elise Hampel, a middle-aged working-class Berlin couple who wrote postcards denouncing the Nazi regime after Elise’s brother was killed during the invasion of France. In the novel, the couple loses a son and undertakes the same perilous campaign—ending, as the Hampels’ did, with their arrest, trial, conviction, and execution.
As preoccupied as Fallada is with these quixotic resisters, he offers a portrait, writ large, of life under the Nazis. His achievement is making the desperation of the times palpable on every page, thus making readers recognize that their assumptions about behaving with decency in similar circumstances—much less having the courage to resist—are in all likelihood illusions. Yet the heroism of the main characters and the random acts of kindness by others produce a story that ends with a ringing affirmation of the human spirit. A must-read if there ever was one.
Originally published in the February 2013 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here.
