"Every Man Dies Alone" By Hans Fallada

Several years ago, I read one of the first anti-Nazi novels written immediately after WWII entitled, Every Man Dies Alone, by a well-known German author, Hans Fallada. Fallada, who was at one point in his career a favorite of Joseph Goebbels, wrote the book in 24 days but died just prior to its publication.

Every Man Dies Alone  is based on a true story of a husband and wife who lived in Hitler’s Berlin. This is a mid 20^th city held captive by Nazism. Its population exists in a constant state of fear. Any resistance—whether real or perceived—is punishable by death and not just your death, but the death of your family, associates and friends. And yet, as Fallada tells us, resistance happened. Upon hearing of the death of their son who was killed in action, the very quiet and peaceable, Otto and Anna Quangel, decide that in this city without freedom and without hope, they are going to do something. The something is actually quite mundane—even a bit silly to our 21^st c sensibilities: they drop postcards around the city: “Hitler has murdered my son.”  The Quangels will be betrayed, arrested, tortured and killed. They know this going in, and so does the reader.  We need to ask ourselves: what is Hans Fallada — who later in his career is also caught up in the Nazi mousetrap and incarcerated—trying to say to us almost 7 decades later? What are his ideas? How do they change how we live?

Fallada introduces two key themes that have influenced my reading over the last 2 years. First, that individuals must question their society’s Big Ideas. We do this to keep our politicians and journalists honest and clear in their thinking; we also do this to ensure we don’t wind up in Fallada’s Berlin.

 In an anthropology course I took in the early 90s called something like Cultures of Terror, my professor told us to beware of any word ending in “ism. Isms tend to represent Big Ideas. Vague ideas. Ideas that sometimes contain contradictions.  Writers, journalists, professors, politicians like to use “isms’. They slide these words easily into their writing and we the reader gloss over them and fool ourselves into thinking that a. we know what these words mean and b. that we and the author think these words mean the same thing. Think about it for a minute: Communism, Fascism, Socialism, Neoliberalism, Conservatism, and my personal favorite-post modernism. We all use these words. But what do these words mean? What context are they being used in? Who is using them, and how, and why? Are these words really benevolent or are they loaded with more unsavoury content? When we see these Big Ideas written by authors, journalists and politicians, we need to question them. This, I think, is what Fallada is trying to tell us.  His book is a warning of what happens when we become lazy and let others do our thinking for us.

Fallada’s second theme that has informed my reading is about individual heroism. The Quangels know that their resistance is futile. Why do they persist?  When the State (often in the name of a Big Idea) has a  machine gun with its hand on the trigger pointed at the heads of your spouse and children, how do you resist? What Individual Idea does one need to counter a State’s Big Idea?

My September 10th blog post on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor who was part of the resistance movement against Hitler, will revisit this theme.

Book: Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone. Melville House Publishing: 2009