Alone in Berlin: a retrospective

Last week marked eighty years since the sentencing of Otto and Elise Hampel to death. Their lives were almost unremarkable except for their persistent acts of defiance against the Nazi regime - motivated by the initial, intense grief of family bereavement. Yet their efforts over a two year period brought minimal effect beyond their own eventual demise, their 'defamatory' postcard distribution often reaching only as far as the offices of the Berlin police and later the Gestapo. But after the war, their case file eventually made its way to Hans Fallada who, in his final weeks, adapted their resistance into Every Man Dies Alone, later published in Britain as Alone in Berlin. Fallada's quest, accomplished in only 24 days, was to offer meaning to these futile resistance tactics, a legacy for these well-intentioned if otherwise forgettable citizens. It is a legacy which survives neither in revolution or popular consciousness, but in Gestapo archives and fictional dramatisation. 

In an afterword for the novel, Dr Geoff Wilkes identified the novel as honouring the 'banality of good', though it also makes for a mentally draining read. It is a story of pain and hopelessness where characters are figuratively and literally beaten into submission, compelled to absorb rather than resolve their problems and injustices. Arduousness is compounded by grief. Emotions are confronted with violence. Autonomy and freedom are deprived by institutionalised fear – an omnipotent force that drives some to their early release, and others into a stubborn determination to maintain their conscience for as long as the state allows, sometimes longer. 

Describing one particularly pitiful character, a lout whose fall from grace lacked a discernible altitude drop, Fallada identified a man doomed by the 'unequal complexities of these times', incapable of finding external help without 'stability within him'. The complexities are at once both layered and simple, with societal stability entirely dependent on unquestionable loyalty towards the most demanding hierarchical structure. It leaves a state apparatus that comes ahead of family, duty, and dignity, with the most tragic of consequences.  

The story itself thrives in its characters turmoil, the collective miserability only burgeoning among them as their arcs are ripped up by circumstance and mutual proximity. Only the fortunate find escape, the scarcity of such goodwill both remarkable and indicting of the wretchedness of the Nazi regime. Fallada's style is both delicate and pummelling, the pages elegantly conveying the state's brutality, its citizens' complicity, and the overbearing pain from spiralling trauma. In contrast, death is a release, a tranquil peace on which to reflect and begin anew. 

The emotional despondency transponded between Fallada and us is immeasurably accentuated by the novel's grounding in reality and lived experiences. Experiences endlessly imagined and reinterpreted through generations, each encapsulating a consumer's attention on the abnormal environment that incited the most extraordinary actions from ordinary people. In an environment where cause once superseded effect, Otto and Elise Hampel's actions have finally outweighed their own livelihoods that were trapped by tyranny. Hans Fallada's legacy, complicated by his own collusion with and coercion from the Nazi's, can be emboldened by this incredible depiction of his former government's barbarity. As adaptations across film, television and translation spread, may Alone in Berlin’s legacy rest not only in the worthiness of its story-telling, but in its craft and articulation. For Alone in Berlin is a masterpiece.