I am aware this might seem dangerously obsessive, but "Alone in Berlin" is just the second in a series of books I have bought recently about Berlin (next is a history of the Berlin Wall). What can I say, the history of this city is just fascinating…
Here we are in the realm of fiction, a recent translation into English of the 1947 work of Hans Fallada (of whom, I confess, I had never previously heard) fictionalising the story of an improbable and slightly oddball resistance couple who wrote anti-regime postcards to leave lying around in stairwells. This decidedly low-key (and in reality only semi-literate) form of dissent, hoped to subtly instil anti-Hitler feelings in the populace, like an early, insidious form of social media. In Fallada's novel, and, one guesses, in reality, the cards achieve nothing, with the enormous majority instantly handed in to the authorities by the terrified "victims" who are unlucky enough to pick them up.
In the hands of Falada, the essential futility of the exercise lends it a certain existential nobility. The point of the exercise becomes internal, the need of the protagonists, the Quangel couple, to give concrete form to their anger and dissent, regardless of whether it will have any practical effect. Indeed, their efforts are juxtaposed in the novel with more "serious" attempts at resistance, and ultimately compare favourably, at least in the sense that no effort at resistance seems to achieve anything and at least the Quangels are devoid of pretension or vanity.
Friends who have read this book described it as "bleak" and "pessimistic". I suppose it is, insofar as the Quangel's efforts achieve nothing and ultimately propel the couple, some of their allies, as well as their adversaries, into the hands of the Gestapo and to, well, death. However, it doesn't quite read that way. The Quangels seem to regard it as quite probable that they will be caught sooner or later, and accept their fate, when this happens, with some equanimity. They are also disappointed to learn about the extent to which their efforts were futile, but this too is ultimately accepted philosophically.
From all of this, one might assume that Fallada writes a novel of noble, tragic heroes facing a cruel destiny with clear-eyed courage. That would be to mistake the writer's intentions, as his world view seems rather to be of a deeply flawed humanity all round. We may come to admire Quangel for the way he confronts capture and execution, but we would be pushed ever to like him very much, or warm to him in a human sense at any point. Even the most sympathetically drawn characters in the novel are flawed, frequently misguided and often foolish. By the same token, the Nazi antagonists are far even from their own ideals: rather loutish, drunken, inefficient. The "best" Nazi (who is actually never really a Nazi, but their servant), the investigator who finally tracks down the Quangels, turns out to be anything but, destabilised and deranged by the comparative dignity and lack of fear he perceives in his victim.
Much of the novel is in fact spent in slightly tangential narratives about various Berlin low-life, work-shy, petty criminals, and their various vicissitudes. The overall impression is consistently to undermine any notion of the wartime German capital as anything other than a rather base habitat of deeply flawed humanity where abject money-grubbing and constant threat of violence are the main motivating factors.
To set against this, the novel maybe offers three models for another way. First, there is the Quangel route - to at least have the courage to stick to what you think, to do something, however pointless, about it, and to take the inevitable consequences when they come. A second vision is offered by two characters who embody genuine higher principles, a neighbour of the Quangels, a elderly judge, who believes in justice and courageously acts to mitigate the suffering of the Nazis' victims, and the musician who shares Quangel's death row cell, and shows him how higher values, such as a belief in truth, art, music, beauty, can help counter the brutality of everyday life. The judge and the musician are important in the value system of the book, but their efforts at best alleviate suffering: the judge, for example, manages to stave off capture for a Jewish neighbour only briefly, delays the work of local Nazi thugs only for different thugs to capture their booty, and brings succour to the Quangels only by offering the advantage of a cyanide capsule to cheat the executioner. The musician's great achievement is help Quangel to glimpse a better life before it is prematurely ended.
If there is a figure of any practical hope in the novel, it is in the third model, a boy who manages to escape the thuggish brutality of Berlin (not without resorting to a fair bit of thuggishness himself), renounce his abject, drunken, wife-beating father and who has the good luck to be adopted by a woman who was fortunate enough to escape the city for an anonymous potato-cultivating existence in the fields outside the city. This hope is, we know for sure, only possible in the devastated post-Nazi Germany (ironically, we, unlike Fallada writing in 1947, know what comes next for the eastern part of Germany), but hope it nevertheless is.
On the cover of my copy, the word "redemptive" is printed, citing some newspaper review. Yes, that is a good word for this book, even if the redemption on offer is of the pretty hopeless variety. Fallada's view of humanity is very far from any idea of innate nobility. At best, his characters manage to be as good as they can be, and if they are wise, they will expect no reward for their effort.
It should be said that the other fascinating aspect of the book for this (English) reader is its contemporary perspective - published just two years after the end of the war - evoking how Berlin felt to those who lived through that period, and how the Gestapo state was experienced by its residents. Some of this is quite surprising, especially to those who have grown up with an image of ruthless, cold, efficient machine. Sure, the regime is brutal and effective, but we also see its most bloodless, genuinely efficient servants ultimately as victims too of the machine.
Recommendation? It won't be to everyone's taste, but as a rare contemporary view by a gifted writer who somehow survived the period (which itself implies compromises), this is for me a book well worth reading.
Bleak, yet redemptive. Alone in Berlin
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