Reading Every Man Dies Alone

The Brooklyn-based publisher Melville House has accounted for more than its fair share of the really worthwhile titles I have come across in recent years--among them David Graeber's Debt, and the issue of translations of Hans Fallada's novels Little Man, What Now? and Every Man Dies Alone--the latter, in English for the first time.

Based on a true story, at its beginning Otto Quangel, a formerly independent carpenter who was ruined in the Depression and is now a foreman at a furniture factory, and his wife Anna, at the time of Germany's triumph over France in early 1940, receive word of the death of their son's death in action. It is for them the final straw in their alienation from a regime for which they had voted back in '33, and they launch their unconventional campaign of protest against the government, writing seditious statements on postcards and leaving them about their home city of Berlin.

Reading the reviews on Amazon I was struck by how many sneered at the plainness of the prose and the straightforwardness of the technique--middlebrows unthinkingly proclaiming their allegiance to the standards set by The Literary Authorities. Contrary to the pretension that a "good" writer will abide by the injunction "Show, don't tell," the reality is that a writer must often tell if they are to give us very much at all; and that good telling can be not only superior to bad showing, but extremely effective.

Certainly it is so with Fallada, as he shows in his capacity to imbue what can seem minor, trivial, incidents with extraordinary power. While I have read a great many works depicting oppressive dystopias I can think of none that so forcefully conveyed the sheer visceral terror of being watched all the time, and of even being suspected of having other than the "correct" opinions, as the scene in which Max Harteisen is flung into a panic by his discovery of one of Otto's postcards. Equally I cannot recall many occasions when a writer made us empathize with a character's sense of betrayal and wretchedness so keenly as Fallada does when depicting Eva Kluge's confrontation with her estranged husband Enno in Chapter Five. I was staggered by the swirl of intrigue he created surrounding the plunder of an old woman's rather modest apartment by rapacious neighbors--and what it revealed about the shabby life that made such trifles seem such a prize to them. The same goes for the exchanges Otto and his fellow prisoner, an internationally known conductor, have while locked up together after he is caught. The conductor actually has to explain what his job is to a disbelieving Otto in a scene that, more than any other, drove home just how little a share working people like Otto had in their country's celebrated higher culture. The result is that while the book is far from what one might expect from the blurb by Primo Levi on the front cover of the hardback hailing it "The greatest book ever written about the German resistance to the Nazis," for me, at least, it lived up to the high praise as very few works do.