Every Man Dies Alone

Description

This never-before-translated masterpiece—by a heroic best-selling writer who saw his life crumble when he wouldn’t join the Nazi Party—is based on a true story.

It presents a richly detailed portrait of life in Berlin under the Nazis and tells the sweeping saga of one working-class couple who decides to take a stand when their only son is killed at the front. With nothing but their grief and each other against the awesome power of the Reich, they launch a simple, clandestine resistance campaign that soon has an enraged Gestapo on their trail, and a world of terrified neighbors and cynical snitches ready to turn them in.

In the end, it’s more than an edge-of-your-seat thriller, more than a moving romance, even more than literature of the highest order—it’s a deeply stirring story of two people standing up for what’s right, and for each other.A New York Times Book Review “Notable Book of The Year” 2009
The New Yorker’s Favorite Fiction Books of 2009
A Globe & Mail Best Books of the Year selection 2009
Barnes & Noble Review’s Top Ten Fiction Books of 2009
Amazon Top Ten Novels of the Year So Far
NPR’s On Point Radio Top Ten Summer Reads
The San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of the Year
Minneapolis Star Tribune Top Books of the Year
The New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
The New Republic’s Top 5 Fiction Books of 2009
Washington City Paper’s Top 10 Books of 2009
The Scotsman Best Fiction Books of 2009
The Sunday Telegraph Best Books of 2009
Best Books of the Year, Shelf Awareness

“The greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis.”- Primo Levi
 
“A wonderful novel…Compelling.” – Ian McEwan

“Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone is one of the most extraordinary and compelling novels ever written about World War II. Ever. Fallada lived through the Nazi hell, so every word rings true–this is who they really were: the Gestapo monsters, the petty informers, the few who dared to resist. Please, do not miss this.”- Alan Furst
 
“An unrivaled and vivid portrait of life in wartime Berlin.” – Philip Kerr

“A signal literary event of 2009 has occurred. Rescued from the grave, from decades of forgetting, [Every Man Dies Alone] testifies to the lasting value of an intact, if battered, conscience. In a publishing hat trick, Melville House allows English-language readers to sample Fallada’s vetiginous variety [and] the keen vision of a troubled man in troubled times, with more breadth, detail, and understanding than most other chroniclers of the era have delivered. To read Every Man Dies Alone, Fallada’s testament to the darkest years of the 20th century, is to be accompanied by a wise, somber ghost who grips your arm and whispers in your ear: ‘This is how it was. This is what happened.'”- New York Times Book Review

“One of the most extraordinarily ambitious literary resurrections in recent memory.” – The Los Angeles Time

“A riveting page turner.” – NPR’s Fresh Air

“An unforgettable portrait of a middle-aged couple’s campaign of civil disobedience against the Nazis.” – Vogue
 
“A publication of enormous importance.” – Washington Times
 
“Fallada’s prose is rough and ready … it grabs you by the throat.” – Boston Phoenix

“It is no wonder that the work’s reception in the English-speaking world has been the journalistic equivalent of a collective dropped jaw.” – The Montreal Gazette

“Every Man Dies Alone…deserves a place among the 20th century’s best novels of political witness.”-Sam Munson, The National

“Every Man Dies Alone [is] a suspense-driven novel…one-of-a-kind.”–Alan Furst, Toronto Globe and Mail

“Every Man Dies Alone [is] one of the most immediate and authentic fictional accounts of life during the long nightmare of Nazi rule.”–The New York Observer

“Primo Levi…called this “the greatest book ever written about the German resistance to the Nazis.” It is, in retrospect, an understatement. This is a novel that is so powerful, so intense, that it almost hums with electricity.”–Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“[Every Man Dies Alone] has the suspense of a John le Carré novel, and offers a visceral, chilling portrait of the distrust that permeated everyday German life during the war.”–The New Yorker

“[At] once a riveting page turner and a memorable portrait of wartime Berlin…With its vivid cast of characters and pervasive sense of menace, Every Man Dies Alone is an exciting book.”—John Powers for Fresh Air / NPR Books We Like

“…a belated revelation.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“…necessary and gripping.”—The Oregonian

“A classic … as morally powerful as anything I’ve ever read.” – The Daily Telegraph (London)
 
“Essential, thrilling.” – The St. Petersburg Times

“His masterpiece.” – Nextbook

“This novel is far more than literary thriller.” – The Financial Times

“Every Man Dies Alone [is] one of the most immediate and authentic fictional accounts of life during the long nightmare of Nazi rule.” – The New York Observer

“An amazing book … it’s not a novel just of ideas, it’s a novel that is a page turner … you just can’t let go… just amazing.” – WKAR/NPR
 
“…paved with terrific suspense, lively vignettes of Berlin life, and some very funny episodes…infusing it with a brilliant bleak irony and terrible power.” – The Barnes & Nobel Review

“[An] unblinking, brilliant report from a living Hell…Fans of the novels of Alan Furst and Irene Nemirovsky will love the gritty “you are there” feel of this harrowing saga of a German couple fighting for their dignity in the face of unrelenting Nazi oppression and sadism.” – Shelf Awareness

“It is a harrowing book. I recommend it.” – America MagazineBefore WWII , German writer Hans Fallada’s novels were international bestsellers, on a par with those of his countrymen Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse. In America, Hollywood even turned his first big novel, Little Man, What Now? into a major motion picture.

Learning the movie was made by a Jewish producer, however, Hitler decreed Fallada’s work could no longer be sold outside Germany, and the rising Nazis began to pay him closer attention. When he refused to join the Nazi party he was arrested by the Gestapo—who eventually released him, but thereafter regularly summoned him for “discussions” of his work.

However, unlike Mann, Hesse, and others, Fallada refused to flee to safety, even when his British publisher, George Putnam, sent a private boat to rescue him. The pressure took its toll on Fallada, and he resorted increasingly to drugs and alcohol for relief. After Goebbels ordered him to write an anti-Semitic novel, he snapped and found himself imprisoned in an asylum for the “criminally insane”—considered a death sentence under Nazi rule. To forestall the inevitable, he pretended to write the assignment for Goebbels, while actually composing
three encrypted books—including his tour de force novel The Drinker—in such dense code that they were not deciphered until long after his death.

Fallada outlasted the Reich and was freed at war’s end. But he was a shattered man. To help him recover by putting him to work, Fallada’s publisher gave him the Gestapo file of a simple, working-class couple who had resisted the Nazis. Inspired, Fallada completed Every Man Dies Alone in just twenty-four days.

He died in February 1947, just weeks before the book’s publication. Chapter One
Some Bad News
The postwoman Eva Kluge slowly climbs the steps of 55 Jablonski Strasse. She’s tired from her round, but she also has one of those letters in her bag that she hates to deliver, and is about to have to deliver, to the Quangels, on the second floor.
Before that, on the floor below, she has a Party circular for the Persickes. Persicke is some political functionary or other — Eva Kluge always gets the titles mixed up. At any rate, she has to remember to call out “Heil Hitler!” at the Persickes’ and watch her lip. Which she needs to do anyway, there’s not many people to whom Eva Kluge can say what she thinks. Not that she’s a political animal, she’s just an ordinary woman, but as a woman she’s of the view that you don’t put children in the world to have them shot. Also, that a home without a man is no good, and for the time being she’s got nothing: not her two boys, not a man, not a proper home. So, she has to keep her lip buttoned, and deliver horrible field letters that aren’t written but typed, and are signed ‘Regimental Adjutant’.
She rings the bell at the Persickes’, says “Heil Hitler!” and hands the old drunk his circular. He has his party badge on his lapel, and he asks: ‘Well, so what’s new?’
She replies: “Haven’t you heard the special report? France has capitulated.”
Persicke’s not content with that. “Come on, Miss, of course I knew that; but to hear you say it, it’s like you were selling stale rolls. Say it like it meant something! It’s your job to tell everyone who doesn’t have a radio, and convince the last of the moaners. The second Blitzkrieg is in the bag now, it’s England now! In another three months, the Tommies will be finished, and then we’ll see what the Fuhrer has in store for us. Then it’ll be the turn of the others to bleed, and we’ll be the masters. Come on in, and have a schnapps with us. Amalie, Erna, August, Adolf, Baldur — let’s be having you. Today we’re celebrating, we’re not working today. Today we’ll wet the news, and in the afternoon we’ll go and pay a call on the Jewish lady on the fourth floor, and see if she won’t treat us to coffee and cake! I tell you, there’ll be no mercy for that bitch any more!”
While Mr. Persicke, ringed by his family launches into increasingly wild vituperative and starts hitting the schnapps, the postie has climbed another flight of stairs and rung the Quangels’ bell. She’s already holding the letter out in her hand, ready to run off the second she’s handed it over. And she’s in luck: it’s not the woman who answers the door — she usually likes to exchange a few pleasantries — but the man with the etched, birdlike face, the thin lips, and the cold eyes. He takes the letter out of her hand without a word and pushes the door shut in her face, as if she was a thief, someone you had to be on your guard against.
Eva Kluge shrugs her shoulders and turns to go back downstairs. Some people are like that; in all the time she’s delivered mail in the Jablonski Strasse, that man has yet to say a single word to her. Well, let him be, she can’t change him, she couldn’t even change the man she’s married to, who wastes his money sitting in bars and betting on horses, and only ever shows his face at home when he’s skint.
At the Persickes’ they’ve left the apartment door open, she can hear the glasses and the rowdy celebrations. The postwoman gently pulls the door shut and carries on downstairs. She thinks the speedy victory over France might actually be good news, because it will have brought the end of the war nearer. And then she’ll have her two boys back.
The only fly in the ointment is the uncomfortable realization that people like the Persickes will come out on top. To have the likes of them as masters and always have to mind your p’s and q’s, that doesn’t strike her as right either.
Briefly she thinks of the man with the bird face who she gave the field post letter to, and she thinks of old Mrs. Rosenthal up on the fourth floor, whose husband the Gestapo took away two weeks ago. You had to feel sorry for someone like that. The Rosenthals used to have a little haberdashery shop on Prenzlauer Allee. That was Aryanized, and now the man’s disappeared, and he can’t be far short of seventy. Those two old people can’t have done any harm to anyone, they always allowed credit — they did it for Eva Kluge too when she couldn’t afford new clothes for the kids — and the goods were certainly no dearer or worse in quality than elsewhere. No, Eva Kluge can’t get it into her head that a man like Rosenthal is any worse than the Persickes, just by virtue of him being a Jew. And now the old woman is sitting in her flat all alone, and doesn’t dare go outside. It’s only after dark that she goes and does her shopping with her yellow star, probably she’s hungry. No, thinks Eva Kluge, even if we defeat France ten times over, it doesn’t mean there’s any justice here at home…
And by now she’s reached the next house, and she makes her deliveries there.
In the meantime shop foreman Otto Quangel has taken the field post letter into the parlor and propped it against the sewing machine. “There!” he says, nothing more. He always leaves the letters for his wife to open, knowing how devoted she is to their only son Otto. Now he stands facing her, biting his thin under lip, waiting for her smile to light up. In his quiet, undemonstrative way, he loves this woman very much.
She has torn open the envelope, for a brief moment there really was a smile lighting up her face, and then it vanished when she saw the typed letter. Her face grew apprehensive, she read more and more slowly, as though afraid of what each next word might be. The man has leaned forward and taken his hands out of his pockets. He is biting his underlip quite hard now, he senses something terrible has happened. It’s perfectly silent in their parlor. Only now does the woman’s breathing come with a gasp.
Suddenly she emits a soft scream, a sound her husband has never heard from her. Her head rolls forward, bangs against the spools of thread on her sewing machine, and comes to rest among the folds of sewing, covering the fateful letter.
In a couple of bounds Quangel is at her side. With uncharacteristic haste he places his big, work-toughened hand on her back. He can feel his wife trembling all over. “Anna!” he says, “Anna, please!” He waits for a moment, and then he says it: “Has something happened to Otto? Is he wounded, is it bad?”
His wife’s body continues to tremble, her mouth doesn’t make a sound. She makes no effort to raise her head to look at him.
He looks down at her hair, it’s gotten thin in the many years of their marriage. They are getting old; if something serious has happened to Otto, she will have no one to love, only him, and there’s not much to love about him. He doesn’t have words to tell her ever how much he feels for her. Even now he’s not able to stroke her, be tender to her, comfort her a little. It’s all he can do to rest his heavy hand on her hair, pull her head up as gently as he can, and softly say: “Anna, will you tell me what’s in the letter?”
But even though her eyes are now very near to his, she keeps them shut tight, she won’t look at him. Her face is a sickly yellow, her usual healthy color is gone. The flesh over her bones seems to have melted away, it’s like looking at a skull. Only her cheeks and mouth continue to tremble, as her whole body trembles, caught up in some mysterious inner quake.
As Quangel gazes into this so familiar, and now so strange face, as he feels his heart pounding harder and harder, as he feels his complete inability to afford her the least comfort, he is gripped by a deep fear. A ridiculous fear really, compared to the deep pain of his wife, but he is afraid that she might start to scream, scream louder and wilder than she did a moment ago. He was always one for peace and quiet, he didn’t want anyone to know anything about the Quangels at home. And as for giving vent to feelings: no, thank you! But even in the grip of his fear, the man isn’t able to say any more than he did a moment ago: “What is it in the letter? Tell me, Anna!”
The letter is lying there plain to see, but he doesn’t dare to reach for it. He would have to let go his wife’s head, and he knows that this head — there are two bloody welts on it from the sewing machine — would only slump once more. He masters himself, asks again: “What’s happened with Ottochen?”
It’s as though the pet name, one that the man hardly ever used, recalled the woman from the world of her pain back into life. She gulps a couple of times, she even opens her eyes, which are very blue, and now look bled white. “With Ottochen?” she says in a near whisper. “What do you think’s happened? Nothing has happened, there is no Ottochen any more, that’s all!”
“Oh!’ the man says, just a deep “Oh!” from the core of his heart. Without knowing what he’s doing, he’s let go his wife’s head, and has reached for the letter. His eyes stare at the lines, without being able to decipher them.
Thereupon the woman grabs the letter from him. Her mood has swung round, furiously she rips the piece of paper into scraps and shreds and fragments, and she shouts into his face: “What do you even want to read that filth for, those common lies they always write? That he died a hero’s death for Fuhrer and Fatherland? That he was an exemplary soldier and comrade? Do you want to hear that from them, when you know yourself that Ottochen liked nothing better than fiddling about with his radio kits, and that he cried when he was called away to be a soldier? How often he used to say to me when he was recruited that he would give his right hand to be able to get away from them? And now he’s supposed to be an exemplary soldier, and died a hero’s death? Lies, all a pack of lies! But that’s what you get from your wretched war, you and that Fuhrer of yours!”
Now she’s standing in front of him, the woman, so much shorter than he is, but with eyes sparkling with fury.
“Me and my Fuhrer?” he mumbles, stunned by this attack. “Since when is he my Fuhrer? I’m not even in the Party, just in the Arbeitsfront (*), and everyone has to join that. As for voting for him, I only did that once, and so did you.”
He says it in his slow and cumbersome manner, not so much to defend himself as to clarify the facts. He still can’t understand what induced her to mount this sudden attack on him. They were always of one mind…
But she says heatedly: “What gives you the right to be the man in the house and determine everything? If I want so much as a space for my potatoes in the cellar, it has to be the way you want it. And in something as important as this, it’s you who made the wrong decision. But then you creep around everywhere in carpet slippers, you want your peace and quiet and that’s all, and not come to anyone’s attention. So you did the same as they all did, and when they yelled: ‘Fuhrer, give us your orders, we will obey!’ you went with them like a sheep. And the rest of us had to follow you! But now Ottochen’s dead, and no Fuhrer in the world can bring him back, and nor can you!”
He listened to her without saying a word back. He had never been a man for quarrel and argy-bargy, and he could also tell that it was her pain speaking in her. He was almost glad to have her scolding him, because it meant she wasn’t giving in to her grief. The only thing he said by way of reply was: “One of us will have to tell Trudel.”
Trudel was Ottochen’s girlfriend, almost his fiancÈe; she called them Mother and Father. She often dropped in on them for a chat in the evening, even now, with Ottochen away. By day she worked in a uniform factory.
The mention of Trudel straightaway set Anna Quangel off on a different track. She glanced at the gleaming clock on the mantel, and asked: “Will you have time before your shift?”
“I’m on from one till eleven today,” he replied. “I’ve got time.”
“Good,” she said. “Then go, but just ask her to come. Don’t say anything about Ottochen. I’ll tell her myself. Your dinner’ll be ready by midday.”
“Then I’ll go and ask her to come round tonight,” he said, but he didn’t leave yet, but looked in her jaundiced, ill-looking face. She looked back at him, and for a moment they looked at each other, two people who had been married for almost thirty years, always harmoniously, he quiet and silent, she bringing a bit of life to the place.
But however much they now looked at each other, they still had no words to say about this thing that had happened, and so he nodded and went out.
She heard the apartment door close. And no sooner was she certain he was gone than she turned back towards the sewing machine, and swept up the scraps of the fateful field post letter. She tried to put them back together, but quickly saw that it would take too long now, and above all she had to get the dinner ready. So she scooped the pieces into the envelope, and slid it inside her hymnbook. In the afternoon, when Otto was at work, she would have time to fit the pieces together and glue them down. It might all be lies, mean, stupid lies, but it remained the last news she would have had of Ottochen. She would keep it safe, and show it to Trudel. Maybe she would be able to cry then; at the moment it still felt like a flame in her heart. It would do her good to be able to cry!
She shook her head crossly and went to the stove.US

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