Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin is a tremendous book, possibly my favourite of the six or seven books I’ve read so far with Tough Guy Book Club. It opens in Nazi Berlin, where an official letter regrets to inform main characters Otto and Anna Quangel that their only son has died in battle. Then follows an exploration of their grief and their reactions to it, which include secretly distributing handwritten postcards urging resistance to the futile war.
The Quangels have to avoid not only the Gestapo, but also the everyday surveillance of their fellow Berliners who, through enthusiasm or fear, are all potential informants. Most of the novel unfolds indoors (even the postcard drops in staircases and foyer mailboxes) and Fallada gives a claustrophobic pressure to the privileged inside perspective of Nazi Germany that he offers his readers, rather than our more usual view from the outside looking in.
More than the historic slice of everyday life, though, the most interesting thing for me was the theme of human decency that runs from beginning to end, raising questions like: how to heed the demands of decency when society sets them up against our instincts for self-preservation? How do we balance self-interest against altruism? And do we owe our neighbours more decency and altruism than we owe strangers?
Without giving too much of the plot away, an archetypally decent character arrives towards the end of the book and provides one (perhaps impossibly) virtuous answer to those questions. Whether any of us in the real world could live up to his, or even Otto’s, examples of retaining our decency and altruism under such extreme pressures is another matter. Let’s hope none of us ever have occasion to find out.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and highly recommend it.
Greg Chandler (Echuca, Vic Chapter)
