Postcard from the Edge

From : http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/books/review/Schillinge... 

Postcards From the Edge

• By LIESL SCHILLINGER

Published: February 27, 2009 

A signal literary event of 2009 has occurred, but if publishers had been more vigilant, it could have been a signal literary event in any of the last 60 years. This event is the belated appearance in English of the novel "Every Man Dies Alone," the story of a working-class Berlin couple who took on the Third Reich with a postcard campaign intended to foment rebellion against Hitler's Germany. Published in 1947, the book was written in 24 days by a prolific but psychologically disturbed German writer named Rudolf Ditzen, who spent a significant portion of his life in asylums (for killing a friend in a duel, for threatening his wife with a gun), in prison (for embezzling to finance his morphine habit) and in rehab. In spite of his precarious emotional state, he wrote more than two dozen books under the pen name Hans Fallada, which he took from Grimm's Fairy Tales.

 

Courtesy of Uli and Achim Ditzen
Hans Fallada in 1934.

Falada was the name the Brothers Grimm gave to a slaughtered horse in the story "The Goose Girl," whose head, nailed on a city gate, speaks to its former mistress, a princess who had been betrayed by her servant. The king of the realm, overhearing the talking head, rights the injustice that caused the horse's death. (Fallada added a second "l" to make the name his.) "Hans" he took from the Grimm tale "Hans in Luck," about a man who mistakes his bad luck for good and is contented, let the world jeer as it may. The pen name fulfills its prophecy. Rescued from the grave, from decades of forgetting, this novel, first published just weeks after the author's death, testifies to the lasting value of an intact, if battered, conscience.

Fallada's novel takes place in wartime Berlin. Early in 1941, half a year after the French capitulation to Germany, a Gestapo inspector named Escherich stands in his office on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, contemplating a map of the city into which he has stuck 44 red-flagged pins. Each marks a spot where a different inflammatory postcard has been found - "Hetzkarten" that denounce Hitler, hand-written in heavy, clumsy print. The first card reads: "Mother! The Führer has murdered my son. Mother! The Führer will murder your sons too, he will not stop till he has brought sorrow to every home in the world."

Inspector Escherich's job is to locate and stop the distributor of the cards, using the pins as a chart of his movements. Will the "postcard phantom" be found? Escherich's life depends on it; the brutish Obergruppenführer Prall who oversees his activities makes no mystery of that. A terrified populace ensures that the red-flagged pins will continue to be turned in to the authorities. The "phantom" by necessity must live among other people - in a certain building, on a certain street, in a certain neighborhood - during a time when "half the population is set on locking up the other half" and any unusual (or usual) behavior can be reported by neighbors intent on saving their own skins. ­Every man may die alone, but nobody lives alone, or entirely unobserved.

The "phantom" turns out to be a quiet, cautious, middle-aged couple, Otto and Anna Quangel. The building they live in also houses a timid Jewish grandmother whose husband has been arrested, a bookish judge and a bestial Nazi family. Other characters pass through, from mail carriers, housekeepers and policemen to an opportunistic thug and a whiny drifter,as well as the Quangels' prospective daughter-in-law. Quangel, a taciturn factory foreman, has always kept to himself, using a shield of surliness to ward off any person but his wife, any activity but his work. He has neither joined nor defied the Nazi Party. But when he learns that his only son, who never wanted to be a soldier, has died at the front, Quangel is shaken from his passivity, inspiring the postcard plot. When his wife protests that this resistance is too inconsequential to make a difference, he retorts, "Whether it's big or small, Anna, if they get wind of it, it'll cost us our lives." "He might be right," she concludes. "No one could risk more than his life. Each according to his strength and abilities, but the main thing was, you fought back."

The Otto and Anna Quangel of Fallada's novel are stand-ins for real-life Berliners, Otto and Elise Hampel, a working-class couple who conducted a postcard campaign for more than two years at the height of Hitler's power, after Elise's brother was killed in the war. Arrested in October 1942, they were sentenced to death by the Volks­gerichtshof (People's Court) in January 1943 and executed by beheading. Their Gestapo files came into Fallada's hands in the fall of 1945, entrusted to him by a poet and postwar culture official, Johannes Becher, who knew of Fallada's prolific literary output and recognized his gift for objective narration.

In a publishing hat trick, Melville House allows English-language readers to sample Fallada's vertiginous variety - and understand Becher's faith in him - by accompanying the release of Michael Hofmann's splendid translation of "Every Man Dies Alone" with the simultaneous publication of excellent English versions of Fallada's two best-known novels, "Little Man - What Now?" (translated by Susan Bennett) and "The Drinker" (translated by Charlotte and A. L. Lloyd).

In "Little Man - What Now?" (first published in Germany in 1932), a white-­collar salesman named Pinneberg and his ­working-class bride try to find employment in Berlin, but their fortunes are ruined by the global depression. (Imagine a Horatio Alger novel in which the humble hero fails.) When a policeman bullies Pinneberg - jobless, collarless and nearly pfennigless - as he stares into the window of a fancy delicatessen, he realizes he has fallen off the grid: "He understood that he was on the outside now, that he didn't belong here anymore, and that it was perfectly correct to chase him away. Down the slippery slope, sunk without trace, utterly destroyed."

"Little Man - What Now?" became an international hit, translated into more than 20 languages and filmed in both Germany and the United States in the first years of the 1930s. Today its pathos lives on chiefly in the tender song "Kleiner Mann - Was Nun," by a Weimar-era choral group called the Comedian Harmonists, who sang it together onstage until they were banned from performing (a year and a month after the burning of the Reichstag) because half their members were of Jewish descent. In his probing afterword to "Little Man - What Now?" Philip Brady ponders the question of why the book isn't better known today: "Enduring success is one thing, immediate impact is something different, and clearly the immediate impact of Fallada's novel was undeniable." Given our current economic ­circumstances, the book may have a second chance at impact and endurance.

"The Drinker," which Fallada wrote in 1944 while he was locked up in a criminal asylum for attacking his estranged wife, is a memoirish novel in which a country merchant describes his unrepentant, gloating slide into alcoholism and failure. Erwin Sommer, who has come to hate his wife, Magda, for her business acumen, starts drinking himself senseless, takes up with low company, steals the family savings, threatens to kill Magda and is institutionalized. In the asylum, vain and obdurate, he abases himself like a Karamazov, rolling in the muck he has made of his life, yet putting on airs to the end. "You're an easily offended man, Herr Sommer," a doctor tells him. "But I must tell you quite frankly that in your marriage, your wife is the guiding hand, the superior partner." He urges Sommer to let himself "be sheltered and guided" by her. The words infuriate Sommer: "I could not forgive his remarks about Magda's superior efficiency."

Fallada's books generally recapitulated his personal history, from "Young Goedeschal: A Novel of Puberty," a youthful effort he later disowned, to "Farmers, Functionaries and Fireworks," a fictionalized account of a conflict between rural workers and greedy authorities in Schleswig-Holstein (he covered the dispute while working as a reporter), to the three novels discussed here. "Every Man Dies Alone" stands above these others, perhaps because so many of the circumstances it enfolds lie outside Fallada's firsthand experience, forcing him to harness his empathy and broaden his focus. And yet the novel he wrote about the Hampels reads less like fiction than like an act of witness: a reincarnation of their world, a posthumous tribute to their sacrifice.

But what can be made of the author himself? An enigmatic, complicated figure, Fallada has been the subject of a handful of biographies in German. The fascinating scholarly afterwords contributed to "Little Man - What Now?" by Philip Brady and to "The Drinker" by John Willet retrace the author's life and work, and weigh his contribution. They acknowledge that the critics of Fallada's own era praised him for his "authenticity" and well-drawn characters but questioned his imaginative powers, often dismissing his writing as unpolished or workmanlike - as, in short, an overly literal interpretation of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) that overtook German arts and letters in the 1920s and '30s in revolt against abstraction and expressionism. But at the remove of more than half a century, Fallada's reanimation of the actions, motivations and private terrors of Berliners who are long since dead - leaving a full record of wickedness and, sometimes, goodness - is infused with something else. Call it Alte Sachlichkeit: the reality of another age, restored.

According to Brady, the author once admitted that he "could depict only what he saw, not what might happen." What Fallada saw in Berlin in the 1940s was enough to make a weaker man close his eyes. But Fallada kept his open. He was not strong enough to leave Nazi Germany, although he was given the chance. But he was strong enough to record what he saw. "From the minute I sit down and write the first line," he once explained, "I am lost, a compelling force is in command. That force dictates just how and how much I must write, whether I want to or not, even if it makes me ill. . . . A hundred times I have wondered what it is that drives me so." It was as if he had no choice. On another occasion, he compared his need to write to an "intoxication," like the morphine he once craved. He called it "a poison that I could not shake out of my mind or my body, I was thirsty for it, I wanted to drink more of it, to drink it always, every day for the rest of my life."

The appearance of these three books in English brings to a wider audience the keen vision of a troubled man in troubled times, with more breadth, detail and understanding (if not precisely sympathy) than most other chroniclers of the era have delivered. Perhaps Lucky Hans was strong­er than he knew: rich in his misfortunes. 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 shoulder and whispers into your ear: "This is how it was. This is what happened."

 

Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.

Related First Chapter: 'Every Man Dies Alone' (March 1, 2009)