¿ y ahora qué ?

http://www.dosdoce.com/continguts/res_libros/vistaSola_ca...

 

Pequeño hombre, ¿y ahora qué?

Autor: Hans Fallada

Editorial: Maeva

Los años de entreguerras fueron una época muy fértil para la literatura en lengua alemana, como lo fue para la pintura. Una "época dorada" a pesar de las circunstancias convulsas en las que crecía -o quizá por eso- tras los vestigios de un fin de siglo decadente, también fecundo. Del Expresionismo a la Nueva objetividad, las letras del ámbito germano intentaban todo tipo de recursos poéticos y narrativos con los que reflejar una vez más un cambio de mentalidad y, con ello, sus transformaciones sociales y políticas. (Son todavía los años de Kafka, Hofmannsthal, Trakl, Döblin, Musil, junto a Thomas Mann, Hesse, Roth, Broch, por citar a los muy conocidos y representativos.) Hans Fallada se ubica en este período de tanta "competencia", años finales para él de acoso político y controvertido "exilio interior". Y años en los que el debate literario, por su profundidad, en ocasiones parece obviar su tiempo -dos guerras mundiales- para ceñirse al intento de devolverle a la literatura el rango de "bella arte", cansados de la actitud acomodaticia y esteticista del Biedermeier o del realismo burgués.

En Pequeño hombre, ¿y ahora qué? (Ediciones Maeva; inmejorable traducción), Fallada pudiera querer adscribirse con más firmeza a esa Nueva objetividad, alejándose de derivas narrativas un tanto manieristas en las que prevalece el narrador y la fábula dentro del relato -como haría en Una vez tuvimos un hijo- sobre los diálogos ágiles, sencillos -en su caso muy acertados- de esta nueva corriente y forma que descubrimos en Pequeño hombre. Un lenguaje claro, coloquial, que a veces nos podría recordar al Döblin de Berlin, Alexanderplatz pero sin sus intenciones narrativas e implicaciones estéticas, con una crítica social menos agresiva, aunque igualmente válida. (Ambas con Berlín como trasfondo: la ciudad devoradora que excluye a desempleados y resignados.) Una novela -la de Fallada- con apenas descripciones; los personajes se describen a sí mismos en sus palabras, y con ello al mundo y sociedad que les rodea, más bien les hostiga.

Así lo hacen los pequeños héroes de esta novela, el joven matrimonio Johannes Pinneberg y Emma, a quien él cariñosamente llama "Corderita". Una pareja de la Alemania de finales de los años 20, en plena crisis económica, cuando se apunta cada marco que se gasta, es imposible ahorrar, tener hijos es algo que nadie se puede "permitir", cualquier habitáculo puede ser un hogar -eso o vivir con la madre- y, lo más importante, como afirma el protagonista en uno de sus diálogos de ánimo mutuo con su "Corderita": "¡Sobre todo no quedarse en paro!". (Sí, la pertinencia de la publicación de este libro en este preciso momento es evidente.) También era aquella una época de movimientos sociales y sindicales -estos, a su vez, con sus pequeñas intolerancias y contradictorias pautas-, donde asalariados y obreros, al ver que cada vez eran menos sus derechos y más las humillaciones, elegían a la desesperada entre el comunismo o el nacionalsocialismo en pleno auge. A lo largo de la novela son varios los diálogos espontáneos que describen estas luchas entre ideologías, donde la elección entre uno u otro bando, como afirma uno de los personajes, al final dependía más que nada del aburrimiento. Aburrimiento que crecía cuando no se veía solución alguna a la apretada -y peligrosa- situación que se estaba viviendo.

Con el aumento de las dificultades va decreciendo la inocencia de "Corderita", quien creía en un principio en la solidaridad de los obreros pero que termina por aceptar que luchar por uno mismo es la única manera de seguir adelante. Así, de ser en un principio algo caprichosa, pasa a tomar las riendas del hogar, pero apartando cualquier fantasía sobre una vida mejor para conformarse con lo que tienen, lo poco que pueden conseguir. Mientras, Pinneberg ya estaba experimentando esa falta de solidaridad y envilecimiento entre los empleados cuando trabaja en unos grandes almacenes donde los vendedores se quitan los clientes lo unos a los otros si no quieren ser despedidos por no llegar a un cupo mínimo de ventas, y si no a la calle, o lo tomas o lo dejas.

Fallada consigue hacer de estas trágicas situaciones verdaderas escenas de sátira social. Con algo de candidez, quizá con intención de poner un punto de optimismo a unos tiempos tan extremos, el autor no deja de mostrar trazos de ilusión entre tanta adversidad, haciendo por momentos de su héroe un pusilánime o conformista, pero al cabo luchador. Es el tono con el que Fallada consiguió un éxito amplio de lectores, posiblemente gracias tanto a este estilo claro y "simpático" -si podemos hablar en estos términos-, como a su fácil lenguaje y a la vez perfecta descripción de los conflictos en su país. También a la diversidad de personajes, todos muy logrados, sobre todo en su discurso. Con todo ello, aún consigue hacer una literatura accesible, apacible y de empatía. Así, no estamos ante un Hermann Broch o Thomas Mann -quien por cierto alabó este libro-, pero sí ante un escritor que buscaba hacerse entender desde la claridad, sin falsear u ornamentar por ello el mundo que le rodeaba.

Tampoco faltan los momentos de negación, donde, en las escasas reflexiones directas del autor -fuera de los diálogos- o algún protagonista, las conclusiones se dicen con la rotundidad que merecen:

"¿Puede reír gente como nosotros? ¿Cómo se puede reír, reír de verdad, en un mundo semejante con saneados dirigentes de la vida económica que han cometido mil errores y gentes anónimas, humilladas, pisoteadas, que siempre se esfuerzan cuanto pueden?"

Puede que no haya mucha profundidad en lo que dice, pero tampoco hace falta más. El texto es claro. La moraleja final del libro de Hans Fallada es que, a pesar de todo, si existe el amor las dificultades son menos. Mientras, sólo queda esperar y permitirse el lujo, en el caso de nuestros héroes, de tener un hijo. Y de nuevo quedarse fuera, sin trabajo. Lo cual, pasado un tiempo, a algunos todavía les resulta sospechoso (p.336). Es entonces cuando comienza el desarraigo y la vergüenza. Aquí se termina la sátira.

 

Texto: José Antonio Vázquez (Equipo Dosdoce)

 

About a page-turner

From

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1036...

 

Books

A Recently Rediscovered Page-Turner Of Nazi Berlin

by John Powers

 

Fresh Air from WHYY, April 30, 2009 · There are some things that history books, even good ones, can't teach you. I was recently reading The Third Reich at War, the final volume of Richard J. Evans' magnificent trilogy about the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. Late in the book, Evans notes that there was some civilian opposition to Hitler, then adds the crushing truth. It was hopeless. The only people who could've changed things belonged to the military — figures like Count von Stauffenberg, the officer played by Tom Cruise in the movie Valkyrie. The others, however heroic, were just small fry.

Now, if you want to know what it was like to be small fry in that demented reich, you're better off going to Every Man Dies Alone, the recently rediscovered 1947 novel by the German writer Hans Fallada. Vibrantly translated by Michael Hofmann, this story of ordinary resistance to Nazism is at once a riveting page-turner and a memorable portrait of wartime Berlin.

The story centers on a married couple, Otto and Anna Quangel, who hear that their son has been killed in the war. While Anna falls into rage and despair, the normally passionless Otto — a stolid, laconic foreman whose men think of him as a machine — decides they should act. The two begin entering public buildings and leaving a single postcard with an anti-fascist message for someone to find. It's a small act, but they know that one mistake will mean their own doom — as well as ruin their family and friends.

Fallada uses the Quangel's rebellion as the launching pad for a panorama of life under the Nazis. There's the retired judge who quietly deplores Hitler and the apartment super who robs his frail Jewish tenant knowing she won't dare report the crime. There's the Hitler Youth who bullies his parents and the postal worker who flees to the countryside in despair when she learns that her beloved son has been seen smashing Jewish babies' heads against car fenders.

The most complicated figure is Inspector Escherich, the Gestapo man who's chasing the Postcard Phantom, as he calls the people dropping the subversive messages. As he tracks down the Quangels, he goes from being a thoughtless, sometimes violent servant of the Reich to a man who comes to grasp that he himself is merely a replaceable cog in a society run by gangsters.

If anything binds these diverse characters, it's that they share the paradoxical condition created by police states. Even as they feel desperately isolated and alone, they also feel that they're not alone — somebody out there is watching, or could be watching, every single thing they do. It's a feeling Fallada knew first hand. He lived a life of drug abuse, alcoholism, asylums and prison. As both a writer and an addict, he spent much of life trapped inside his own head — yet aware that he was under surveillance.

Perhaps because he was himself an outsider, Fallada has a knack for capturing the small, unglamorous, seemingly futile heroism of the Quangels. Virtually all the people who find their postcards are either such loyal Nazi citizens or so such cowed ones that they instantly turn these hot potatoes into the authorities. And still the Quangels fight their fear and go on.

With its vivid cast of characters and pervasive sense of menace, Every Man Dies Alone is an exciting book. Yet like so many stories about Hitler's Germany, it's also a challenge. It compels you to wonder how you would behave if you were in the same dreadful situation. I mean, it's easy enough to think that, with his position and resources, we would've been as brave as Oskar Schindler, who even had the satisfaction of knowing he was saving lives. But what if you were Otto and Anna — with no real power — and no way of knowing if your actions achieved anything at all?

Without being sentimental about it, Fallada suggests that the Quangels may not have changed the regime, but they did change themselves. The workaholic Otto finds himself opening up to many wonderful things he'd never bothered to notice — he becomes more fully human. As for Anna, she has the transcendent satisfaction of knowing she fought back against evil. She may not have been able to save the world, but at least she tried to save her own soul.

Now that may not seem like very much in the grand sweep of history, but Fallada makes us understand that, in frail, mortal, human terms, such courage is more than enough.

The Human Comedy

From :

http://www.laweekly.com/2009-04-30/art-books/the-human-comedy-reintroducing-hans-fallada/

The Human Comedy: Reintroducing Hans Fallada

By Nathan Ihara

Published on April 29, 2009 at 5:08pm

Rudolph Ditzen took the pen name Hans Fallada in 1913 to protect his family - his father was a respected judge - from embarrassment at his first angst-ridden novel. He took "Hans" from the folktale of "Lucky Hans," the story of a foolish farmer who barters away all his possessions, trading his life savings for a horse, the horse for a cow, and so on, until he is left carrying a millstone down a dusty road. The farmer's natural optimism, however, is such that he views each new item as a wonderful bit of luck, and when his millstone rolls into a river, he feels "light at heart, free from all his troubles."

"Fallada" derives from the fairy tale of "The Goose Girl," in which a cruel chambermaid swaps identities with a princess as she travels to be married. The only witness is a horse, Falada, whom the false princess orders beheaded. The true princess bribes a servant to have the horse's head nailed above the gate to the city, where it sings songs bewailing the crimes it has witnessed. These twin motifs - the fool's cheer in the face of hardship, and the lonely voice singing against injustice - would mark much of Fallada's work, as he wrote through the economic blight of the Weimar Republic and the atrocities of the Third Reich.

A troubled, sickly, guilt-ridden youth, Fallada was just 18 when he and one of his few friends arranged to kill each other in a staged duel. The friend died, Fallada survived. Over the course of his life, he would spend many years in and out of mental institutions, was often unemployed, and succumbed periodically to his alcohol and morphine addictions. He considered writing his great escape (he called it his "little death"), and he wrote with the same voracious speed as he smoked his hundreds of daily cigarettes. Part of the "New Objectivity" ( "Die Neue Sachlichkeit" ) art movement, Fallada's writing is intentionally plain: Grocery lists make more appearances than metaphors, the characters speak in exclamations, and weep easily. Though the goal is realism, there are elements of pantomime and slapstick. The characters tend to be flat, social types, but Fallada renders them with great sympathy and vividness. There's a strong genetic connection between his writing and the films of Charlie Chaplin- The Tramp is essentially a comic figure rather than a "real" person, yet in his travails and hardships we cannot help but feel his humanity. Fallada's characters - cruel bosses, generous libertines, petty thieves, Nazi thugs, bumbling drunks, hapless young lovers - are a literary paradox, simultaneously static and vibrating with life. There is no great mystery to them, but their lives are full of surprises.

Fallada's 1932 novel, Little Man, What Now?, tells the tale of a naive young married couple, Johannes and Lammchen, as they struggle to make ends meet in the aftermath of World War I. It became an international success, was translated into 20 languages and made into two films. Though the novel's theme is the hardships of poverty, the tone remains light, comic and sweet, with many whimsical scenes, as when Johannes spends all his wages on a fancy dressing table - their only furniture - or when a pregnant Lammchen eats their entire salmon dinner and weeps with guilt. Fallada never directly addresses politics - he is no Bertolt Brecht - but the reader becomes acutely aware of the tensions in the air: National Socialists clash with communists in the street, the parks teem with the unemployed, cruel bosses fire their employees only to fall victim to the next wave of layoffs. By novel's end, Johannes has been crushed by the economy. Ragged, jobless, he cowers in the bushes until his wife coaxes him back into their cottage - a similar note to the last scene of Modern Times as The Tramp urges the beautiful gamin to "Buck up!" Little Man ends on this bittersweet note: Times are hard, food is scarce, there are riots in the streets and strikes at the factory, but hope remains, love remains.

By the time he wrote The Drinker, hope and love were mostly gone. After the rise of the Nazis, Fallada was deemed an undesirable writer, and his marriage had fallen into chaos as a result of his manias and drinking. For firing a revolver at his wife, Fallada was thrown into a psychiatric prison. While there, he wrote a semiautobiographical novel of an incompetent small-town businessman, Erwin Sommer, who destroys his business, his marriage and his life through his sudden infatuation with schnapps. For a ruined man writing in prison during a terrible war, Fallada surprisingly kept his comic undertones, and the first half of the novel has the slapstick escapades of a dark farce. His character makes one poor decision after another, full of braggadocio and self-satisfaction even as he inexorably falls. In one sublime scene, after being called up to a barmaid's room for a tryst, the narrator takes off his shoes but then dreamily climbs out a window and wanders home in the countryside, singing songs and drinking brandy. Only when his wife finds him drinking the last of her cooking sherry does Fallada mention the man's bleeding feet.  

This is a repeated Fallada trope: a veneer of humor over half-hidden and horrible truths. By the novel's second half, the veneer begins to scrape away as the narrator's humiliations and degradations mount. He is charged with murder, imprisoned, robbed, beaten, and his nose bitten off by another convict. When The Tramp goes to prison in Modern Times, it is an excuse for a Keystone Cops routine, but Fallada's descriptions of the prison inmates have a harrowing veracity unlike either a Chaplin film or Fallada's Little Man. A lovelorn prisoner is callously tricked out of his tobacco by a beautiful young inmate. Herr Sommer's cellmate, Holz, is a "master" at imagining delicious meals (a common practice among the starving inmates): "He was most eloquent when he described how a farmer had . given the convict-party pieces of bread spread thick with 'good butter'... [and] his voice trembled as he described how his stomach had not been able to stand the unwonted rich food, and he had brought it all up again."

There's a ruthless sadness and accuracy to these details, and one senses that Fallada's old literary model is bending to breaking point. How can his broad plot lines and simple characters encompass such madness? After World War II, Chaplin said if he had known the true extent of the Nazis' monstrosity, he would not have been able to make The Great Dictator, and one of the pleasures of The Drinker is watching Fallada's style shift under the strain of witnessing the naked depths of the human experience.

Released from prison after the war, Fallada was a nervous wreck. He had left his wife, and remarried a fellow morphine addict in Berlin. In hopes of reinspiring him, one of his literary patrons gave him a Gestapo file concerning a famous case that took place in Berlin under Nazi rule: A middle-aged couple, who for years spread hundreds of anti-Nazi propaganda post cards around Berlin, avoided capture and infuriated the SS. Fallada took this material, and at his typical breakneck pace, in 24 days produced Every Man Dies Alone. Having already investigated the suffering of poverty and addiction, in this novel, his masterpiece, he bears witness to the 20th century's greatest crime. Primo Levi hailed the work as "the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis," and Levi and Fallada's books share an understanding that while the Nazis were evil, the moral corruption of citizens and prisoners themselves was nearly as grotesque.

Fallada's depiction of wartime Berlin reveals dissolution on all levels of civilization: Yes, there are brutish Gestapo agents and sadistic SS torturers, but equally fiendish are the looters, blackmailers and bullies among the general population. When a man, the morning after learning his son has died at the front, complains that Germany's new wealth "isn't worth a single dead body," his neighbor reminds him, "You know I can get you put in a concentration camp for defeatist mutterings like that," and promptly tries to cadge 10 marks.

This is not a novel about a monolithic evil empire but rather one that charts a million transgressions. One of its major side plots features two louts' bumbling attempts to steal a dead Jewish woman's linens. For a few marks a boy beats up his father. The leader of a communist resistance cell smugly orders a young woman to commit suicide because she has jeopardized their security. Every Man Dies Alone is a vision of humanity unmasked, of our basest instincts given free rein.

Fallada spares no one: The retired judge who shelters a Jewish woman is so cold in his rules of her confinement that she decides to kill herself rather than live forever in a shuttered room. Otto and Anna Quangel, the couple heroically defying the Nazis, are shown to be fools: They dream of instigating righteous resistance, but no one reads their post cards; every single one is either destroyed or turned over immediately to the Gestapo. After his capture, and realizing the futility of his efforts, Otto sighs, "Given the chance I'd do it again. Only, I'd do it very differently."

The novel's final chapter, fittingly titled "The End," is aswarm with misery. Yet in these final pages, stripped of hope, love and the last vestiges of civilization, Fallada reaches new artistic heights. In a surreal tangent, Otto Quangel is thrown into a cell with a psychotic SS officer, who believes that he is a dog. This dog-man bites Otto, steals his food, licks his entire body, and generally torments the poor man. But surprisingly, the dog-man learns to like Otto, and as Otto is led away to trial, he "howled piteously ... [and] when Karlchen the dog was driven back into his cell, then Quangel's face was no longer cold and implacable, and in his heart he felt a slight pressure akin to regret. The man who all his life had only ever given his heart to one being, his wife, was sorry to see the multiple murderer, the beast of a man, pass out of his life." Otto has been slipped a cyanide pill, which he plans to take before his execution, but as he's led toward the guillotine, "A terrible, tormenting curiosity tickled him. ... A couple minutes more, he thought. I must know what it feels like to lie on the table. ..." Miraculously, here at the bitter end, the spirit of Lucky Hans is still alive, still nursing his perverse optimism, still finding something worthwhile in his wretched life: His compassion and curiosity may be irrational but they survive. Even the sensation of your own murder has some small value.

After finishing the novel in 1946, Fallada told his sister Elisabeth, "At last I've got one right." He died before he saw it published. The first English translation, lovingly prepared by Melville House, deserves celebration for its historical insight, its literary beauty and its rare sense of humanity.

Unlucky Hans

 http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090116/REVIEW/8007...

Unlucky Hans

[from The National (see link above) : January 16. 2009

Hans Fallada spent his life nervously vacillating between rebellion against and co-operation with Nazi rule. But just before his death, Sam Munson finds, he wrote the great novel of German resistance.

To the exquisitely cultured 21st-century reader, Primo Levi’s endorsement of a first-rate thriller as “The greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis” might seem improbable. German literature has a well-deserved reputation for formal and philosophical difficulty. The names that English readers most quickly recognise – Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin, Günter Grass – have come to be almost synonymous with a vision of the novel as an uncompromising, compositionally demanding object, one that makes little concession to its reader. The German canon is no place for thrillers.

But Levi is right. Every Man Dies Alone, the German novelist Hans Fallada’s final book (now available for the first time in English, in a fluid translation by Michael Hofmann), deserves a place among the 20th century’s best novels of political witness.

The story of the novel’s genesis is as dark as the book itself – and its author’s trouble-heavy life. Fallada, a writer of closer stylistic kinship to Graham Greene than to Günter Grass, was born Rudolf Ditzen in 1893. He began his literary career as an outsider, a transplant to Berlin from the provinces with a passionate interest in European literature, a youthful suicide attempt in his past and a string of drug-related arrests on his record (Fallada suffered from morphine addiction for much of his adult life). In 1932, he produced his first best-seller, Little Man, What Now?, the story of a working-class marriage set in the last days of the Weimar Republic.

Two years later, his next novel, Once We Had A Child, brought him to the unfriendly attention of the Nazi authorities for its deviation from the party line on family life. The remaining 14 years of Fallada’s life were spent vacillating unhappily between rebellion against and co-operation with Hitler’s regime. He planned to leave Germany; he abandoned the plans. He wrote forewords to his own novels aimed at placating the authorities by suggesting that, when read correctly, they did not actually contravene government policies. For a time he avoided serious literature, writing humour books and children’s stories. Then he agreed to produce an anti-Semitic novel for Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. But during his subsequent incarceration (for domestic violence) in a psychiatric hospital, he used Goebbel’s (somewhat uncertain) backing to procure pen and paper and produce The Drinker – a piercing novel of alcoholism (one of Fallada’s own vices) and social decay, and surely no piece of agitprop.

Fallada was released in December 1944, just months before the Nazi government fell. Shortly thereafter, one of his friends got him a copy of the Gestapo file on Otto and Elise Hampel, a middle-class couple who had embarked on a dangerous and ultimately pointless leafleting campaign against the government. Working from this material, Fallada – his mental and physical health failing, his family life irreparably damaged by his alcoholism and his political status – wrote Every Man Dies Alone.

The book’s protagonists (they are certainly not heroes) are Otto and Anna Quangel, a factory foreman and his wife. Otto is congenitally silent, Anna pathologically generous of spirit. They have an uneventful marriage; a son, Ottochen, at the front; and a soon-to-be-daughter-in-law, Trudel, at home in Berlin. When Ottochen dies at the front (or “falls”, as the argot of the Hitler years had it), Truden collapses at the news, and Otto breaks his long-running silence. Though he helped vote Hitler into power (“It was true, thus far he had been a believer in the Fuhrer’s honest intentions. One just had to strip away the corrupt hangers-on and parasites”), Otto finds himself disenchanted with the government’s war-making abroad and repression at home. He begins a propaganda campaign against the regime, writing out anti-Hitler postcards by hand and depositing them around Berlin. Anna, who had already taken her own small steps towards resistance by sheltering a Jewish refugee for a single night (much to Otto’s anger), is impressed by her husband’s new expressiveness and, like him, driven to act by Ottochen’s death.

Together they scatter postcards and evade the Gestapo for months, causing hilarious internal strife at the security offices on the Alexanderplatz. Eventually Otto fumbles a card en route to a drop, and he and Anna end up in the hands of the security apparatus. Otto is sentenced to execution by the People’s Court (Nazi Germany’s central organ of extra-judicial public punishment), and he dies by guillotine in a dark, stifling basement. Anna, awaiting her own execution date in Berlin’s Old Moabit Prison, dies in a bomb blast during one of the British bombing runs.

Partisans, whether they hide in a forest with guns or drop postcards in Berlin apartment houses, are supposed to win. Even when they do not, we expect them to possess any number of romantic attributes. The Quangels, however, are boring, morally dubious people. Otto, after all, had been an early supporter of Hitler, if not a party member; Anna’s existence is more or less untouched by political conviction; and the two managed to live for years without the slightest inclination to obstruct their government (Anna’s night of refugee shelter aside). But even as passive a character as Otto can be forced to wakefulness by history:

“No, he says to himself, almost aloud. No, Quangel, you’ll never be the same again. I’m curious what Anna’ll have to say to all this... Foreman Otto Quangel walks alertly from machine to machine, takes a hand here, glowers at a chatterbox there, and thinks to himself, That’s the end of that, for good and all. And they haven’t got a clue. As far as they’re concerned, I’m just a doddery old fool... I wonder what I’m going to do next. Because I will do something, I know. I just don’t yet know what it will be ...”

Fallada interweaves the tale of this failed resistance movement – which he paints as almost senseless, eccentric and foredoomed – with those of the lives affected, directly and indirectly, by the Quangels’ decision: Trudel (their deceased son’s fiancée); Emil Borkhausen, a neighbour of the Quangels’ and a petty criminal who, with his partner Enno Kluge, robs an Aryanised apartment in the Quangels’ building; the tenacious, soulless Inspector Escherisch, the policeman assigned to capture the Quangels, whose failure to do so lands him in prison and who only finds a measure of redemption after his release – through suicide. Almost every character Fallada introduces to us dies, most of them at the hands of the government. Fate is blind and cruel in this book, and fear is the definitive component of German life. The Nazi bureaucracy – in which suffocating, indecipherable organisational codes and casual brutalities merge and thrive – possesses the same frightening omnipresence of the city government in Kafka’s The Trial. Readers of Every Man Dies Alone, however, cannot succour themselves with the thought that these officers, these prisons, this justice, are works of the author’s imagination.

The book’s treatment of the Gestapo is perhaps the ultimate source of its particular greatness. The archetypal German literary work of the war years, for good and ill, is Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus: the story of a musician seduced by the dionysian attractions of his art (and, obliquely, of a nation seduced by the power and dark glory of Manichean political evil). Layered with discussions of music theory and theological history, Doktor Faustus is, in short, a novel of metaphysics, not a novel of grim particularity. Thus it neglects the dismal everyday that Fallada chronicles so well and so relentlessly: the quantities of booze drunk by the miserable officers, the number of blows delivered in interrogations, the dimensions of prison cells, the colour and details of police and military uniforms, train schedules, back room low-level party meetings. Where Mann might use the police headquarters on the Prinz Albrecht Strasse as a chance to explain the dialectic between modern and medieval German architecture, Fallada sees only petty human evil in action:

“They caught hold of the still-staggering Borkhausen and slung him down the stairs like a sack of potatoes, tumbling over and over... The next sentry grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and screamed ‘You think you can dirty our nice floor here, you pig!’ dragged him to the exit, and heaved him out into the street... The passersby on the Prinz Albrecht Strasse studiously avoided looking at the man sprawled in the dirt...”

That Fallada discerned in all this, and in the brief rebellion and deaths of the Hampels, fit material for a novel demonstrates a piercing psychological acuity. So does his prose, which hurries mercilessly along, bald and frank as time itself:

“‘I’ll throw you in the water, son of a bitch. And it’ll be self-defence...’ Two shots rang out, in quick succession. The Inspector felt the man crumple between his fists, and topple over. Reflexively, Escherisch made a move as he saw the dead man slip off the edge of the pier. His hands wanted to grab hold of him. Then with a shrug the Inspector watched as heavy body smacked into the water and straightaway disappeared.

“Better that way! He said to himself, as he moistened his dry lips. Less evidence. . . He walked slowly back down the pier, up the bank of the lake towards the station.

“The station was locked, the last train was gone. Indifferently, the Inspector set off on the long walk back to Berlin.

“The clock struck.

“Midnight, thought the inspector. He made it to midnight. I’m curious how he’ll like his peace, really curious. Wonder if he’ll feel cheated again? The piece of s***, the whimpering piece of s***.”

Mann’s impulse to metaphysics – to view the catastrophes of one’s own age and the eruption of subterranean human desires primarily as philosophical or aesthetic events – appears in a plurality, if not a majority, of 20th century German fiction, in writers as varied as Arno Schmidt and Alfred Andersch. In On the Natural History of Destruction, a brilliant collection of essays on postwar German literature, the novelist WG Sebald deems this tendency useless, insufficient — even “dubious”, as he puts it in his discussion of Schmidt.

In Sebald’s opinion, witness to the horrors of the war, and in particular the horrors of the camps, demands something else entirely: books of brutal, surgical clarity, the better to express and confront the cataclysmic, a state of being that became quotidian for Germany’s victims. Sebald cites the work of the novelist Hubert Fichte; better known entrants in this field are Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness.

Sebald’s diagnosis is more accurate than not; thus we don’t typically think of effective books of witness being written by Germans who had ambiguous relationships with the Nazis. But Fallada did write such a book – in the seemingly-impossible span of 24 days, after which he died. It is telling that he took his pen surname from a figure in The Goose-Girl, one of the fairy tales collected by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm: Fallada, a hapless talking horse so bent on revealing the truth that decapitation failed to silence him.

Sam Munson has written about books for The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, Commentary and numerous other publications.