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Alone in Berlin
by Hans Fallada

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Alone in Berlin
Hans Fallada

Book details for title
List Price: €13.35
Format: Paperback, 198 x 129 x 26mm, 608pp
Publication date: 28 Jan 2010
Publisher: Penguin Classics
ISBN-13: 9780141189383

Dubray Review

Set in Berlin during World War II, this superb novel centres on the lives of Otto and Anna Quangel whose only son has been killed while serving his country.  With broken hearts they undertake an act of rebellion by dropping postcards around the city with handwritten slogans denouncing Hitler. They realise that if they are caught they will pay with their lives. This seemingly minor subversion reverberates through society, affecting the lives of a diverse range of characters from hapless criminals to the upper echelons of the Gestapo. Paranoia and fear jump off the page and you feel as though you are there with the Quangels in their ultimately futile struggle. Fallada gets to the heart of the German psyche during the war and closely examines life under a totalitarian regime. He truly deserves a place amongst the great chroniclers of war.

- Dermot Hicks & Mary Burnham, Dun Laoghaire

Synopsis

Its Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm and the unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France. Shocked out of their quiet existence, they begin a silent campaign of defiance, and a deadly game of cat and mouse develops between the Quangels and the ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich. When petty criminals Kluge and Borkhausen also become involved, deception, betrayal and murder ensue, tightening the noose around the Quangels' necks...

Reviews

Fallada assembles a cast of vivid low-life characters, stoolies, thieves and whores -- James Buchan Guardian Visceral, chilling ... has the suspense of a Le Carre novel New Yorker A classic study of a paranoid society. Fallada's scope is extraordinary. Alone in Berlin is ... as morally powerful as anything I've ever read -- Charlotte Moore Telegraph 20090319 First published in Germany in 1947 and evoking the horror of life in Germany in the Second World War. A rediscovered masterpiece that makes you want to seek out more works by this great chronicler of events in my own lifetime. Barry Humphries, Books of the Year, Sunday Telegraph The other fictional high point of 2009 was Alone in Berlin ... Hans Fallada's 1947 portrait of an ordinary German couple stung into a life of protest by the death of their soldier son is harrowing and masterly. -- David Robson Books of the Year, Sunday Telegraph [This novel] suggests that resistance to evil is rarely straightforward, mostly futile, and generally doomed. Yet to the novel's aching, unanswered question: 'Does it matter?' there is in this strange and compelling story to be found a reply in the affirmative. Primo Levi had it right: This is the great novel of German resistance. -- Richard Flanagan 'What Irene Nemirovsky's "Suite Francaise" did for wartime France after six decades in obscurity, Fallada does for wartime Berlin.' Roger Cohen, New York Times '[Alone in Berlin] has something of the horror of Conrad, the madness of Dostoyevsky and the chilling menace of Capote's "In Cold Blood"'. Roger Cohen, New York Times 'Fallada's great novel, beautifully translated by the poet Michael Hofmann, evokes the daily horror of life under the Third Reich, where the venom of Nazism seeped into the very pores of society, poisoning every aspect of existence. It is a story of resistance, sly humour and hope' -- Ben Macintyre The Times 'an extraordinary novel' Daily Express