Every Man Dies Alone

by Hans Fallada

  Fallada transfers this almost bathetic characterization of the Hampels to their counterparts in Every Man Dies Alone, Otto and Anna Quangel. The fictional couple initially approve of the Nazi regime, believing after the failure of Otto’s business during the Great Depression that “Hitler was the one who had pulled their chestnuts out of the fire” (20). Although the Quangels subsequently feel some reservations about the regime, their active rebellion against it originates in the purely personal grief of their son’s death in 1940, and only develops a broader ethical dimension—for example in a postcard decrying “the persecution of the Jews” (154)—as it continues. The couple’s eventual capture is pronounced inevitable not only by Inspector Escherich, with the authority of his professional experience, but also by Otto, who feels that chance must defeat them sooner or later. When the Quangels are arrested, Otto accepts Escherich’s statement that the Gestapo “never heard anything from the public at large that leads us to think they [the postcards] had the least effect” (376), and Anna incautiously draws an interrogator’s attention to her son’s former fiancée, Trudel Baumann, who is then arrested and later commits suicide in prison.

  The Quangels’ lack of intellectual sophistication and political impact is paralleled by the numerous other dissidents in Every Man Dies Alone, who sometimes act from idiosyncratic motives, and almost always fail to thwart or damage the regime. Karl Hergesell joins the resistance cell in his factory primarily as a pretext to spend time with Trudel, the cell disbands after Trudel reveals its existence to Otto, and it subsequently emerges that the authorities had the group under observation in any case. Hetty Haberle is not really “interested in politics” (212), but rather is sheltering Enno Kluge from the Gestapo because they persecuted her husband, and she is unable to prevent Enno’s death. Of the four Communist dissidents, Walter Haberle is murdered in a concentration camp, his associate Anna Schonlein is arrested for helping Hetty and Enno, Grigoleit—the third member of Karl and Trudel’s cell—is eventually presumed to have “gone AWOL” (398), and Jensch—the fourth member—is described very fleetingly and vaguely as “carrying on” (284) after the cell breaks up. Among those who challenge the Nazis on ethical grounds, the retired Judge Fromm invokes his lifelong commitment to “Justice” (75) when giving refuge to his Jewish neighbor Frau Rosenthal, only for her to reject his stringent safety precautions and immediately fall victim to the Gestapo (while Fromm himself later dies in an air raid); Trudel also decides to hide a Jewish woman, but Karl determines to stop her, and the couple are arrested before she can act on her resolve; and the orchestral conductor Reichhardt makes repeated public statements about “how disastrous the course was that the German people were taking under their Führer” (424), for which he is imprisoned and condemned to death. With the possible minor exceptions of Grigoleit and Jensch, the only dissident who is neither incarcerated nor dead by the end of Every Man Dies Alone is Eva Kluge, and even this is essentially a matter of chance, in that the Nazi state—which Eva defies openly by resigning from the Party and her government job—decides on lesser sanctions:

  She only just avoided being sentenced to concentration camp—but in the end they had let her go. Enemy of the state—that designation was punishment enough. (335)

  Thus Fallada goes to considerable lengths to create a large number of anti-Nazi dissidents who in practical terms fail almost completely. It is the sound not just of the Quangels’ protest, but of many other protests, which dies away unheard, to repeat Fallada’s phrase from the article about the Hampels which I quoted above. However, after using that phrase Fallada wrote that the couple

  sacrificed their lives in a purposeless battle, apparently

  in vain. But perhaps not entirely purposeless, after

  all? Perhaps not entirely in vain, after all?

  I, the author of an as yet unwritten novel, I hope

  that their battle, their suffering, their deaths were not

  entirely in vain.

  And when the novel was written, it did suggest that the dissidents had not lived or died in vain. The fact that they achieve very little material success against the Nazi regime is portrayed as secondary to the idea that they defeat the regime in ideal and even metaphysical terms, by preserving their moral integrity both as individuals, and as representatives of a better Germany who justify the nation’s survival. This means that Every Man Dies Alone examines for one final time the recurring tension in Fallada’s works between how people struggle with—or, as in The Drinker, are destroyed by—the world around them, and how they still assert themselves against it in some meaningful way.

  That the Quangels’ objectively largely ineffectual resistance nevertheless has an ethical significance is emphasized when Otto first tells Anna that he intends to write the postcards. She protests that this initiative is “a bit small,” but he points out that “if they get wind of it, it’ll cost us our lives,” prompting her to reflect that “no one could risk more than his life,” and that “the main thing was, you fought back” (132). Later the couple promise each other that they will stand by their criticisms of the regime even under threat of death, so that—as Otto says—they will “be able to die properly, without moaning and whimpering” (294). Like the Quangels, Eva recognizes that she is planning an individual and dangerous rebellion, but goes ahead in the conviction that through it “she will keep her self-respect. Then that will have been her attainment in life, keeping her self-respect” (44). And Reichhardt assures Otto that even though their and others’ resistance will have no concrete result, “it will have helped us to feel that we behaved decently till the end” (430). I should perhaps note here that in the German text of the novel, Otto’s “properly,” Eva’s “self-respect” and Reichhardt’s “decently” are all expressed by the adjective-cum-adverb “anständig,” which refers primarily to what is “decent” or done “decently” in a moral sense, and moreover that “anständig” and its related forms are key words in many of Fallada’s novels. Little Man, What Now?, in particular, can be understood partly as an examination of the strains which the Great Depression imposes on human decency.

  Fallada reinforces the significance of the Quangels’ moral integrity through Escherich. Originally the Inspector regards himself simply as a police detective, a servant of the state, whose work pursuing dissidents for the Gestapo has no more complex ethical implications than a clerk’s work selling stamps for the post office. However, the brutality of his superior Prall gradually shows Escherich that he has assimilated to a corrupt system. Under pressure from Prall to demonstrate progress towards catching “the hobgoblin,” Escherich first falsely incriminates Enno Kluge and then murders him to conceal the deception, an action for which “he will never be able to exonerate himself” (257). When Prall later has Escherich himself arrested and mistreated, the Inspector becomes “thoroughly acquainted with fear” (352), and realizes that it is the driving principle of the regime. And when Escherich (who is eventually released) finally captures the Quangels, he concedes that their resistance was legitimate and that he has forfeited his integrity, returning no answer when Otto takes responsibility for his own actions, and challenges the Inspector to accept responsibility for his:

  You’re working in the employ of a murderer, delivering ever new victims to him. You do it for money; perhaps you don’t even believe in the man. No, I’m certain you don’t believe in him. Just for money, then… (377)

  Escherich shoots himself that night, reflecting as he pulls the trigger that he is Otto’s “only disciple” (381). While Escherich’s suicide is unlikely to damage the Gestapo substantially, Otto clearly and literally gains a moral victory. Incidentally, there is nothing in the extant files in the Hampels’ case which indicates that either Otto or Elise exercised any particular influence on the chief investigating officer, Willy Püschel, and Manfred Kuhnke’s masterly study of the continuities and discontinuities between the Hampels’ and the Quangels’ stories has demonstrated that Püschel survived until at least 1947.
That Fallada creates a more complex relationship between Otto Quangel and Inspector Escherich, which culminates in the latter’s dramatic acknowledgement of his own inhumanity, highlights the emphasis that the novel places on the Quangels’ steadfast decency.

  Every Man Dies Alone characterizes the dissidents not only in ethical terms, as upholding profound ideals, but also in more metaphysical terms, as the conscience of the nation. This idea is introduced when Trudel tells Otto that the members of her factory cell see themselves as being “like good seeds in a field of weeds. If it wasn’t for the good seeds, the whole field would be nothing but weeds” (32). The motif is repeated when Eva clears a potato paddock which is “choked with weeds” (334), and varied when Otto must “sort batches of dried peas and pick out the wormy ones, the broken ones, stray seeds of this or that” (474) while on death row. These references recall the biblical parable of the wheat and the tares (Matt. 13:24-30 and 36-43), suggesting that those who oppose the Nazis embody Christian virtues which will ensure Germany’s eventual salvation from the regime. This suggestion becomes stronger when Anna and Trudel are reunited in prison, and Anna says that “I still believe in God” (409), and it becomes explicit in Reichhardt’s evaluation of his and the Quangels’ and others’ resistance, which I quoted in part above:

  Well, it will have helped us to feel that we behaved decently till the end. And much more, it will have helped people everywhere, who will be saved for the righteous few among them, as it says in the Bible. (430)

  Reichhardt is invoking Genesis 18:26-32, which begins: “And the Lord said, If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes.”

  The dissidents’ significance as “the righteous few” who redeem the nation is reinforced by the association between their rebellion and their children, who symbolize the nation’s future. The Quangels of course begin writing their postcards when their only son is killed during the invasion of France. Eva’s revolt is triggered by the news that one of her sons has murdered Jewish children in Poland. And Trudel forms her plan of sheltering the Jewish woman after she becomes pregnant, and starts thinking about how her son would grow up in the Nazi system. That Fallada is particularly concerned to establish the dissidents as the metaphorical parents of a better Germany born after 1945 is underlined by the fact that the Quangels’ and Trudel’s and Eva’s children are all his own invention. For the Hampels turned against the regime when Elise’s brother died in France, and had no children of their own, while Fallada’s acquaintance Alfred Schmidt—who was executed in April 1943 for possessing duplicating machines which had been used for anti-Nazi propaganda, and who probably influenced Trudel and Karl’s story—had no children either, and no one involved in the Hampels’ case or known to Fallada personally was an obvious counterpart to the fictional Eva or either of her children. It is perhaps also worth noting that Trudel’s miscarriage in the fifth month of her pregnancy and her renewed (if unfulfilled) commitment to opposing Nazism can be interpreted as repudiating the Pinnebergs’ belief, in Little Man, What Now?, that their love for each other and for their son provides a safe haven from the deeply flawed society around them.

  All the elements which invest the dissidents’ actions with ideal and transcendent meanings are combined in the brief final chapter of Every Man Dies Alone. The opening sentence replaces the third-person narration which has preceded it with an authorial “we” in order to emphasize that the novel has shown the dissidents’ moral victory:

  But we don’t want to end this book with death, dedicated as it is to life, invincible life, life always triumphing over humiliation and tears, over misery and death. (506)

  The chapter then moves forward to summer 1946, and describes how Eva remained in the countryside, married Kienschaper, civilized and adopted the delinquent teenager Kuno (without realizing that he was the son of her dead husband’s criminal associate Emil Borkhausen), and is now building up a smallholding. The redemptive quality of Eva’s—and by extension of the other dissidents’—actions is highlighted by the baptismal imagery in Kuno’s recollection of how Eva “put me in the water and washed the dirt off of me with her own hands” (509) when she first took him into her home, as well as by a final invocation of the parable of the wheat and the tares in the novel’s closing sentence:

  Because it is written that you reap what you sow, and the boy had sown good corn. (509; see also Gal. 6:7-10)

  And Eva’s and the others’ metaphorical status as the parents of a humane post-Nazi Germany is underlined literally by Eva’s formal adoption of Kuno, and more figuratively both by her quasi-baptismal washing of him and by his rejection of his unreformed ex-convict father Emil, who reappears unexpectedly and tries to claim or extort a share of Kuno’s comparative prosperity: “‘I’ve got no father!’ shouted the boy, wild with anger. ‘I’ve got a mother, and I’m starting afresh.’” (509)

  It could be argued that Fallada’s affirmative portrayal of the anti-Nazi resistance in Every Man Dies Alone is somewhat unconvincing, especially in his use of Christian symbolism. Some of the religious references which I have noted are contested elsewhere in the narrative. For example, when Anna tells Trudel that she still has faith in God, she goes on to say that Otto thinks “everything comes to an end after this life” (409), and minutes before his execution Otto insists to the prison chaplain that: “I don’t believe in any Almighty” (495). The narrative then seems to challenge Otto’s unbelief as the guillotine blade falls—”the rushing had become a piercing scream that must be audible up in the stars, to the throne of God.” (503)—but the subsequent description of Anna’s death in an air raid concludes more equivocally: “She is … reunited with him. She is where he is. Wherever that may be” (505). This uncertain treatment of Christian motifs is entirely congruent with Fallada’s previous career. And Fallada’s personal relationship to Christianity may be judged from the letter to the Rowohlt firm on January 15, 1934, in which he mentioned a biblical quotation that might serve as an epigraph to The World Outside, and sought advice about “where it is in the Bible (I don’t own one to look in).” Thus it is arguable that in seeking—as foreshadowed by his article in Reconstruction—to demonstrate that the dissidents had not lived or died in vain, Fallada adopts a metaphysical framework with which he is rather uncomfortable and unfamiliar. Similarly, the opening of the final chapter (“But we don’t want to end this book with death.”) can be read as suggesting that the author is still trying to convince himself that the resistance’s failures were nevertheless meaningful. And that chapter’s comment about how the Kienschapers “were given” their smallholding “the previous year” (507)—which refers to the Soviet military administration’s program of expropriating large agricultural properties—is also interesting in possibly indicating that Fallada is unduly eager to establish continuities between the dissidents and the postwar promises of a better Germany. But even assuming that Fallada does not entirely establish his case for the resistance’s ultimate historical significance, these minor hesitations and exaggerations are hardly surprising in a novel written barely eighteen months after the Nazi defeat, and by a man who had struggled to survive artistically and psychologically under the Nazi regime, as he had struggled to survive in German society all his life. They are unlikely to obscure the novel’s particular achievement, which is perhaps best characterized by a comparison with a later, purely factual and more celebrated examination of Nazi oppression: whereas Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) dissects and analyzes “the banality of evil,” Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone comprehends and honors the banality of good.

  Editorial Note

  All quotations from Every Man Dies Alone and Little Man, What Now? are from the Melville House editions.

  All quotations from Fallada’s letters are from the copies held by the Hans Fallada Archive in Carwitz. All translations are my own.

  All quotations from Fallada’s essay about the Hampels are from Fallada, “Über den doch v
orhandenen Widerstand der Deutschen gegen den Hitlerterror.” In “…wir haben nicht nur das Chaos, sondern wir stehen an einem Beginn…”: Hans Fallada 1945-1947, edited by Sabine Lange, 45-56. Neubrandenburg: Literaturzentrum Neubrandenburg, 1988. All translations are my own.

  All references to the Bible are to the King James Version.

  The extant files in the cases of the Hampels and Alfred Schmidt are held by the “Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR” of the Federal Archive in Lichterfelde, Berlin. The files on the Hampels are NJ36/2, NJ36/3, NJ36/4, and ZC12614; the files on Schmidt are NJ1705/1, NJ1705/2, NJ1705/4, and NJ5110/1.