Every Man Dies Alone (80 page)

It was during his incarceration in Alt-Strelitz that Fallada, having secured permission to work on his novel about the financial scandal, wrote a deliberately almost illegible manuscript—writing in a very small hand, and first filling the pages, then writing upside down in the spaces between the lines, then writing in any remaining spaces, so that the manuscript was not deciphered until some years after his death, when it was found to consist of several different texts. In addition to some uncontroversial short stories, it contained both his politically sensitive account of his clashes with the Nazi authorities, and his novel
The Drinker
, which was not deciphered and published until 1950.
The Drinker
describes how a provincial merchant called Sommer succumbs to alcoholism, is confined to an asylum, and finally tries to commit suicide by infecting himself with tuberculosis in the asylum’s infirmary. Thus in one sense the novel reverses the pattern which I have identified in some of Fallada’s works by showing how Sommer—in contrast to figures like the Pinnebergs or Pagel or Petra—is resoundingly defeated by his problems. But in an autobiographical sense
The Drinker
shows Fallada’s characteristic defiance, not simply by thematizing and criticizing his own substance abuse, but also by daring to do so in Nazi Germany, where eugenic and cultural policy encompassed extreme sanctions (including physical abuse or sterilisation or death) both for alcoholics and for authors who wrote about them (whether privately or for publication) with any degree of empathy.

There is no simple concept which adequately describes Fallada’s career in Nazi Germany: he was neither an eager collaborator nor a resistance fighter. In his life as an author, Fallada cooperated with the Nazi regime, most obviously by accepting officially sanctioned commissions and writing or revising with the official ideology in mind, but he also challenged the regime, among other things by reasserting his humane values in a novel such as
Wolf Among Wolves
and attempting anti-Nazi allegory in ostensibly light fiction like
Old Heart Goes A-Journeying
(1936). In his life as a citizen, Fallada complied with most of the Nazi system’s demands, for example by enrolling his oldest son in the Hitler Youth, but he also gave financial and legal support to some of the system’s outcasts, particularly authors and publishers’ employees who suffered discrimination on political or racial grounds. And there were contradictions in the way the Nazis treated Fallada, sometimes promoting his work and sometimes censoring it, sometimes sending him on propaganda tours and sometimes imprisoning him. It is not overly generous to point out, however, that what resistance he made put him in actual, deadly jeopardy, and what compromises he made were in the same context.

While the debate about the justifications for emigrating from or remaining in Nazi Germany which has not ceased since 1933 is too complex to recapitulate here, it is worth noting that the conflicting currents in Fallada’s story are not untypical of the stories of those who remained: collaboration was not necessarily prompt, uncoerced or unconditional, and resistance was not always immediate, impassioned or uncompromising. The only certainty for Fallada, as for all those who remained, was that even moderate acts of resistance carried the threat of imprisonment or death.

Fallada and Occupied Germany

In February 1945 Fallada married Ursula Losch, a widow of working-class background whose first husband had been a wealthy businessman. However, neither Fallada’s new marriage nor the Nazi defeat a few months later significantly reduced the personal and political pressures on him. Ursula had weaknesses for alcohol and morphine which matched, and encouraged, Fallada’s own. And in May 1945 the Soviet military authorities appointed him mayor of the district around Carwitz, evidently because he was a nationally known figure who had demonstrated some independence from the Nazi regime. Fallada then faced such daunting tasks as securing food and medical supplies for the local population, assisting the flood of refugees from hitherto German-occupied areas further east, dealing with demands that alleged Nazis be handed over to the Soviet secret police, and curbing the numerous Red Army soldiers who were literally raping and pillaging their way across Germany. He proved unequal to the job, perhaps partly because—as he later claimed in a letter to Johannes R. Becher on October 15, 1945—the local Soviet commandant deliberately overworked him with the aim of “destroying me, in order to get his hands on my twenty-four-year-old wife.” In August, after Fallada had resumed his morphine habit and Ursula had attempted suicide, they were admitted to hospital in nearby Neustrelitz, and when they were discharged in early September they moved to Berlin, where Ursula owned a badly damaged apartment in what was now the US sector of the city.

It was in Berlin that Fallada met Johannes R. Becher, a German author of his own generation who had returned from a decade of exile in the USSR and was now a leading figure in the Soviet military administration. Among other things, Becher was president of the Cultural Association for the Democratic Renewal of Germany, in which he was attempting—in accordance with the USSR’s overall political policy immediately after the war—to create a wide-ranging alliance of intellectuals who were committed to revitalizing culture in Germany on a broadly antifascist basis. Becher provided Fallada with a comparatively comfortable house in the Soviet sector of Berlin, procured him additional rations of food and fuel, arranged for him to make some public speeches and radio broadcasts, and put him in contact with the newspaper founded by the Soviet administration, the
Daily Survey
, in which Fallada began publishing a variety of short pieces.

Becher also encouraged Fallada to write novels again, suggesting that he fictionalize the story of Otto and Elise Hampel, a middle-aged couple who began leaving handwritten anti-Nazi missives in buildings around Berlin after Elise’s brother was killed during the invasion of France, and who were arrested in October 1942, tried in January 1943, and executed eleven weeks later. Fallada examined some of the documents in the Hampels’ case, and in October 1945 he signed a contract for a novel about it with the Reconstruction publishing firm, which had recently been established by the Soviet authorities, and which was to reissue
The World Outside
in March 1946. Although Fallada wrote a short and largely factual account of the Hampels’ story which appeared in a Soviet-sponsored magazine (also called
Reconstruction)
in November 1945, he did not then start work on the book, which he had undertaken to deliver by January 1, 1946. He spent much of the first seven months in 1946 undergoing hospital treatment for substance abuse and failing general health, but by September he had completed
The Nightmare
(1947), a novel in which an author called Doll struggles both to acknowledge his complicity in the Nazi regime and to overcome his dependence on morphine and sleeping drugs, but ultimately—and with the assistance of the Soviet administration—rededicates his literary career to helping build a new antifascist Germany. Fallada returned to the Hampels’ case in late September 1946, and finished the first draft of the novel before the end of October, and the final revisions before the end of November. In early December he was admitted to the Charité hospital, where he wrote various letters which expressed his satisfaction with
Every Man Dies Alone
, sometimes comparing it to his last major published work,
Wolf Among Wolves
. He described
Every Man Dies Alone
to his mother on December 22 as “a truly great novel;” he repeated to his sister Margarete on December 27 that it was “a real one … a great novel…somewhat along the lines of my ‘Wolf’;” and he also told his sister Elisabeth on the same day that he had produced “a great novel…You could say that, after ‘Wolf,’ at last I’ve got one right.”

Fallada was transferred to another hospital in early January 1947, and died there on February 5, before
Every Man Dies Alone
could be published.

Every Man Dies Alone

There was substantial and heroic resistance to the Nazi regime at all levels of German society, from aristocratic officers in the army to brutalized inmates of concentration camps. But all this resistance was unsuccessful, in the sense that the regime was destroyed by the foreign armies which conquered it rather than by internal rebels who overthrew it. Otto and Elise Hampel’s resistance was particularly unsuccessful, in that (as the files in their case indicate) almost all the subversive materials which they distributed were handed to the Nazi authorities. I mean no disrespect to the Hampels’ memory in adding that their resistance was unspectacular and unsophisticated, when their localized propaganda effort is compared to (say) von Stauffenberg and his associates’ attempted
coup d’etat
in July 1944, or when their sometimes ungrammatical and inarticulate missives are compared to (say) the literate and cultivated leaflets written by the university-educated dissidents of the “White Rose” group in 1942-43. Fallada knew that the German resistance was ineffectual before he even learned of the Hampels’ existence as, for example, Anna Seghers could not know when she described the Communist underground in
The Seventh Cross
(1942), or as Klaus Mann could not know when he invoked a Communist uprising in the final pages of
Mephisto
(1936). And when Fallada read about the Hampels’ resistance, he found their story uninspiring. In the article published in
Reconstruction
he described the couple as “two insignificant individuals … without particular skills,” noted that they were “faithful supporters of the Führer” until 1940, commented that their postcard propaganda was “poorly spelt” and “clumsily expressed,” speculated that such few cards as were not taken to the police were “read hastily and fearfully and destroyed immediately,” and emphasized that “the sound of their protest died away unheard.”

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)