About a Gift. Hans Fallada's "Alone in Berlin".

© Silke Hesse 2013

About a Gift. Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin

Silke Hesse

Naomi and I both grew up in Australia, the country in which both our parents had sought refuge, mine from a politically worrying Germany in 1933 and with the advantage that they already had Australian citizenship, hers from a Germany that deported them as Jews to the extermination camp of Auschwitz, which they had somehow survived. Australia was not particularly welcoming to my parents and probably not to hers either, but it allowed us freedom to live in our own ways within our families. For me, and perhaps for Naomi too, our families were a little like islands in an unfamiliar sea, her island smaller because she was an only child, mine quite substantial because I was the oldest of six children.

Compared with other nations in Europe and Asia, Australia was only minimally affected by the war. It was a stable country and wished to stay so, putting quite some effort into the maintenance of this stability. In my youth Australia still had an influential censor who determined what we were allowed to see and read; in later years his office could increasingly become an obscure and seldom noticed institution because the Australian public itself was happy to fulfill that role. (Even today Australians are extraordinarily unbending in their insistence on things being “politically correct”.) In those days, what was heavily controlled by public opinion and law were above all sexuality, religious affiliation and privilege. In Britain, privilege had been regulated most obviously by class, but in Australia class had become marginal and it was wealth on the one hand and race on the other that mainly determined it. There was an extraordinary consensus on matters of sexuality, religion and privilege and they were all viewed as inviolate package deals. You were either heterosexually married for life with a family if this was biologically possible, or you were a virginal spinster or bachelor. Similarly, you were either Church of England or Roman Catholic, either Presbyterian or Methodist, and in each case you adhered to the relevant doctrine and custom: lock, stock and barrel. You were either British or Alien (there were only these two options). And you were expected to be partisan in all matters: a militant member of the Church of England, if that was the denomination you had been born into and a militant Catholic if your family came from Ireland. In our Australia of the mid twentieth century, the party system, which had proved to be a useful way of organizing democracies, had proliferated and spread like a cancer through all walks of life. Perhaps military oaths of allegiance also served as a model after the war years. Loyalty was the virtue above all virtues and disloyalty the sin that could never be forgiven. In this partisan society, the party to which you adhered was always right and the other wrong; to question such black and white values put you beyond the pail. History too had its incontestable narratives. One of them was that European colonizers were driven solely by their desire to bring civilization and Christianity to the millions who were “unredeemed, untamed, untaught”, in the words of Rudyard Kipling. The most rigid of all historical absolutes, and it seems to have survived to this day, was, however, that of the unredeemably wicked Germans. My parents had taught us that our German ancestry demanded we show a responsible concern for the consequences of Germany’s crimes and their terrible effects on victims throughout the world, but they had not taught us to live with the stain of being evil and the guilt for crimes neither we or they had had a part in. But not just for us, for Naomi too her status here must have been disconcerting; she was the awesome victim of Germany’s wickedness but she would also have been a despised alien whose parents had obviously come from a very un-British Europe.

What do two young women do in this situation? In the first place, they both choose to study German literature, culture and history in an attempt to see beyond the clichés. They also travel to Germany; they have to try to understand what went wrong. And they both meet men, a Jewish man and a German man, with whom they fall in love and because all other paths to reconciliation seem to be blocked, deadlocked, this love assumes for them a sacred or magical healing power, even though some might consider it an illicit love. They do not want to continue on through life hating and being hated; boxed in on all sides they go over the top.

The Jewish woman’s name was not Naomi; but she exists and when she rang a few months ago and said “you will not know me but I know you; may I come and speak to you about something” I remembered having met her briefly in uncomfortable circumstances perhaps thirty-five or more years earlier. There is no need to recount her strange story that took several hours to relate. Later she sent me a short story her mother had written which was about reconciliation. And following that, I lent her my biography of my father. He had been born in Australia in 1899 which made him Australian but had lived in Germany off and on as a German (his parents were German) from 1911 to 1933. In acknowledgement of our respect for each other Naomi then sent me a recent translation of Hans Fallada’s 1947 novel Alone in Berlin for Christmas. She told me that it had meant much to her. It is about my reading of this novel that I want to write here.

Geoff Wilkes tells us in his afterword to the translation, that Hans Fallada – he was only six years older than my father - was a troubled individual. As schoolboys, unable to cope with their sexuality within the parameters set by the times, he and a friend had entered into a suicide pact. They had disguised it as a duel for the honor of a lady to save the reputation of their families. Fallada, at the time still Rudolf Ditzen, killed his friend whose bullet missed, then tried to shoot himself in the chest with the other’s revolver. But he survived. He served several years in prison for murder and on release, deemed unfit for academic study by his doctor and his family, worked in the rural sector. Throughout his life he relied on alcohol, morphine and other drugs to keep him going. He later served further prison sentences for embezzlement. Two marriages were unsuccessful; after threatening one of his wives with a gun in 1944, he also spent a period in an insane asylum. In spite of all this, or was it because of all this, he published among other things more than a dozen  novels, at least one of which, Little Man, What Now, was a world-wide best-seller and became a successful Hollywood film. Fallada’s strength rested on two things: he had not only enough talent but also enough education to be a writer and he had a great deal of experience of milieus and people other middle-class writers would not have encountered. Though Fallada was anti-Hitler, he let an opportunity to emigrate – his family’s bags were already packed – lapse and thus had to subsist in the hostile Nazi environment, trying to make only a minimum of compromises. He probably felt that a writer needed to be where the action was, needed to understand how complicated life could become even for quite simple people. Alone in Berlin was then published as Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Everyone dies alone) in 1947, the year of Fallada’s death. It fictionalizes the story of a lone and ineffectual resistance campaign conducted by a poorly educated Berlin working-class couple, Elise and Otto Hampel. For a whole two years all the resources of the Gestapo could not trace them; but eventually, they did fall victim to the Nazi henchmen. A writer friend, Johannes R. Becher, who had returned from Russia with the occupying forces after the war, had provided Fallada with the material. Though he was initially unenthusiastic, Fallada eventually considered this novel to be one of his great ones.

The novel gives us a panorama of the people who live in or are associated with a tenement building in a marginally working class pocket of central Berlin. These people are typically of a generation who were drawn to the city from surrounding rural areas in the wake of the industrial revolution, have very little education beyond some trade skills, and no friends or family to support them or share ideas. They have also recently been through Germany’s second period of economic disaster since WWI, the Great Depression. In 1933 these people were voters and their decisions at the time could only have been based on economic recovery and the improvement of the employment situation because that was all they had any knowledge of. Some among them had not had a job for years and wouldn’t have known how to work; they had learnt to get by on petty crime, prostitution and gambling and, as it turned out, the Nazi regime offered them great opportunities for blackmail, extortion and corruption, though they might not have known this when they went to the ballot box. All the parties on offer at the time had a record of failure except the untried Nazis.

None of Fallada’s characters, except possibly the shadowy Grigoleit, have been moulded by the Communist movement. It had once had cells in many of the working class suburbs and had vigorously opposed Hitler on ideological grounds. Such cells then disappeared quickly once all other parties and non-Nazi institutions were banned by Hitler and their more active members transferred to concentration camps. For the young girl Trudel, who joins an illegal cell at her factory, this is simply a way of resisting the Nazis in whose war her fiancé has fallen; she is quite innocent of Communist doctrine. Quangel, the main character, uses some of their slogans in his postcard campaign but without making the connection. Fallada’s characters are on the whole not Nazis, even if they voted for this party in 1933; they are pre-political with an ideology of either decency or self-seeking. Their political consciousness is only likely to be kindled if their sons or fiancés are killed on the battlefield, if they hear of atrocities family members are involved with in the east, if the corrupt opportunism of Nazi party members who are their neighbours erupts into their lives, or if inoffensive neighbours are persecuted because they happen to be Jewish. Even among the bureaucrats of the Gestapo and among professionals like doctors and clergymen in the prison system there are few true Nazis. There are opportunists, there are people who try not to notice how their jobs have changed and how their ethical standards are being compromised in the Nazi system, and there are people who betray or neglect others from fear or laziness or indifference. The story of Germany as presented here is not about the Nazis and their ideology, but about criminals on the one hand and people who, for various reasons, do nothing about the Nazis on the other. But it is also about a surprising number of people who in their own small way try to resist the Nazis, even though such resistance, if aimed directly at the Nazis, is almost always ineffective and from a practical point of view, stupid.

There is the post-woman Eva Kluge who gives up her job and leaves the party when she hears of the atrocities her son has committed against Jewish children. She is brave enough to then face the music, is lucky to be spared the concentration camp, and leaves Berlin for a simple and hard-working though not unharassed life in the country where she has relatives. She later takes in the nasty criminal Borkhausen’s son, who has made a stand against his father, and rehabilitates the boy. There is Anna Quangel who allows her Jewish neighbour, Mrs Rosenthal to spend the night with her when her flat is burgled. There is retired Judge Fromm, who observes everything from the peep-hole in his flat and uses his former connections to help where he thinks it can make a difference, like smuggling cyanide capsules to those on death row. He also tries to hide Frau Rosenthal in his flat under comfortable though strict and lonely conditions, which the woman unfortunately finds too alienating and inhuman to cope with. Later he sees to it that the Nazi brute and drunkard Persicke, abandoned by his terrified wife and uncaring daughter, is delivered to a clinic before it is too late. There is the above-mentioned Trudel who is desperate to do something against the Nazis, join a resistance group or hide a Jewish person, though she is always too unconsidered and impetuous to carry it off. There is the consumptive prison chaplain who delivers messages to the prisoners, persistently though unsuccessfully demands the sacking of a negligent doctor, and allows Trudel to sit by her dead husband for a night, though this is against the rules. Prior to that there had been the young SS-guard who allowed her to search the morgue for him. There is the famous conductor condemned to death because he has spoken openly against the Nazis at home and abroad; he insists on sharing all his privileges with his cell mates and he teaches Quangel how to cope. There is the doctor who offers Quangel an anaesthetic before his execution. And there is of course Quangel about whom the novel revolves, a foreman in a furniture factory now specialized in making coffins. Realizing the effect that the death of their son in Hitler’s war has had on his beloved wife, this solitary and reticent worker decides to spend his Sundays painstakingly writing postcards calling for resistance against the Nazis and then dropping them in the stairwells of tenement houses. He is under the illusion that these postcards will be widely read whereas in reality they set off panic-like fear in the finders who perceive them simply as another senseless danger lurking in their lives and usually hand them to the Gestapo without delay. As mentioned earlier, it takes this highly efficient organization two years of active investigations to find and capture the culprit: he has a surprisingly long stretch of good luck.

Fallada lets us realize gradually how wide the network of Hitler’s spies was, what brutality the Nazis used against their enemies, how they missed no opportunity to torture and humiliate even after a death sentence had been passed, and how the most innocent family members and friends were dragged into the doom of  dissidents. Had the resisters known a little more about what awaited them and their friends and how pointless their actions were in such a fool-proof system, they might have desisted. While the various acts of kindness and decency we are allowed to witness have their own value in that they ameliorate suffering, affirm human solidarity and look towards a humane future, it is harder to judge the post-card campaign. It obviously allowed the Quangels to feel they had done what they could, even if this was in effect not only useless but harmful to many. Is it personal satisfaction that matters here, is it setting an example, is it achieving ends which might include not causing further harm?  

What Fallada’s novel seems to show us is that once a Hitler (or presumably any other dictator) is established in power, it is likely that nothing will topple him. But to prevent his rise to power in Germany was also impossible because so few of the voters in this young and troubled democracy were equipped to assess the consequences and, we might add, because there were no uncompromised candidates to choose from. Fallada shows us that even people in a terror state will remain human beings; some will be courageous and others cowardly, some generous and others opportunistic, many will be kind and some will be cruel; it is just that an extreme political system will always enhance such tendencies: the good will become more courageous and the bad more opportunistic, sadistic and cowardly. Germans as such were not better or worse than other human beings and the sufferings of those of them who endured  prison would have perhaps matched those of the Jewish inmates of concentration camps. These exonerating conclusions are of course not what post-war Germans were encouraged to reach and Alone in Berlin did not become a bestseller.

What Fallada’s novel treats, and what such a novel can treat, is only one small fragment of the German mosaic; in other communities – Peter Handke’s rural Austria as described in his mother’s story A Sorrow Beyond Dreams comes to mind – the attractions and consequences of Nazism were quite different. The biography of my father tells its own  story. And the role of individuals is, of course, also only part of a far more complex picture. Though under the Nazi regime dissident Germans had virtually no possibility to act in unison, history will always judge them not as individuals but as Germans, members of a delinquent nation that should have been capable of preventing the Hitler disaster or at least of concerted action.  

Naomi’s gift to me was given as to a German (I have never actually held a German passport) and in the spirit of forgiveness. But am I entitled to accept this gift of forgiveness in the name of my parents’ countrymen? Novels treat of specific situations. As one person I recently heard of who was congratulated on never joining the Nazi Party said: Berlin was different. Fallada tells us about the people he knows; there are, however, other questions that cannot be considered on the basis of his novel.

In the first place, people and nations who have committed crimes, no matter what the circumstances, must be brought to justice and accept their punishment. The novel ends too early for this.

Secondly people need to examine the disasters they have caused analytically and search for any causes embedded in their culture and traditional attitudes. The people in Fallada’s novel were too uneducated to have a culture and too new to their surroundings to be a community with traditions.

Thirdly, and here we step into a quagmire: people should perhaps be entitled to ask what outsiders, other nations with their cultures and agendas, may have contributed to the German problem. This line of questioning is still largely taboo; but there can be no doubt that the First World War and its aftermath, determined largely by the Treaty of Versailles, did play a part in the equation. It is worth having another look at John Maynard Keynes’ knowledgeable contemporary critique of a treaty that he felt focussed on anything but peace. Fallada does not bring up the Great War.

Fourthly, there needs to be a better understanding of the nation as culprit versus the individual as culprit. Everyday life in Hitler’s Germany was full of small acts of kindness and courage and independent decision-making as well as acts of nastiness and cruelty. But they all had little direct bearing on the behaviour and the functioning of the nation. The story of my father with his two nationalities and his awkward efforts at understanding his identity and responsibilities during the nationalist era he was fated to become a part of have made such questions that are beyond the scope of Fallada’s story seem crucial to me.

Fifthly, the issues arising from the German debacle need to be made fruitful in a much wider arena. Hitler has come to be seen almost as a magical pollutant that once touched can never be washed off. Anyone who, like the Quangels, voted for him in 1933 did not just make a mistake: they are for ever defiled. This is an approach that suits the sanctimonious and all those who would prefer not to examine their own behaviour both then and in times since but it does little to help us understand the German people and their guilt. In 1947 this mythologizing of the Nazis had not yet become evident.               

What Fallada’s novel does tell us, however indirectly, is that the idea of a “race” of Germans as perpetrators is as ill conceived as that of a “race” of Jews as victims. Jews and Germans are human beings just like anyone else. “German blood” and “Jewish blood” exists only in the minds of the vindictive, those who seek vengeance for real or perceived injuries. There is nothing in our DNA that makes it possible to distinguish between us. If neither Naomi nor I, who both grew up as Australians and both belong to generations appalled by the atrocities of the past, are determined by our blood, then we are entitled to see ourselves as friends and even sisters, united rather than separated by our common concern. And this must obviously be: to do everything we can to prevent such disastrous fallacies ever again being disseminated. On this basis, I believe I can gratefully and happily accept her gift.