http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/hans-falladas-alone-in-berlin/Alone in Berlin, the title of Michael Hofmann’s new English
translation of Hans Fallada’s 1947 novel, is far less piquant than the
German original. “Everyone dies for himself alone” (
Jeder stirbt für sich allein)
conveys that it is dying, much more than being alone, that is at the
heart of this book. Fallada, who never escaped official suspicion after
his most popular novel,
Little Man, What Now (1932), was
banned, had ample grounds for fearing death himself. In and out of
insane asylums for the last years of his life (he died in 1947, shortly
after completing
Alone in Berlin), he knew
the fragility of existence under fascism intimately.
the strength of Fallada’s indictment of
a regime that declared war on
its own citizens, as well as on the rest of the world. For good reason,
this story is told less frequently than that of Nazi atrocities against
those defined as outsiders
