Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin Joshua Billings

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