Alone in Berlin
by Hans Fallada
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Wednesday 24 March |
Introduction
For the March Book Club we discussed another side of Berlin.
Unlike other prominent writers including Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse, Fallada decided not to leave Germany during World War II, and he was eventually institutionalised in a hospital for the criminally insane after refusing to join the Nazi Party. The Gestapo ordered him to write a work of anti-Semitic propaganda, but instead, while in hospital, he wrote his masterpiece The Drinker, using a dense code that was not fully deciphered until after his death.
Fallada managed to outlive his captors by convincing them he was working on his assignment, but after the war he descended into alcohol and morphine addiction. It was during this time that a friend presented him with the Gestapo file of a couple arrested for distributing anti-Nazi propaganda across Berlin during the war.
That couple’s story is retold in Alone in Berlin, a recently rediscovered classic of German literature, and the work that Primo Levi called ‘the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis’. Fallada died before the book saw publication.