Every Man Dies Alone: A Novel Paperback by Hans Fallada (Author), Michael Hofmann (Translator) (Melville House)

I can’t remember having read anything more compelling in my life. This is the perfect novel. The plot weaves the experiences of a variety of characters to provide a disturbingly accurate depiction of life in a totalitarian state.

The two primary characters, Otto and Anna Quangel, receive a letter informing them that their son, a soldier in the German Wehrmacht, has been killed in the invasion of France. The Quangels later decide to engage in a secret plan to inform Germans about the reality of Nazism—leaving anonymous messages on postcards in places throughout Berlin—a decision that sets off a series of events and an intense manhunt that demonstrates what life was really like in the Third Reich. The characters include neighbors like a distraught Jewish woman, a retired prosecutor, a family of hard-core Nazis, a small time criminal informer and his sometime accomplice. Others range from a somewhat sympathetic Gestapo investigator, a prison chaplain based on the Tegel prison pastor Harald Poelchau and a Nazi judge, Feisler, based on the notorious Roland Freisler.

Hans Fallada (pseudonym of Rudolf Ditzen) was a troubled writer who remained in Germany during the Third Reich—a decision that was condemned by Thomas Mann. But his story is so believable because only one who lived through the day-to-day reality of Nazi Germany could have described the incongruities and gray areas that everyone experienced. The moral of the story is that resistance, whatever its form, preserves that dignity and worth of humanity in an inhuman world.

Fallada’s story is loosely based on a real-life couple. He wrote the book in less than four weeks in November 1946. He died as a result of various addictions on February 5, 1947. This edition, which restored a number of edits from the original published edition, came out 60 years later. Although we Americans are prone to hyperbole and love to rank everything, I won’t write that it was best book I’ve ever read. But I do have a hard time naming any that are its equal. Five stars don’t seem adequate for this truly majestic, humanistic novel.