How Terror Works

A 1947 German novel explores the sometimes corrosive, sometimes energizing nature of fear.

- Hillary Kelly

In 24 days during the fall of 1946, a German novelist known as Hans Fallada produced a rare, and now especially timely, literary touchstone: a humane depiction of muted resistance. Every Man Dies Alone was based on a Gestapo file detailing the case of a Berlin couple who had run an illicit two-year postcard-writing campaign aimed at rebutting Hitler's propaganda. The novel was published in 1947-part of a postwar effort to start de-Nazifying German literature.

Mere weeks before his book came out, Rudolf Ditzen (Fallada was a pen name) died at 53, weakened after a long struggle with alcoholism and morphine addiction. He'd faced criminal trouble too (he had shot and killed a friend in a botched suicide pact in adolescence, been twice convicted of embezzlement, and in 1944 been detained in a psychiatric hospital after pulling a gun on his wife). His literary credentials were also vexed.

After winning recognition as a promising novelist in the early 1930s, Fallada was labeled an "undesirable author" by the newly installed Nazi regime. Later, in a letter to a friend, he confessed to complicity with the government, admitting that, under threat from Hitler's chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, he'd altered a novel to have a character join the Nazi Party. Unsurprisingly, Fallada was preoccupied with gray areas in his final book.

His version of the couple in the Gestapo file, whom he names Otto and Anna Quangel, draft a vivid postcard after their only son dies in combat: "Mother! The Führer has murdered my son. Mother, the Führer will murder your sons too, he will not stop till he has brought sorrow to every home in the world" is the message they leave in the stairwell of an office building across town, hoping the card will be picked up and shared. Soon, they're writing and delivering a fresh card or two every week to other addresses in Berlin.