Rudolf Ditzen was a drug addict, an alcoholic and a crook. Committed to a psychiatric institution at 18 for killing a schoolmate in a duel, he later served jail terms for theft, embezzlement and trying to kill his wife. He died in 1947, aged 53, after a morphine overdose.

He was also, under the pen name Hans Fallada, one of the most popular and prolific German authors between the wars. The best known of his many novels, Little Man, What Now? (1932), was an instant bestseller. The “little man” of its title is in some form the protagonist of all his books: a lower-middle-class Everyman, struggling for respectable survival amid economic catastrophe and political turbulence.

The class that Fallada portrays - office workers, shopkeepers, foremen, petty officials - would provide the Nazi party with much of its support, but for the most part his characters have little interest in politics. The consequences of that passivity and ignorance were soon clear. Alone in Berlin (1946) might have been titled Little Man at War. Its characters are adrift in a murderous world ruled by tyranny and fear.

Fallada based his last novel on a case found in Gestapo files. In his version a middle-aged couple, the Quangels, who, on learning of the death of their son at the front, begin - almost to their own surprise - a small campaign of resistance to the grim regime in whose service he fell.

Fallada's prose, well rendered by Michael Hofmann, has a journalistic clarity and a thriller writer's pace as the Quangels move towards their brutal, inevitable end.

Like most of his characters, Fallada went along with things. No supporter of the Nazis, he nonetheless stayed in Germany when other writers left. At his rural retreat, it was possible not to get too involved.

The story of the Quangels shows that this was not enough. Herr Quangel, facing death, thinks that his action has been futile because it was undertaken alone; in concert with others, he might have achieved much more. Yet Fallada declines to dismiss the Quangels' isolated gesture of resistance, preferring to see in it a small triumph for life in the face of darkness and death.

Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada translated by Michael Hofmann
Penguin, £20 Buy the book

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