Primo Levi's declaration that Alone in Berlin is “the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis” is bold and unequivocal. English readers have had to wait 60 years to explore the novel for themselves. Hans Fallada published it in 1947; he lived in Germany throughout the war and wrote directly from experience, his own and that of others. His naturalistic method helps us believe in the story and the accuracy of its details, but we are left with little sense of how and why all this happened. Perhaps that's too much to ask of any writer.

The two central characters are Otto Quangel, a factory foreman with a birdlike face and a grim, laconic manner, and his longsuffering, good-hearted wife Anna. When their son is killed in France “for Führer and Fatherland”, they begin to write anonymous postcards, denouncing the war and the regime, and leave them on the stairwells of large buildings in Berlin. As Otto's firm switches to making coffins, the cards become their life. Trapped through a trivial mistake, they are put on trial and find a strange freedom in a mocking defiance and then in silence. Otto is killed by the executioner and Anna by an enemy bomb.

Fallada capably introduces us to their neighbours. “Most people today are afraid”, and many, like the elderly Jewish woman who kills herself, lead lives of quiet desperation. The fear gives scope and sanction to liars, blackmailers, sadists, spongers, informers and drunks. We also meet members of the SS, the Gestapo and the judiciary. As “no one is beyond suspicion” and bullying is encouraged rather than punished, there are horrifying scenes of Armagnac-fuelled conviviality alternating with vicious brutality. We grasp the near impossibility of innocence in a country that has itself become a criminal conspiracy.

Other people try to hang on to basic human values. A priest, a guard and an imprisoned musician struggle to treat the Quangels decently, but they don't last long. A judge called Fromm - the name means “devout” in German - hopes to enact justice; his worldly reward is a slow and agonising death from high explosives. The fiancee of the Quangels' son attempts to find love with a new partner, but we rapidly realise when Otto sees her in front of a poster denouncing traitors that her attempt is doomed. There is “no such thing as private life in wartime Germany”.

The picture of the Reich is built up through countless small scenes. There are insistently visible uniforms in the street and at social gatherings, prisoners screaming in terror during air raids, workmen squabbling in factories, illtempered queues at the doctor's. Old-fashioned rural piety is subdued by the new religion of Hitler, muttered disrespect for party leaders drowned by noisy tirades from party loyalists. Very few Jewish names feature, though some have been forcibly or surreptitiously changed. Everyone seems to be searching for gaps in the totalitarian fabric through which to creep and hide. This bleakness lasts for 500 pages.

The documentary density contrasts strongly with another 1947 novel, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. Otto simply hears Beethoven as “strong and brave” and Bach as “dark and heavy”. By contrast, Mann's profound exploration of his country's disasters unites music and religion with philosophy and history. Otto muses that “no one could believe in God any more” but there's nothing to the thought beyond the commonplace that God couldn't allow such wickedness. There's no sense here of where Nazism came from, no exploration of its roots in German Kultur or in the wildly different ideas of Luther, Romantic theorists, Wagner, Nietzsche and modern ideologues.

Fallada often packs in detailed paragraphs of redundant exposition or alerts us to what will happen in later chapters. There are intrusive pieces of editorialising - “They had done nothing. But they were doomed” - that blunt the sharpness of the direct narrative. The effect can be banal; it's hardly necessary or enlightening to say about Hitler that “what interests him is war, destruction and killing”. There are some unlikely coincidences and ungainly repetitions. Perhaps these faults can be explained by the author's lifelong morphine addiction or by the almost incredible fact that he wrote the book in less than a month.

Yet despite its flaws, Alone in Berlin is, by unrelenting implication, a case study of how Nietzsche's reassessment of all values might take a frighteningly distorted historical form. “He must be a madman!” someone says of the strictly sane Otto. His and Anna's solitary and ineffective actions paradoxically transform their lives from obscurity to exaltation. Judge Fromm thinks - and here the irony is Brechtian - that “the worse it gets, the better it will be”. One character muses that “you had to pay for everything in life, and usually more than it was worth”. Fallada shows how this is - or was - appallingly true.

Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada
trans Michael Hofmann
Penguin Classics £20 pp576

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