This is a truly fascinating story, an insight into the lives of those who endured the excesses of the Nazi state at the height of its power. Fallada wrote this book shortly after the war in less than a month, a novel inspired by reading through Gestapo files. It was his last, but one he was very proud to have written.
At heart, the book deals with one couple’s private campaign of resistance to the Nazi regime. As Fallada wrote in an article about the novel, “Über den doch vorhandenen Widerstand der Deutschen gegen den Hitlerterror”, his writings were dedicated to their sacrifice that it not be in vain. The core of the book centres on the Quangels, a couple who lose their son during Hitler’s invasion of France, and who strive to offer a token of resistance, by way of writing postcards and letters denouncing the Nazi acts. These political flyers almost unswervingly end in the arms of the Gestapo, who catalogue this defiance and use their ruthless methods in pursuit of the perpetrators, destroying lives as they do so. This, in my opinion, is one of the book’s greatest strengths, its depth of living characters, almost reminiscent to me of a Dickensian world, each role played by a figure of flesh and blood, and not merely props for the main actors to play up against. Thus the novel details episodes in the lives of thieves and prostitutes, Jews and Gestapo inspectors, youth and the permanently unemployed.
