Every Man Dies Alone

Every Man Dies Alone

One of earliest German editions, 1948
Author	Hans Fallada
Translator	Michael Hofmann
Country	West Germany
Language	German
Genre	Fiction
Publisher	Melville House Publishing
Publication date	1947
Published in English	2009
ISBN

Every Man Dies Alone or Alone in Berlin (German: Jeder stirbt für sich allein) is a 1947 novel by German author Hans Fallada. It is based on the true story of a working class husband and wife who, acting alone, became part of the German Resistance. They were eventually discovered, denounced, arrested, tried and executed. Fallada's book was one of the first anti-Nazi novels to be published by a German after World War II.

Otto and Elise Hampel, a working class couple in Berlin, were not interested in politics, but after Elise Hampel learned that her brother (portrayed as a son in the novel) had fallen in France, she and her husband began committing acts of civil disobedience. They began writing leaflets on postcards, urging people to resist and overthrow the Nazis. They wrote hundreds of them, leaving them in apartment stairwells and dropping them into mailboxes. Though they knew the law made this a capital crime, they continued this work for well over a year until they were betrayed and arrested. They were tried by Nazi judge Roland Freisler and executed in Plötzensee Prison.

The English translation contains reproductions of actual postcards handwritten by the Hampels in Sütterlin-like block letters in a clumsy hand. The uneducated Hampels made spelling mistakes and their language was simple, but their message was strong—enough to terrify those who found the postcards. Nearly all of them were immediately turned in to police or the Gestapo.

Fallada was given the Hampels' Gestapo files by Johannes Becher, a poet, novelist and friend of Fallada's, who returned from exile after the war and became president of the cultural organization established by the Soviet military administration in the Soviet sector. In his job to create a new anti-fascist culture, he went through the Nazi files of executed Resistance fighters and then sought authors who would write these stories according to the new anti-fascist model. He gave the Hampels' files to Fallada in autumn 1945 in an effort to help him recover by giving him good subject matter for a book. Fallada, who had many personal problems, including morphine addiction, had been both institutionalized and incarcerated during the Nazi era. He did not at first want to write the story, saying he had not fought back and had even cooperated with the Nazis. However, unlike many writers and intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany, Fallada had felt too attached to the German language and culture to leave, despite the fact that he was urged to flee and had been blacklisted by the Nazis. As a result, he lived through all years of fear, distrust and danger in the daily life of wartime Berlin and the psychological aspect of the Hampels' story intrigued him. He also had an ear for the simple speech of the common worker. A year after receiving the files, in autumn 1946, Fallada wrote Every Man Dies Alone in just 24 days and died a few months later, weeks before the book was published.