by Hans Fallada
Thoughts from Paulette and Craig on Fallada’s “Jeder stirbt für sich allein”.
A
mile or so from our house in Overijse, near the foot tunnel under the Brussels
ring road, stands a simple stele commemorating Michel Donnet and Léon Divoy,
who repaired an old bi-plane in 1941, distilled their own aviation fuel right
under the noses of occupying forces and flew the plane to England.
They
said that they did it because they wanted to fight for their country.
Not
all of us could tinker with an old plane and get it to fly. But it strikes me
that once they had decided that the regime in Belgium in 1941 was not something
they could condone, they harnessed their particular skills and talents and did
what only they could to resist. Like Quangel, whose simple acts of resistance
were mundane postcard-dropping exercises, they decided that silent disapproval
was not enough.
The
novel describes with utter realism - this is no imagined Kafkaesque state - the
everyday constraints laid upon the citizens of a totalitarian state in which
uttered thoughts, acts, relations and advancement are subjugated to the creed
of officialdom. In spite of small acts of revolt and kindness, as displayed by
the judge and the post woman, individualism is suffocated at the slightest
whiff by the system. The original text uses Berliner dialect and surroundings
to great effect so that the reader is plunged into a real world of real people,
far removed from a fictional or romanticised account of history. As Fallada
swings us from hope to fear and back again as the cat and mouse interaction
with police develops, a feeling of unease increases as the main characters
inexorably move to a dreadful climax.
What
would I have done? Would I have acted differently if I had had children?
Fleeing
the country might be an answer, as, ironically, Fallada himself was set to do,
all bags packed, until he realised he would be leaving his home, his roots and
his normality. And if fleeing was impossible, was staying any more possible if
it meant never standing up for what you believe? Perhaps there remains very little choice for the
preservation of one’s self-belief, dignity and conscience - beyond compromising
one’s beliefs by giving in and cooperating, as Thomas Mann would have us
believe of Fallada – than quiet opposition. Overt civil disobedience, as Ghandi
applied in India, where the downtrodden majority had clear levers of influence,
was not an option in this case. The state had made too many inroads into hearts
and minds for that. And the laws of the country, far from freeing citizens from
their natural state to become civic beings à la Rousseau, had been harnessed to
straightjacket the population with fear and mistrust in Orwellian fashion. So
Quangel, like Enzensberger’s Hammerstein, makes up his mind to resist in the
only way which is possible for him.
It
is the struggle of the individual to combat absolute, coercive control by the
state that ultimately constitutes the universality of this story. Quangel’s
sorry execution gives a clue as to how naïve Fallada believed he was, but in
the end it is the resistance, however insignificant or futile, to an inhuman
and soul-destroying regime that counts.
CMD
24Aug2013
Jeder stierbt fuer zich allein
ReplyDeleteThe book was discussed at the dinner with husbands at Vibeke´s and Robert´s in October. As always, the atmosphere was great. Unfortunately, Helen and Paulette with their husbands were not present.
The novel paints a picture of Germany during the war years very different from the stereotypes we usually read about in other books or see in films, and it lead to a lively discussion around the table.
Everybody agreed that it yet again underlines the fact of how a dictatorship, of whatever ideology, corrupts people of whatever nationality and race, using fear as its main instrument and drawing the worst out of some people and the best out of others. It recalls to mind the following three books, which I think we all read, on the subject of totalitarian regimes in different parts of the world that also give testimony to this:
1/ Red Star over China: by Edgar Snow, published in 1937
A history of the famous Long March, and the men and women who were responsible for the Chinese revolution.
(Edgar Snow was the first Westerner to meet Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communist leaders in 1936, and to write the first authorized biography of Mao.)
2/ Archipelago Gulag by Alexander Solženicin about the Stalin era
2/ La Fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat) by Mario Vargas Llosa, set in the Dominican Republic in the 1950s.
Most of us had positive things to say about the book, though there were negative commentaries as well. I am sorry if I do not remember them all (too much of good food and wine).
Joris referred to Germany´s intellectual heritage of the past centuries.
Susan and I agreed on our common experiences under similar regimes in Iran and in Czechoslovakia and the stories of the ordinary people were familiar and sounded true to life to us. What came as a surprise to me, however, was the fact of the similarities between the Nazi and the Communist systems, which, ironically, were ultimately fighting each other to death.
The theoretical questions that Craig and Paulette posed in their comment in the blog “What would I have done? Would I have acted differently if I had had children?” are very real questions in everyday life in such dictatorships.
Like the characters in Fallada´s novel, the passive majority lives in a constant fear of being denounced for “crimes” like, for example, listening to foreign radios´ transmissions or just simply denounced as a class/ideology enemy and lose their jobs or whatever else there is to lose.
Sometimes it does not take much for the passive to be pushed against their will over into the camp of collaborators – it takes courage even to remain passive. And children suffer for what the parents did or did not do. Or even for who their parents were.
Not many have the courage to take up active resistance, risking prison and sometimes life, and endangering their families and friends.
But it takes no courage at all to collaborate with the regime, on the contrary, there are only benefits to be gained at the cost of others.
In our group we all have lived or travelled in many parts of the world and so even those who had not lived in a dictatorship themselves have at some time came into contact with such regimes; therefore everybody found something in the book to connect with, especially the way Fallada analyses his characters´ mental states and their minds´working under pressure (here he equals Dostoyevski in his Crime and Punisment, I think).
A PS from a linguist in me:
I have found the confirmation of my interpretation of the original title,
“Everybody dies for himself only” – in the sense of: die for fatherland (zich = self ; allein = alone in the sense of only (In Dutch: Iedereen sterft alleen voor zichzelf),
in Wikkipedia: The US title is close to the original German title, which translates verbatim as "Everyone dies for himself alone".[10] Wikkipedia ) ) Still, all the other traslations went with Everybody dies alone…
Blanka