This fictional account of wartime Nazi Germany is unusual in many respects. The author clearly wants the reader to view the protagonists, Otto and Anna Quangel, as being heroic; yet they are ordinary working people in no position of influence and without connections or power to resist—much less to overturn– the deadly suppression of the Third Reich. Their subversive actions are doomed to fail for they lack the sophistication and support to shake the underpinnings of Hitler’s regime.
They are simple people who live simply. After two years of seemingly ineffectual “resistance,” they are apprehended, treated brutally by the Gestapo and the courts, and eventually sentenced to death. Very few people seem to have been inspired by the Quangels’ behavior; in fact most of the ordinary citizens have been so cowed by the Nazi regime, that they have become informants, eager to betray any and all independent thinkers. It is their unwavering determination to go against the flow of their world—knowing that apprehension, brutality, and execution eventually await them—that establishes the couple as heroic figures.
Interestingly, Fallada’s novel, first published in Germany in 1947, was viewed as a work of “rebirth,” a harbinger of the New Germany that would emerge after the inevitable fall of the Third Reich. Otto and Anna, citizens of Berlin, had defied the regime by writing postcards decrying the evils of the “Fuehrer,” who sacrificed the country’s youth in order to build the wealth of a corrupt political party. Calling for individual citizens to reject the Party, to refuse to contribute to “funds” that financed the war effort, and to perform simple acts of industrial sabotage, the Quangels demonstrated a sense of moral outrage and a desire to appeal to human decency –both of which were commodities being crushed within the population of once-decent people.
The Quangels’ arrest, persecution, incarceration, and prosecution will resonate with readers of that time period. There are many works describing the mockery of justice that was the court system of that period. What stands out in this description is the refusal of both victims of injustice to bow before their tormentors. Ironically, their sense of honor and decency has a major impact on one person. Escherich, the Gestapo detective who finally tracks down the “Hobgoblins,” the postcard dissidents. Recognizing the innate goodness of Otto, as opposed to the ferocious corruption of the police system, particularly its apotheosis, Prall, Escherich commits suicide because he cannot deal with his guilt over the betrayal of humanity.
This novel, published one year before George Orwell’s 1984, also focuses on the futility of the common person’s attempts to combat the suffocation of living in a dictatorial society. Both authors had witnessed first-hand the horrors which they presented in their novels, though Fallada’s accounts are obviously more realistic. Orwell despairs for the future of Western civilization, as he shows the crushing of the hope for individuality through Winston Smith’s rejecting independence and embracing Big Brother’s world. Fallada suggests that there is hope for his world as the Quangels, in refusing to submit to the monstrosities of Nazism, have sown seeds that will produce a healthy crop (the metaphor with which he concludes this novel).
Reviewed by:
Ted Odenwald and his wife, Shirley have lived in Oakland for 40 years. He taught HS English at Glen Rock High School for all of those years plus one more. Now he is enjoying time spent with his family, singing in the North Jersey Chorus and quenching his wanderlust. Ted is also the Worship Leader at the Ramapo Valley Baptist Church in Oakland.