Every Man Dies Alone - Hardcover

Fallada, Hans

 
9781935554271: Every Man Dies Alone
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1935554271 ISBN 13: 9781935554271
Verlag: Melville House Pub, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

This never-before-translated masterpiece—by a heroic best-selling writer who saw his life crumble when he wouldn’t join the Nazi Party—is based on a true story.
 
It presents a richly detailed portrait of life in Berlin under the Nazis and tells the sweeping saga of one working-class couple who decides to take a stand when their only son is killed at the front. With nothing but their grief and each other against the awesome power of the Reich, they launch a simple, clandestine resistance campaign that soon has an enraged Gestapo on their trail, and a world of terrified neighbors and cynical snitches ready to turn them in.
 
In the end, it’s more than an edge-of-your-seat thriller, more than a moving romance, even more than literature of the highest order—it’s a deeply stirring story of two people standing up for what’s right, and for each other.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Before WWII , German writer Hans Fallada’s novels were international bestsellers, on a par with those of his countrymen Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse. In America, Hollywood even turned his first big novel, Little Man, What Now? into a major motion picture.
 
Learning the movie was made by a Jewish producer, however, Hitler decreed Fallada’s work could no longer be sold outside Germany, and the rising Nazis began to pay him closer attention. When he refused to join the Nazi party he was arrested by the Gestapo—who eventually released him, but thereafter regularly summoned him for “discussions” of his work.
 
However, unlike Mann, Hesse, and others, Fallada refused to flee to safety, even when his British publisher, George Putnam, sent a private boat to rescue him. The pressure took its toll on Fallada, and he resorted increasingly to drugs and alcohol for relief. After Goebbels ordered him to write an anti-Semitic novel, he snapped and found himself imprisoned in an asylum for the “criminally insane”—considered a death sentence under Nazi rule. To forestall the inevitable, he pretended to write the assignment for Goebbels, while actually composing
three encrypted books—including his tour de force novel The Drinker—in such dense code that they were not deciphered until long after his death.
 
Fallada outlasted the Reich and was freed at war’s end. But he was a shattered man. To help him recover by putting him to work, Fallada’s publisher gave him the Gestapo file of a simple, working-class couple who had resisted the Nazis. Inspired, Fallada completed Every Man Dies Alone in just twenty-four days.
 
He died in February 1947, just weeks before the book’s publication.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One
Some Bad News
 
The postwoman Eva Kluge slowly climbs the steps of 55 Jablonski Strasse. She’s tired from her round, but she also has one of those letters in her bag that she hates to deliver, and is about to have to deliver, to the Quangels, on the second floor.
Before that, on the floor below, she has a Party circular for the Persickes. Persicke is some political functionary or other — Eva Kluge always gets the titles mixed up. At any rate, she has to remember to call out “Heil Hitler!” at the Persickes’ and watch her lip. Which she needs to do anyway, there’s not many people to whom Eva Kluge can say what she thinks. Not that she’s a political animal, she’s just an ordinary woman, but as a woman she’s of the view that you don’t put children in the world to have them shot. Also, that a home without a man is no good, and for the time being she’s got nothing: not her two boys, not a man, not a proper home. So, she has to keep her lip buttoned, and deliver horrible field letters that aren’t written but typed, and are signed ‘Regimental Adjutant’.
She rings the bell at the Persickes’, says “Heil Hitler!” and hands the old drunk his circular. He has his party badge on his lapel, and he asks: ‘Well, so what’s new?’
She replies: “Haven’t you heard the special report? France has capitulated.”
Persicke’s not content with that. “Come on, Miss, of course I knew that; but to hear you say it, it’s like you were selling stale rolls. Say it like it meant something! It’s your job to tell everyone who doesn’t have a radio, and convince the last of the moaners. The second Blitzkrieg is in the bag now, it’s England now! In another three months, the Tommies will be finished, and then we’ll see what the Fuhrer has in store for us. Then it’ll be the turn of the others to bleed, and we’ll be the masters. Come on in, and have a schnapps with us. Amalie, Erna, August, Adolf, Baldur — let’s be having you. Today we’re celebrating, we’re not working today. Today we’ll wet the news, and in the afternoon we’ll go and pay a call on the Jewish lady on the fourth floor, and see if she won’t treat us to coffee and cake! I tell you, there’ll be no mercy for that bitch any more!”
While Mr. Persicke, ringed by his family launches into increasingly wild vituperative and starts hitting the schnapps, the postie has climbed another flight of stairs and rung the Quangels’ bell. She’s already holding the letter out in her hand, ready to run off the second she’s handed it over. And she’s in luck: it’s not the woman who answers the door — she usually likes to exchange a few pleasantries — but the man with the etched, birdlike face, the thin lips, and the cold eyes. He takes the letter out of her hand without a word and pushes the door shut in her face, as if she was a thief, someone you had to be on your guard against.
Eva Kluge shrugs her shoulders and turns to go back downstairs. Some people are like that; in all the time she’s delivered mail in the Jablonski Strasse, that man has yet to say a single word to her. Well, let him be, she can’t change him, she couldn’t even change the man she’s married to, who wastes his money sitting in bars and betting on horses, and only ever shows his face at home when he’s skint.
At the Persickes’ they’ve left the apartment door open, she can hear the glasses and the rowdy celebrations. The postwoman gently pulls the door shut and carries on downstairs. She thinks the speedy victory over France might actually be good news, because it will have brought the end of the war nearer. And then she’ll have her two boys back.
The only fly in the ointment is the uncomfortable realization that people like the Persickes will come out on top. To have the likes of them as masters and always have to mind your p’s and q’s, that doesn’t strike her as right either.
Briefly she thinks of the man with the bird face who she gave the field post letter to, and she thinks of old Mrs. Rosenthal up on the fourth floor, whose husband the Gestapo took away two weeks ago. You had to feel sorry for someone like that. The Rosenthals used to have a little haberdashery shop on Prenzlauer Allee. That was Aryanized, and now the man’s disappeared, and he can’t be far short of seventy. Those two old people can’t have done any harm to anyone, they always allowed credit — they did it for Eva Kluge too when she couldn’t afford new clothes for the kids — and the goods were certainly no dearer or worse in quality than elsewhere. No, Eva Kluge can’t get it into her head that a man like Rosenthal is any worse than the Persickes, just by virtue of him being a Jew. And now the old woman is sitting in her flat all alone, and doesn’t dare go outside. It’s only after dark that she goes and does her shopping with her yellow star, probably she’s hungry. No, thinks Eva Kluge, even if we defeat France ten times over, it doesn’t mean there’s any justice here at home...
And by now she’s reached the next house, and she makes her deliveries there.
In the meantime shop foreman Otto Quangel has taken the field post letter into the parlor and propped it against the sewing machine. “There!” he says, nothing more. He always leaves the letters for his wife to open, knowing how devoted she is to their only son Otto. Now he stands facing her, biting his thin under lip, waiting for her smile to light up. In his quiet, undemonstrative way, he loves this woman very much.
She has torn open the envelope, for a brief moment there really was a smile lighting up her face, and then it vanished when she saw the typed letter. Her face grew apprehensive, she read more and more slowly, as though afraid of what each next word might be. The man has leaned forward and taken his hands out of his pockets. He is biting his underlip quite hard now, he senses something terrible has happened. It’s perfectly silent in their parlor. Only now does the woman’s breathing come with a gasp.
Suddenly she emits a soft scream, a sound her husband has never heard from her. Her head rolls forward, bangs against the spools of thread on her sewing machine, and comes to rest among the folds of sewing, covering the fateful letter.
In a couple of bounds Quangel is at her side. With uncharacteristic haste he places his big, work-toughened hand on her back. He can feel his wife trembling all over. “Anna!” he says, “Anna, please!” He waits for a moment, and then he says it: “Has something happened to Otto? Is he wounded, is it bad?”
His wife’s body continues to tremble, her mouth doesn’t make a sound. She makes no effort to raise her head to look at him.
He looks down at her hair, it’s gotten thin in the many years of their marriage. They are getting old; if something serious has happened to Otto, she will have no one to love, only him, and there’s not much to love about him. He doesn’t have words to tell her ever how much he feels for her. Even now he’s not able to stroke her, be tender to her, comfort her a little. It’s all he can do to rest his heavy hand on her hair, pull her head up as gently as he can, and softly say: “Anna, will you tell me what’s in the letter?”
But even though her eyes are now very near to his, she keeps them shut tight, she won’t look at him. Her face is a sickly yellow, her usual healthy color is gone. The flesh over her bones seems to have melted away, it’s like...

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Verlag
Melville House Pub
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1935554271
ISBN 13 
9781935554271
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
539
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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