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Alone in Berlin (Penguin Hardback Classics) [Hardcover]

Hans Fallada (Author), Michael Hofmann (Translator)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (280 customer reviews)

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Review

The greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis. --Primo Levi

This novel is far more than a literary thriller. Fallada's vivid novel gives us the true, concentric circles of lives in a Berlin apartment block under totalitarianism. Michael Hofmann should be congratulated for bringing this work with all its immediate clarity to the English language.
--Hugo Hamilton, Financial Times, March 23, 2009

Review

An unrivalled and vivid portrait of life in wartime Berlin.

Review

Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin is one of the most extraordinary and compelling novels ever written about World War II. Ever. Fallada lived through the Nazi hell, so every word rings true - this is who they really were: the Gestapo monsters, the petty informers, the few who dared to resist. Please, do not miss this.

Review

'An unrivalled and vivid portrait of life in wartime Berlin'. - Philip Kerr

Book Description

Fallada's prose...has a journalistic clarity and a thriller writer's pace.

Allan Massie, Scotsman, October 14, 2009

This is an extraordinary novel

Eileen Battersby, Irish Times, February 21, 2009

A terrific literary find....the first English translation of this fast-moving, important and astutely deadpan thriller not only fills in more of the story about ordinary life in wartime Germany, it will alert readers to yet another European classic now available to a wider readership.

Liesl Schillinger, New York Times Book Review, March 1, 2009

A signal literary event of 2009 has occurred...to read [Alone in Berlin], Fallada's testament to the darkest years of the 20th century, is to be accompanied by a wise, somber ghost who grips your shoulder and whispers into your ear: `This is how it was. This is what happened.'

Justin Cartwright, Sunday Telegraph, March 1, 2009

An utterly gripping thriller and subtle account of the moral status of Germans under the Nazis....A revelatory text. I urge you to read it.

Caroline Moore, Standpoint, March 2009

A powerful portrayal of the corrosive paranoia engendered by such all-pervading tyranny...hammered out with such passion that it is painfully convincing.

Product Description

Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the nervous Frau Rosenthal, the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm and the unassuming working-class couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the devastating news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France.

Shocked out of his quiet existence, the usually taciturn factory foreman Otto is provoked into an action that will endanger both his and Anna's life. With her help, he begins to drop hundreds of anonymous postcards attacking Hitler in stairwells and offices all over the city. If they are caught, they will be executed for treason.

As their silent campaign escalates, the cards come to the attention of the ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich, and a deadly game of cat and mouse develops between them. When petty criminals Kluge and Borkhausen also become involved, blackmail, deception, betrayal and murder ensue, gradually tightening the noose around the Quangels' necks ...

About the Author

Hans Fallada was one of the best-known German writers of the twentieth century. Born on 21 July 1893 in Greifswald as Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen, he took his pen name from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. His most famous works include the novels Little Man, What Now? and The Drinker. Fallada died from an overdose of morphine on 5 February 1947 in Berlin.

Michael Hofmann is the author of several books of poems and a book of criticism, Behind the Lines, and the translator of many modern and contemporary authors, including Joseph Roth. Penguin publish his translations of Kafka's Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel and Irmgard Keun's Child of All Nations.

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