Alone in Berlin
By Hans Fallada
Translated by Michael Hofmann
Penguin £20, 608 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

Our view of the past becomes distorted with time. Layers of facts and opinions can make us wiser, cleverer and more knowing than ever about events that lie beyond our reach. Historians call it writing history backwards, when we project our understanding on to the lives of people who were exposed to a different set of choices and threats.

Was is possible to resist Hitler? Why didn’t more people rise up against this “criminal” regime as it was secretly called? And what use is resistance when it fails to make a difference? Despite 60 years of discussion, the question is still best answered by going back to Alone in Berlin, a novel published in 1947 and now translated into English for the first time by Michael Hofmann.

Set in the working-class district of Wedding, the story is seen at street level through the first-hand impressions of a writer who had only just stepped out of the rubble himself. Regarded by critics in Germany as a social realist, Hans Fallada emerged from what became known as “internal emigration”, a paralysed form of opposition in which people unable to speak out openly against Hitler still kept to their principles. In a burst of 24 weeks after the war, Fallada wrote down his stored observations, giving us all the confusion, the petty human triumphs and losses, and the whole mess of wartime lives, when not even a man in uniform was safe.

From the horse’s mouth is not a bad way of putting it, since the author’s name, Hans Fallada, is a pseudonym taken from two Grimm’s fairy tales including the story of a decapitated horse’s head that continues to tell the truth until a wrong done to a princess is put right. After finally telling his truth, Fallada died from a morphine overdose in the year of his novel’s publication.

Based on a true story, Alone in Berlin tells of an isolated form of spontaneous resistance that turns out to be suicidal. The original title – Everyone Dies Alone – seems colder, more in tune with the stark realities which end in failure and death by the guillotine, though also emerging with a quiet, private honour: “We stayed decent.”

Otto Quangel and his wife Anna have lost their only son in battle on the front in France. While Anna grieves openly, her husband remains characteristically silent – that is, until his grief takes the extraordinary expression of an imaginative rebellion against Nazi authority: he writes postcards warning the people of Berlin, particularly mothers with sons on the front, about the insanity of the regime.

The couple go out walking together and leave the cards in random places; when each note is found it is inevitably handed in to the Gestapo by loyal and fearful citizens. A manhunt for the culprits takes the shape of a deadly detective drama, with pin flags stuck in the city map marking where the cards are picked up. We watch the net slowly tighten on the Quangels’ doomed resistance. The only redemption is “internal”, in the form of their rediscovered love for each other.

This novel is far more than a literary thriller, however. It gives us a full range of well-drawn characters who live their daily lives on Jablonski Strasse in constant fear – fear of betrayal, conscription, concentration camps, fear of having no food, of losing relatives, of dying in a bombing raid, of thieves knocking on doors with the ruse of “... I have news of your husband”. In a particularly shocking moment, a pregnant woman loses her baby after falling down the stairs but seems happy – because she will not bear a son who might join the SS.

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 is the author of ‘Disguise’ (Fourth Estate)