Hans Fallada was the pen name of Rudolf Ditzen (1893–1947), a German novelist whose Little Man, What Now? (1932) was an international success. His life was marked by psychiatric confinement after a youthful suicide pact in which his friend died, by recurrent morphine and alcohol addiction, and by spells in prison. He remained in Germany under the Nazis, and wrote Alone in Berlin in a few weeks in late 1946, dying in February 1947 before it was published.
Alone in Berlin (Jeder stirbt für sich allein, 'Everyone dies for himself alone') opens in Berlin in 1940, as the postwoman Eva Kluge delivers to Otto and Anna Quangel the news that their only son has been killed in the invasion of France. The Quangels live in a tenement at 55 Jablonski Strasse with neighbours who represent the range of life under Nazism: the Persickes, a family of brutal Party loyalists; old Frau Rosenthal, a Jewish widow whose flat is looted and who is hounded until she jumps to her death; and retired judge Fromm, who quietly helps where he can.
