Alone in Berlin

"So I wanted to have political leadership, sporting leadership and a novel to demonstrate moral leadership: I have chosen a German novel variously translated as Alone in Berlin or Every Man Dies Alone , and it’s by Hans Fallada. So Germany’s leader at the time of this book is Hitler. But it’s the story of this very very ordinary couple, he’s called Otto Quangel and his wife is called Anna. They are not actually ideologically counter to the Nazis, they just try to get on with their lives but their son, Ottochen, is killed fighting in the war, and the dad starts this thing where he writes anti-Nazi postcards and leaves them in stairwells. It sounds mundane but it is extraordinarily fraught because it’s a police state and you’re not allowed to criticise the regime. And eventually he brings his wife in on it and it totally becomes their life’s mission. The main plotline becomes the Gestapo Inspector Escherich, who is put in charge of trying to find out who the hell is putting these postcards around the place. Now the thing is, that as it happens there are maybe a couple of hundred, or three hundred of these postcards that he writes, and all but 18 are immediately discovered by the Gestapo. So the impact, well, who knows? But why I picked it out for a leadership theme is because it’s a very ordinary couple doing a very extraordinary thing – it is based on a true story – and who knows what the impact was? Probably minimal? Probably futile? But you just don’t know. Eventually they are found and captured – she is killed in a bombing but he gets executed. There is an incredible nobility to them, and yet the couple are not presented as heroic figures, they are just doing one thing that is incredibly brave, and so they emerge at the end with extraordinary nobility. It was written in 1947 and published just after the war, but it wasn’t translated into English until 2009 and it became a bestseller in Britain and America, since when Fallada, a pen name, has become a bit of a cult. He wrote it in a month and then he died that year – a really mixed-up guy, addicted to morphine, in and out of psychiatric hospitals. He killed someone when he was young. But it is a really amazing book about moral leadership. Bits of it just read like a thriller – when he’s going around terrified of being caught, the terror of being seen leaving these postcards. It’s quite a brutal, violent book and it does give you the sense of what it was like at that time, when everyone was paranoid as well. In one sense we all restrict our freedom of speech all the time. Take Ireland: in Tony’s book [Tony Blair], he virtually admits that you say one thing to the Unionists and then you go and describe the same thing in a totally different way to the other side. And we all do that in our private lives, we do it in diplomatic relations and so forth. But if you speak freely in the world of Alone in Berlin you get shot or locked up. In most countries you have to behave in certain way. I totally agree. And that’s why I think it is important to read books like this. If you were living in Nazi Germany and you were like this couple, most would just get on with their lives. I mean, what would it have been like to have been a Russian when you really weren’t allowed to say what you thought? I do think in Britain we take so much for granted. I think when you compare the kind of freedoms that we have to the sort of lives that people living under the Nazis lived or people in Burma now, in Zimbabwe, North Korea, Iran. Perhaps, but it doesn’t bring about change. The truth is none of us knows really how we would behave – I would like to think I would be quite good in the resistance. But the fact is in this country we’ve had fairly stable political debate and we have had our changes made in a totally democratic way. Resistance to totalitarianism, who knows? There have been periods, even in British history, where it would have been so hard to have lived on the wrong side of an argument – but I do like to think that I would have been in the resistance movement."

"This is an important novel for a range of reasons, because it was written so shortly after the Second World War by a novelist who lived through the Nazi regime. It is a very rare glimpse into what working-class life was like then. Yes, and there is plenty of ambivalence about Fallada himself. The Nazis tried to court him and ban him all at the same time. Unlike many writers, he remained in Germany throughout the war. The novel shows what it was like to have totalitarianism in the contemporary period, and what the suppression of not just speech but thought results in. You have a situation where neighbour spies on neighbour, and you dare not say what you think. You dare not speak at all. You are fearful that what you say will be used against you. Indeed, it will be used against you and we know the consequences. I think it is a hymn to bravery as well. In the story there are a man and his wife – this is based on a true story – who although not particularly critical of Hitler and the Nazis in the early 1930s, when their son is killed they start to want to speak out. “The novel shows what the suppression of not just speech but thought results in.” Of course, they know the consequences. The book has a literal free speech theme. They write anonymous postcards attacking Hitler and drop them all around Berlin. As it happens, this has little practical consequence. One of the horrible parts of the novel is when they realise themselves that nearly all the postcards have been handed in and it hasn’t led to an uprising. They are inspired to think there are other people like them, who feel the same and are trying to rally the troops. But in the end, Otto Quangel says to his wife Elsie, “What do we care, it is we who must do it.” So there is this morality of speaking out against all the odds, as well as a reminder of what it is like to have absolutely no free speech. For me, this is a book that reminds us all why freedom of speech matters. It is a very modern example of what it actually means to have the state tell you what you can and cannot say."