Finally translated in 2009, Every Man Dies Alone is a stark novel about life in Nazi Germany, the compromises and complicity of the entire nation, and the dignity of even the most futile act of resistance.

The main story tracks Otto and Anna, an ordinary married couple, who lose their only son in the invasion of France, and decide to launch a quixotic campaign to show that Germany does not support Hitler by leaving anonymous postcards around Berlin. However, the narrative quickly abandons them to track the doings of small time crooks, informers, and petty Nazi party members, as they seek to steal from their elderly Jewish neighbors, sponge off lonely widows, beat their children, and otherwise demonstrate that they are the worst of humanity, even without directly participating in the genocide. The pettiness of these people is directly compared to the drunk parties and twisted interrogations of the Gestapo and the supreme People's Court, and the way that the Nazi regime forced the world to match it's low and debased imagination.

Against this is the second half of the book, Otto and Anna in prison, separated, tortured, driven through a long humiliation before and inevitable execution. Even though their crude resistance with the postcards accomplished precisely nothing, they arrive at a sense of peace and mercy against the great injustices committed against them. It's almost bathetic, an undeserved salvation, but somehow it works. We have to believe that there is something left, even when dignity, community, life itself is taken.

My edition has a great historic footnote on Fallada's tragic personal life, and the swerves of his professional life under the Nazis and then the Soviet occupation. This is not an easy book to read, but it might be a great one.