The War Within

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer

by Justin Bauer

Inspector Escherich, who had cast himself as a Gestapo Ahab carefully tracking the traces of resistance committed by a disillusioned Berliner, ushers in the final act of Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone (Melville House, March 3) with a gunshot.

Escherich kills himself at his desk, following the completion of his task: the capture of coffin-factory foreman Otto Quangel, who had spent two futile years distributing anonymous postcards critical of the Reich around the city. "Here I am, probably the only man Otto Quangel converted with his postcard campaign," Escherich says, gun in hand."But I'm no good to you, Otto Quangel, I can't carry on your labor. I'm too much of a coward. Still, I'm your only disciple, Otto Quangel!"

Escherich's proclamation and suicide makes for a moment of full-blown bathos — it's self-pitying and melodramatic and spiced with a very German romanticism, especially taken out of context like this. And to our ears, now, its sentimentality seems dated and awfully unsophisticated.

Given its context, though, it makes sense — Every Man Dies Alone was written in a white heat by Fallada right before his death and right after the end of the WWII. Michael Hoffman's new translation marks the first English-language publication of the book, and completes Melville House's series of Fallada's books (alongside The Drinker and Little Man, What Now).

That Fallada's works have been so long neglected is unsurprising. He's a troublesome figure who neither bought into the Nazi program nor actively resisted it, who chose to stay in Germany after offers to emigrate, and who died broken, an alcoholic and an addict. Fallada, compromised enough as a German writer in Nazi Germany, lacks the kind of righteousness we still expect from our Greatest Generation. Righteousness, after all, remains important in approaching WWII. Even with the distance history might allow, portrayals of the war still provoke controversy, whether through drawing quick criticism or acting as a shortcut to worthiness — this year's Oscars illustrate the stakes of taking on Nazi history. There is a restrictive range of stock positions, and the penalties for transgressing them remain strong.

The strength of this response shows clearly in reactions to Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones (Harper, March 3), also newly published in translation. Littell is an American, living in Spain, who wrote his book in French; it won the 2006 Prix Goncourt and its English publication came about as the result of a reported million-dollar advance.

Framed as a first-person memoir by the unapologetic Dr. Maximilien Aue, a Nazi officer who escaped punishment after the war, the book details Aue's involvement on the Eastern Front and in the genocide of the Jews, alongside his own homosexuality andincestuous desires.

The book is enormous and incredibly detailed; reaction to it has ranged from comparisons with War and Peace to comparisons with snuff pornography. Michiko Kakutani's recent review in The New York Times displayed a clear abhorrence, invoking philosopher Theodor Adorno and critic George Steiner's warnings about the dangers of aestheticizing the Holocaust.

Ultimately, Littell's impulse to shock through depictions of atrocity or indifference or scatology fail less through the need to experience "destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order," in German cultural critic Walter Benjamin's formulation, but through a sheer repetitive accretion.

This is partially a factor of the narration, as when the gutshot cries of a soldier for his mother during the siege of Stalingrad prompt Aue to think only of his anger at his own mother's remarriage. But it is even more a factor of a memoir so lapidary and exhaustive that individual events drown in long paragraphs made of long sentences with little to distinguish one action from the next.

This historical exhaustiveness highlights, by contrast, the impact Fallada's book is able to generate. Otto Quangel, writer of postcards, exists apart from the great historical scenes that Aue, Zelig-like,inhabits. But his futile resistance takes place against a setting that is clearly and boldly sketched in. It gains strength from the factual basis of the story, from Fallada's firsthand experience of wartime Berlin, and from a plot and action as limited and inevitable as Quangel's resistance and death. Even Escherich's melodramatic last words carry an earned impact and set their speaker apart from Littell's parade of venal monsters.

Every Man Dies Alone may not have the luxury of comprehensiveness, nor its author the blessing of righteousness, but it stands as a small and authentic act of resistance.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)