Every Man Dies Alone

First published October 25, 2018

Update August 5, 2024:  Alone in Berlin (2017) is an English-language film of the story and there are German and Czech versions as well

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Man_Dies_Alone

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Based upon the Gestapo files of an actual case, Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada (Brooklyn, NY:  Melville House, 2009 ISBN 978-1-933633-63-3) is about a middle-aged, working class couple who resist the Nazis in 1940 Berlin.  Otto and Anna Quangel drop postcards and leaflets in mailboxes and in public places protesting Hitler’s government and the war.  They know what they are doing can and probably will result in their capture, torture, and death by the Gestapo.  They also know what they are doing is a very small disturbance in the larger world;  but they must do something.  After the death of their only son in the war, they have nothing to lose.

The daily atmosphere of Nazi rule is described so you feel the constriction of the limited choices, always on the edge of violence, every person had to make, every moment of every day.  Everyone is alone in a world where everyone is an informant.

Fallada stayed in Germany throughout the war though he was blacklisted by the Nazis and institutionalized for a time.  He reportedly felt he was something of a collaborator. Every Man Dies Alone was Fallada’s last book.  He died before it was published.  The book was not translated into English and released until 2009, becoming a surprise success. With the wave of authoritarian nationalism and tactical cruelty by despots washing around the world right now, it is a difficult book to read though, perhaps, a necessary one.

We are, it seems, always a few years away from extermination camps in any society and I think I could make a reasonable case that, all my life, there was and is almost always attempted genocide happening somewhere in the world.


Quotes from Every Man Dies Alone
(page 9)  Not that she’s [Eva Kluge, Karlemann’s mother] a political animal, she’s just an ordinary woman, but as a woman she’s of the view that you don’t bring children into the world to have them shot.  Also, that a home without a man is no good, and for the time being she’s got nothing:  not her two boys, not a man, not a proper home.

(20)  Because you could see it with your eyes closed, the way they were making separations between ordinary citizens and Party members.  Even the worst Party member was worth more to them than the best ordinary citizen.  Once in the Party, it appeared you could do what you liked, and never be called for it.  They termed that rewarding loyalty with loyalty.

[footnote]  Winter Relief Fund was a Nazi-organized charity collected during the winter months.  Pressure to contribute was considerable, and armbands and pins were distributed for public display to identity donors - and thus non-donors.  Much of the money was siphoned off by the Party, and scholars have noted that it kept the populace short of extra cash and acclimated to the idea of privation.

(43)  Father of Karlemann: “On his last furlough he showed me a photograph that a comrade took of him.  He was proud of it.  There’s your Karlemann, and he’s holding a little Jewish boy of about three, holding him by the leg, and he’s about to smash his head against the bumper of a car.”

(64)  For an instant, Baldur Persicke [Hitler Youth] thought the game was up.  But then he remembered one of his maxims, Shamelessness wins out…

(78)  [footnote]  Jewish women were forced to change their names to Sara by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 (also known as the Nuremberg Racial Purity Laws);  Jewish men were forced to call themselves Israel.

(132)  He might be right:  whether their act was big or small, no one could risk more than his life.

(146)  In the year 1940, he had not yet understood, our good Harteisen, that any Nazi at any time was prepared to take not only the pleasure but also the life of any differently minded German.

(153)  “Show me one that isn’t afraid!” said the brownshirt contemptuously.  “And it’s so unnecessary.  They just need to do what we tell them.”

“It’s because people have got in the habit of thinking.  They have the idea that thinking will help them."

(157)  In other words, the Quangels were like most people:  they believed what they hoped.

(223)  That was all his superiors really cared about:  something had to be done, even if it was the wrong thing, as the whole pursuit of Kluge [father of Karlemann] was wrong. It was the waiting around the gentlemen couldn’t endure.

(278)  “Thoughts are free,”  they said - but they ought to have known that in this State not even thoughts were free.

….They had failed to understand that there was no such thing as private life in wartime Germany.

(284)  "They just need to overcome their fear.  At the moment, their fear of the future the Nazis are creating is still less than their fear of the present.  But that will change before too long."

…. “Second, my dear chap, you ought to know that it doesn’t matter if there’s a handful of you against many of them.  Once you’ve seen that a cause is right, you’re obliged to fight for it.”

(288)  Eleven of his workforce, including two men who had been at the furniture factory for twenty years, had disappeared without trace:  either in the middle of the shift or they hadn’t come to work one morning.  He was never told what had become of them, and that was further evidence that they had spoken a word out of turn somewhere and been packed off to a concentration camp.

(289)  But sometimes out of that dullness a terrifying rage would explode like the time a worker had fed his arm into the saw and screamed, “I wish Hitler would drop dead! And he will!  Just as I am sawing off my arm!"

(292)  “Danger,” he said.  “There’s always danger, Anna;  otherwise, it’s not fighting….”

(352)  [Detective] Escherich once felt very secure.  He once thought nothing could happen to him.  He worked on the assumption that he was completely different from everyone else.  And Escherich has had to give up these little self-deceptions.  It happened basically in the few seconds after SS man Dobat smashed him in the face and he became acquainted with fear.  In the space of a very few days, Escherich became so thoroughly acquainted with fear that now there is no chance of him forgetting for as long as he lives.  He knows it doesn’t matter how he looks, what he does, what honors and praise he receives - he knows he is nothing.  A single punch can turn him into a wailing, gibbering, trembling wretch, not much better than the stinking coward of a pickpocket who shared his cell for a few days and whose hurriedly rattled off last prayers are still ringing in his ears.  Little better than that.  No, no better at all!

(355)  His parsimony, his “confounded miserliness” prevents him from destroying them, but also his respect for work;  everything that constitutes work is sacred to him.  The destruction of work is a sin.

(359)  They all sense the threat hanging over each one of them.  Because there is not one among the eighty men there who has not in some way opposed the present government, at least by a word or two!  Each one is threatened.  Each life is at risk.  They are all terrified…

(368)  Besides, she seems to belong to the minority that respond to threats with increased obstinacy.  There’s nothing to be gained by knocking her about.

(370)  "Half the population is set on locking up the other half.  Well, it can’t go on like this much longer.  At any rate, I will remain here;  no one is about to lock me up…”

He smiles and nods.

“The worse it gets, the better it will be.  The sooner it will all be over!"

(418)  She had delicate hands, the hands of an old child…

(458)  Everyone is guilty.  You just need to probe for long enough, and you’ll find something.

(483)  A double standard.  Clemency is for Party members, not for members of the public.

(501)  The gravel was a dream gravel, the crunching of stones underfoot was a sound in a dream…

More Notes on Nazis, Fascism, and Tyranny

https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2024/07/notes-on-nazis-fascism-and-tyranny.html

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

I first became aware of Eric Hoffer when I was a young teenager and stumbled upon a half-hour show he did for KQED that was broadcast on the local public TV station in NYC.  I fell in love with his enthusiasm, his joy in learning and thinking, and followed his work until he became an unofficial advisor to LBJ and began to inveigh against the 60s©™allrightsreserved without, to me, much understanding at all.  Still, his books like The True Believer and The Ordeal of Change helped me formulate some of my own thinking and may still be useful to others.

Here are the notes I made when I reread The True Believer in 2008.

The True Believer:  Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer
NY:  Harper & Row, 1951

(xii)  "Starting out from the fact that the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements and that they usually join of their own accord, it is assumed:  1)  that frustration of itself, without any proselytizing prompting from the outside, can generate most of the peculiar characteristics of the true believer;  2)  that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind."

(9)  "Those who would transform a nation of the world cannot do so by breeding and captaining discontent or by demonstrating the reasonableness and desirability of the intended changes or by coercing people into a new way of life.  They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope.  It matters not whether it be hope of a heavenly kingdom, of heaven on earth, of plunder and untold riches, of fabulous achievement or world dominion.  If the Communists win Europe and a large part of the world, it will not be because they know how to stir up discontent or how to infect people with hatred, but because they know how to preach hope."

(10)  "There can be revolutions by the privileged as well as by the underprivileged.  The movement of enclosure in sixteenth and seventeenth century England was a revolution by the rich."
NB:  We are now undergoing a similar revolution of the rich, the enclosure of the intellectual commons and the complete corporate branding of life, down to your DNA.

"Another English revolution by the rich occurred at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century.  It was the Industrial Revolution."

(11)  "For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power.  They must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking.  Experience is a handicap."

(15)  "The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless."

(16)  "When people are ripe for a mass movement, they are usually ripe for any effective movement, and not solely for one with a particular doctrine or program."

(17)  "Since all mass movements draw their adherents from the same types of humanity and appeal to the same types of mind, it follows:  a) all mass movements are competitive, and the gain of one in adherents is the loss of all the others;  b) all mass movements are interchangeable.  One mass movement readily transforms itself into another."

(28)  "Discontent is likely to be highest when misery is bearable;  when conditions have so improved that an ideal state seems almost within reach.  A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed."

(29)  "It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt."

(30)  "There is a hope that acts as an explosive, and a hope that disciplines and infuses patience.  The difference is between the immediate hope and the distant hope."

"Later, as the movement comes into possession of power, the emphasis is shifted to the distant hope - the dream and the vision.  For an 'arrived' mass movement is preoccupied with the preservation of the present, and it prizes obedience and patience above spontaneous action, and when we 'hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.'"

(31)  "Freedom aggravates at least as much as it alleviates frustration.  Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual."

(41)  "It is futile to judge the viability of a new movement by the truth of its doctrine and the feasibility of its promises.  What has to be judged is its corporate organization for quick and total absorption of the frustrated."

(43)  "When people revolt in a totalitarian society, they rise not against the wickedness of the regime but its weakness."

(51)  "There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society's ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom."

(54)  "An effective mass movement cultivates the idea of sin.  It depicts the autonomous self not only as barren and helpless but also as vile."

(58)  "It is perhaps impossible to understand the nature fo mass movements unless it is recognized that their chief preoccupation is to foster, perfect and perpetuate a facility for untied action and self-sacrifice."

(59-60)  "Such diverse phenomena as a deprecation of the present, a facility for make-believe, a proneness to hate, a readiness to imitate, credulity, a readiness to attempt the impossible, and many others which crowd the minds fo the intensely frustrated are, as we shall see, unifying agents and prompters of recklessness."

(61)  "The technique of fostering a readiness to fight and to die consists in separating the individual from his flesh-and-blood self - in not allowing him to be his real self.  This can be achieved by the thorough assimilation of the individual into a compact collective body;  by endowing him with an imaginary self (make-believe);  by implanting in him a deprecating attitude toward the present and riveting his interest on things that are not yet;  by interposing a fact-proof screen between him and reality (doctrine);  by preventing, through the injection of passions, the establishment of a stable equilibrium between the individual and his self (fanaticism)."

(63)  "The effacement of individual separateness must be thorough.  In every act, however, trivial, the individual must by some ritual associate himself with the congregation, the tribe, the party, etcetera.  His joys and sorrows, his pride and confidence must spring from the fortunes and capacities of the group rather than from his individual prospects and abilities.  Above all, he must never feel alone.  Though stranded on a desert island, he must still feel that he is under the eyes of the group.  To be cast out from the group should be equivalent to being cut off from life."

(68)  "Glory is largely a theatrical concept.  There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience - the knowledge that our mighty deeds will come to the ears of our contemporaries or 'of those who are to be.'"

(71)  "The self-sacrifice involved in mutual sharing and co-operative action is impossible without hope."

(73)  "It is often the fanatics, and not always the delicate spirits, that are found grasping the right thread of the solutions required by the future." 
Alexis de Tocqueville, On the State of Society in France Before the Revolution of 1789 (John Murray, 1888)

(74-75)  "The radical and the reactionary loathe the present.  They see it as an aberration and a deformity.  Both are ready to proceed ruthlessly and recklessly with the present, and both are hospitable to the idea of self-sacrifice.  Wherein do they differ?  Primarily in their view of the malleability of man's nature.  The radical has a passionate faith in the infinite perfectibility of human nature.  He believes that by changing man's environment and by perfecting a technique of soul forming, a society can be wrought that is wholly new and unprecedented.  The reactionary does not believe that man has unfathomed potentialities for good in him.  If a stable and healthy society is to be established, it must be patterned after the proven models of the past.  He sees the future as a glorious restoration rather than an unprecedented innovation.

"In reality the boundary line between radical and reactionary is not always distinct.  The reactionary manifests radicalism when he comes to recreate his ideal past.  His image of the past is based less on what it actually was than on what he wants the future to be.  He innovates more than he reconstructs.  A somewhat similar shift occurs in the case of the radical when he goes about building his new world.  He feels the need for practical guidance, and since he has rejected and destroyed the present he is compelled to link the new world with some point in the past.  If he has to employ violence in shaping the new, his view of man's nature darkens and approaches closer to that of the reactionary.

(75)  "What surprises one, when listening to the frustrated as they decry the present and all its works, is the enormous joy they derive from doing so.  Such delight cannot come from the mere venting of a grievance.  There must be something more - and there is.  By expiating upon the incurable baseness and vileness of the times, the frustrated soften their feeling of failure and isolation.  It is as if they said:  'Not only our blemished selves, but the lives of all our contemporaries, even the most happy and successful, are worthless and wasted.'  Thus be deprecating the present they acquire a vague sense of equality."

(76)  "One of the rules that emerges from a consideration of the factors that promote self-sacrifice is that we are less ready to die for what we have or are than for what we wish to have and to be."

(77)  "Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself."

(78)  "All active mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world.  They do this by claiming that the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth nor certitude outside it.  The facts on which the true believer bases his conclusions must not be derived from his experience or observation but from holy writ."

"To rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason."

(79)  "The effectiveness of the doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude."

"Crude absurdities, trivial nonsense and sublime truths are equally potent in readying people for self-sacrifice if they are accepted as the sole, eternal truth."

"We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand."

"If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague;  and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable."

"There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer.  He seems to use words as if he were ignorant of their true meaning.  Hence, too, his taste for quibbling, hair-splitting and scholastic tortuousness."

(82)  "The true believer is without wonder and hesitation."
NB:  No curiosity

"The true believer is emboldened to attempt the unprecedented and the impossible not only because his doctrine gives him a  sense of omnipotence but also because it gives him unqualified confidence in the future."

(83)  "The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others.  They are easily persuaded and led.

"A peculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture.  The association of believing and lying is not characteristic solely of children.  The inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism."

(85)  "The fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure.  He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual resources - out of his rejected self - but finds it only by clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace.  This passionate attachment is the essence of his blind devotion and religiosity, and he sees in it the source of all virtue and strength."

"The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle.  He embraces a cause not primarily because of its justness and holiness but because of his desperate need for something to hold on to."

(86)  "He cannot be convinced but only converted."

"Though they seem to be at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end.  It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet."

"The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not."

(87)  "He hungers for the deep assurance which comes with total surrender - with the wholehearted clinging to a creed and a cause.   What matters is not the contents of the cause but the total dedication and the communion with a congregation."

(89)  "On the other hand, the leader of a mass movement has an overwhelming contempt for the present - for all its stubborn facts and perplexities, even those of geography and the weather.  He relies on miracles.  His hatred of the present (his nihilism) comes to the fore when the situation becomes desperate.  He destroys his country and his people rather than surrender."
NB:  Now suicide is a tactic

(92)  "Common hatred unites the most heterogeneous elements.  To share a common hatred, with an enemy even, is to infect him with a feeling of kinship, and thus sap his powers of resistance."

""It seem that, like the ideal deity, the ideal devil is one.  We have it from Hitler - the foremost authority on devils - that the genius of a great leader consists in concentrating all hatred on a single foe, making 'even adversaries far removed from one another seem to belong to a single category.'"

(93)  "Finally,it seems, the ideal devil is a foreigner."

"But we always look for allies when we hate."

(95)  "There is perhaps no surer way of infecting ourselves with virulent hatred toward a person than be doing him a grave injustice.  That others have a just grievance against us is a more potent reason for hating them than that we have a just grievance against them.  We do not make people humble and meek when we show them their guilt and cause them to be ashamed of themselves.  We are more likely to stir their arrogance and rouse in them a reckless aggressiveness.  Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us."

(97)  "It is startling to see how the oppressed almost invariably shape themselves in the image of their hated oppressors.  That the evil men do lives after them is partly due to the fact that those who have reason to hate the evil most shape themselves after it and thus perpetuate it.  It is obvious, therefore, that the influence of the fanatic is bound to be out of all proportion to his abilities.  Both by converting and antagonizing, he shapes the world in his own image."

"Hitler, who sensed the undercurrent of admiration in hatred, drew a remarkable conclusion.  It is of the utmost importance, he said, that the National Socialist should seek and deserve the violent hatred of his enemies.  Such hatred would be proof of the superiority of the National Socialist faith.  'The best yardstick for the value of his [the National Socialist's] attitude, for the sincerity of his conviction, and the force of his will is the hostility he receives from the .. enemy.'"
NB:  The propagation of "Bush-hating" by Republicans?

(107)  "Ferrero says of the terrorists of the French Revolution that the more blood they 'shed the more they needed to believe in their principles as absolutes.  only the absolute might still absolve them in their own eyes and sustain their desperate energy.  [They] did not spill all that blood because they believe in popular sovereignty as a religious truth;  they tried to believe in popular sovereignty as a religious truth because their fear made them spill so much blood.'"
Guglielmo Ferrero, Principles of Power (GP Putnam, 1942)

(116)  "The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership.  What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world."

(121-122)  "A mass movement's call for action evokes an eager response for the frustrated.  For the frustrated see in action a cure for all that ails them."

(132)  "'Vanity,' said Napoleon, 'made the Revolution;  liberty was only a pretext.'"

(154)  "The mass movement leader who benefits his people and humanity knows not only how to start a movement, but, like Gandhi, when to end its active phase."

(162)  "In the eyes of the true believer, people who have no holy cause are without backbone and character - a pushover for men of faith."

(1680  "JBS Haldane counts fanaticism among the only four really important inventions made between 3000 BC and 1400 AD."
JBS Haldane, The Inequality of Man (Famous Books, 1938)

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More Notes on Nazis, Fascism, and Tyranny

https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2024/07/notes-on-nazis-fascism-and-tyranny.html

My Name Escapes Me: Alec Guinness' Diary

I found a copy of _My Name Escapes Me:  The Diary of a Retiring Actor_ by Alec Guinness (NY:  Penguin Books, 1996  ISBN 0140277455) and, since I’d liked Guinness' autobiography, Blessings in Disguise, put it away in my book closet.  A few weeks ago, I took it out and read it, enjoying it as much if not more so than the previous book.  Guinness could write.  In fact, I discovered these three found poems which are very good imagistic works:

(page 75)  The fish lie low and still in the pond, covered by a layer of plate-glass ice.

(126)  Little blue scillas shaking violently in the cold wind, making the borders of garden paths look like running water.

(127)  The sea was driving for the shore with thousands of white horses riding over a pale grey-green surface.

And this following quote reminds me of something Gulley Jimson says in the movie version of "The Horse’s Mouth" which Guinness wrote, his only screenplay, and starred in:  

"'It’s my belief' I said, 'that if you took all the waiters’ boots off, their feet would make such rude remarks to the customers that nobody would be able to enjoy his dinner.’"

(8)  Will 1995 be the year of Universal Suing?  Policemen, I read, are resorting to the courts because of the state of their nerves after the horrid things they have seen at football matches;  and a lot of soldiers want compensation because they have discovered that war is beastly.

Guinness in his diary is continually thinking about winning the lottery, declares himself “not a star,” expresses annoyance at his “Star Wars”  notoriety, buys presents for his wife, and dines out often with friends and colleagues.  He listens to classical music from a wide range of composers and pays great attention to painting and painters.  He seems also to have been a committed Catholic, converting as an adult and taking his spiritual life seriously.

I’d always enjoyed Guiinness as an actor, in the great comedies as well as the dramatic roles and even thought he might have been a fine dancer, judging from a scene in “All at Sea” where he leads a conga line out of a seaside club with, believe it or not, Jackie Collins, Joan Collins’ sister.

I’ve found that there are at least two other books by him I can read, _A Positively Final Appearance_, a continuation of his diaries, and _A Commonplace Book_ which makes me like him more as these notes on the books I read are my own version of an electronic commonplace book.

When I think of Alec Guinness, I smile.  Now my smile is wider and my admiration deeper.

(3)  …rather embarrassing successes and expected failures.

(5)  Early in the war I had tea with him [the painter Tchelitchew] in New York;  very agreeable, and camply amusing, but I had the impression I was in the presence of a professional exile - something I often feel about Russians or eastern Europeans.

(57)  There seems to be no end to the senseless wickedness done on this little planet in a minor solar system, and we puny mortals appear to be decreasing in importance so far as the universe is concerned.

(96)  …. St Augustine, who quoted, with admiration, an old man he knew? - ‘Time comes from the future, which does not yet exist, into the present which has no duration, and goes in to the past, which has ceased to exist.’

(114)  Oh, if only we had written everything down daily [in a diary] we could bore the pants off everyone all the time with our exactitude.

(116)  When interviewed by the press he [Russian actor Alexei Gribov] gave a classic reply to the perennial question,’Which is your favorite of the parts you play?’  Gribov replied, sotto voce, “I can’t tell you that because, you see, it would make the other parts jealous.’  A very true observation.

(123)  Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of the Divine

(130)  My experience is that given time - and plenty of it - I can usually bring myself to forgive, quite genuinely, a personal injury, but I find it virtually impossible to forgive an injury to those I love.

(136)  Group-captain [Geoffrey Leonard] Cheshire, V. C.  [Cheshire Homes, Leonard Cheshire charityk] a man Alec Guinness thought would be considered a saint for his work supporting the disabled and on conflict resolution

… Then with tears in his [Nehru’s] eyes, he turned to an aide and said, ‘That is the greatest man I have met since Gandhi…"

(162)  Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 32 - for me the greatest piece of music I know