Rudolf Ditzen, who wrote under the name Hans Fallada, lived a chaotic life. Born in 1893 in Greifswald in north-east Germany, he was the son of a lawyer who was later appointed a judge. At the age of 18 he killed a schoolfriend in a duel, and spent much of his career in psychiatric hospitals and drying-out clinics or in prison for thieving and embezzlement to support his morphine habit. In between, he worked on the land, wrote a couple of novels and held down jobs for a period on newspapers.

Fallada married in 1929, and for a while straightened out. His 1932 novel, Kleiner Mann - was nun? ("Little Man - What Now?") brought him praise from Thomas Mann, international success, a Hollywood film and a small farm. Under the Nazis, Fallada wrote and published a series of gritty novels of the type that German critics call neue Sachlichkeit, or new objectivity. In 1944, he shot at his wife in a quarrel and was confined again to a psychiatric hospital.

At the end of the war, Fallada was embraced by the new East German literary authorities. In 1947, he published with Aufbau-Verlag Jeder stirbt fuer sich allein ("Each dies only for himself") which is here called Alone in Berlin. It was the first novel by a German author to take as its theme the small-scale domestic resistance to the National Socialists. The same year, weakened by years of alcoholism and drug-taking, Fallada died of a heart attack.

Traces of this unruly life are scattered through Alone in Berlin: brawling, delirium tremens, clinics and drying-out establishments, country idylls, theft, blackmail, morphine, and a vivid world of sub-proletarian swindling that exploits and is exploited by the Nazis. It is remarkable that Fallada, just months before his death, could compose a long novel that, after an overcrowded beginning, advances so confidently to its conclusion.

Otto and Anna Quangel are a Berlin working couple, laborious, unsociable, thrifty to the point of stinginess, and originally not hostile to the National Socialists. That changes in 1940 when their beloved son, Ottochen, is killed while fighting in France. Otto, a foreman in a furniture factory that soon will be turned over to making coffins, is provoked into resistance. He spends his Sundays writing anonymous postcards against the regime and dropping them in the stairwells of city buildings. "Mother Don't give to the Winter Relief Fund! - Work as slowly as you can! - Put sand in the machines! - Every stroke of work not done will shorten the war!"

According to the forward to the first German edition, the novel follows "in its broad lines" the Gestapo files on the illegal activities of an actual Berlin working-class couple, Otto and Elise Hampel. Originally Nazi supporters, on the death of their son in France in 1940 they began to deposit postcards and some 200 written leaflets in post-boxes and stairwells around their home district, Berlin-Wedding. They were betrayed, arrested on 20 October 1942, sentenced to death by the People's Court and executed in Plötzensee prison the following April.

To bring life to these facts, Fallada assembles a staff of vivid low-life characters, stoolies, thieves and whores, Nazi veterans in a haze of drink, as well as ordinary working-people trying to put food on the table. Here is the resistance of the small man, perilous, disorganised, irresponsible, perverse, brave and almost wholly futile. As the Gestapo Inspector Escherich muses: "There were more urgent and important cases. A madman ... did nothing but send Minister Goebbels daily letters that were crude, and often pornographic in nature. Well, Inspector Escherich was in luck, he had managed to solve the 'Filth' case within three months."

In the foreword, Fallada (or his editor) defends the brutality of the book on the grounds that it takes place "among opponents of the regime and their persecutors, where quite a few came to grief". This dialectic of persecutor and persecuted is Fallada's most profound contribution. Of the 276 postcards and eight letters deposited by the Quangels over two years, all but 18 are handed straight in to the Gestapo where they destroy one life and two careers and sow chaos in an arbitrary and unamanageable organisation.

Otto and Anna themselves enjoy a moral triumph before the People's Court. Those who have seen newsreel film of judge Roland Freisler screaming at defendants may find the People's Court scenes hard to credit. It seems Fallada kept his optimism intact to the end of his hard and rackety life. The witness who stands up in court to sing a Lutheran hymn seemed to me as honest as the old peasant couple who beg for clemency in a letter that begins: "Dearly beloved Fuehrer, a wretched mother is begging you on her knees for the life of her daughter, who committed a grave sin against you, but you are so great, you will surely show her mercy." Of course, there is no mercy, least of all from the Allies, who bombed Plötenzee during the night of 3-4 September 1943 and set off an orgy of executions in the prison.

For the British publisher, this book is a "rediscovered" masterpiece - a sort of German Némirovsky - and if that pitch finds readers in the English-speaking countries, so much the better. In truth, the book did very well in the Aufbau-Verlag edition, was filmed for television in both wings of divided Germany and then again for the cinema in the west in 1975 with Hildegard Knef and Carl Raddatz. I suppose by "rediscovered", Penguin means "translated into English".

For a translator, even one as experienced as Michael Hofmann, this book cannot have been easy, not so much on account of the Berlin dialect - "Wat jibt's denn Neuet?" rather than "Was gibt es denn Neues?" - but because of the sometimes slapdash German, the scenes that maunder or run out of puff, and the garish palette of effects. It is harder to translate mediocre German than good German. But Hofmann is a complete literary professional, and although he may prefer Kafka or Josef Roth or Wolfgang Köppen, he gives this tough and shady author his all.

Liebe/r Finder/in,

bitte mache einen Journaleintrag um mich wissen zu lassen, dass dieses Buch gefunden und das es bei dir ein gutes neues Zuhause gefunden hat. Solltest Du neu bei BookCrossing sein, und Du Lust hast dich hier anzumelden, würde ich mich freuen, wenn Du bei Empfehlungs-Mitglied Physalis74 einträgst (Du kannst natürlich auch ohne dich anzumelden, ganz anonym einen Eintrag über Deinen Fund machen). Ich hoffe Du findest gefallen an dem Buch. Du kannst einen weiteren Eintrag machen, wie es Dir gefallen hat sobald Du es gelesen hast.

Dann, wann immer Du bereit bist es weiter zu geben, mache bitte einen Journaleintrag ob Du dieses Buch an eine Dir bekannte Person weitergegeben oder gesendet hast, oder mache ein Freilasseintrag wenn Du es für Jedermann in die „Wildnis“ freigelassen hast. Verfolge die Weitere reise. Du bekommst eine Emailnachricht, wenn dieses Buch wiedergefunden wird und jemand einen Eintrag macht. Alles ist absolut vertraulich (Du bist nur unter deinem Screenname zu sehen, Deine angegebene Emailadresse ist zu keinem Zeitpunkt für andere sichtbar), alles ist kostenlos und absolut Spamfrei!

Möchtest Du mehr erfahren oder Hilfe benötigen schaue einfach im deutschsprachigem Forum vorbei oder besuche die deutsche Support-Site www.bookcrossers.de

Ich hoffe Du kannst Dich auch für BookCrossing begeistern - Viele Grüße Physalis74