A striking story of wartime Berlin, but also a story about how a totalitarian system transforms regular citizens to traitors. How ordinary people resist the war they have been dragged into.

Just stories in an almost non-literary style with a lot of attention to the most horrific details; so be warned.

Although written nearly 30 years after Alfred Doblins 'Berlin Alexanderplatz' (1918) there are a lot similarities. Not only the Berlin locations. In Doblins more symbolic, modernistic tale he describes the struggle of his main character Franz Biberkopf - and so the hope of the reader - to become and stay a 'decent' (anstandig) human being. Also the Quangel couple, main characters of Fallada, keep their decency, even when they have to pay with their lives for it.

From Michael Hanekes film Der weisse Band, Doblins book to this novel of Hans Fallada you experience the suffocating nazification of Germany in the 20th century.

Bit files, Fallada built a monument to the original, brave German couple, killed by theur feloow countrymen.

Recently "rediscovered" through the English translation and welcomed as a 20th century masterpiece, the original German version is to be preferred to read. Easily available in second hand pocket editions. Like in Alexanderplatz the phonetic Berlin dialect seems to be the only soft aspect in it.