How Terror Works

"In 24 days during the fall of 1946, a German novelist known as Hans Fallada produced a rare, and now especially timely, literary touchstone: a humane depiction of muted resistance. Every Man Dies Alone was based on a Gestapo file detailing the case of a Berlin couple who had run an illicit two-year postcard-writing campaign aimed at rebutting Hitler's propaganda. The novel was published in 1947-part of a postwar effort to start de-Nazifying German literature."

"Mere weeks before his book came out, Rudolf Ditzen (Fallada was a pen name) died at 53, weakened after a long struggle with alcoholism and morphine addiction. He'd faced criminal trouble too (he had shot and killed a friend in a botched suicide pact in adolescence, been twice convicted of embezzlement, and in 1944 been detained in a psychiatric hospital after pulling a gun on his wife)."

In 24 days during the fall of 1946 a humane depiction of muted resistance was produced, drawing on a Gestapo file about a Berlin couple. The couple ran an illicit two-year postcard campaign aimed at rebutting Hitler's propaganda. The work appeared in 1947 as part of a postwar effort to begin de-Nazifying German literature. Mere weeks before appearance the creator died at 53 after long struggles with alcoholism and morphine addiction and a history of criminal trouble and institutional detention. The creator had been labeled "undesirable" by the Nazi regime and later confessed to altering a piece under threat from Joseph Goebbels. The depiction names Otto and Anna Quangel and reproduces their vivid postcard blaming the Führer for their son's death; the couple delivered fresh cards weekly despite knowing many fellow citizens might be repelled.

Read at The Atlantic