Perhaps, like me, readers had not noticed an important piece in the history of Nazi Germany, which was the resistance. It never crossed my mind that there were many Germans who were completely against the war unleashed by Hitler, and even less that, when 
discovered, the punishments were very severe, usually the death penalty. As we advance in the story of Otto and Anna, Hans presents us with a cruel Germany, where no one trusts anyone. Fear reigns, and your own relative can condemn you to the maximum penalty, and what is worse, whether you are guilty or not.
The network of characters that Fallada presents us intertwines in a way that the story finds only one path to be followed, even if some of them have never crossed paths during the plot. What dictates the fate of each character is the betrayal. The Nazi regime imposed on the German citizen the dangerous task of policing the next, which brought disastrous consequences to the German people during those days. The fear was not restricted, as the reader can observe, to the “impure” living in Germany, but to any citizen who had to obey the curfew and all the rules imposed during those dreadful times, and yet, everyone was at risk of the guillotine.
Hans was brilliant in exposing what life was like for the German people during Nazism and brought a spine-chilling horror every time someone was interrogated by the Gestapo, for them, everyone was guilty, even if it was not for the reason of their arrest. The treatment in these interrogations was violent and inhumane to the extreme, which in certain passages, moved me greatly, as it is absolutely terrible to read those words and know that it really happened and that it is not mere 
imagination of its author in some work of fiction.
The feeling of helplessness is even greater when we see all the words of an interrogated person being distorted and turned into confessions of guilt for crimes that were never even committed. The reader feels exhausted, humiliated, and horrified along with the character who suffers all kinds of accusation and violence. Death is constant, and with each page, we hope it reaches our characters, given the immense deconstruction applied to each interrogated.
The horrors of the Nazi regime were very well portrayed in Alone in Berlin, where the author spared no words, making it as realistic as possible, where we can see that the Gestapo and the SS did everything to impose Hitler’s sovereignty, even if it meant killing entire cities in concentration camps or in the basements of the Gestapo.
But amidst this horror, we find characters who relied on tolerance, love, and solidarity to help anyone in need during that time of war. Even though these characters are a minority in the plot, it is precisely because of them that the feeling of believing that humanity still has salvation moves us day by day. And Fallada demonstrated this very well in Alone in Berlin.
Even though, in the words of the author himself, Alone in Berlin is a book in which there are many deaths, we can believe that the entire plot is also one of hope and struggle, as Otto, Anna, and a few other characters, even if in small doses, had their share in the internal resistance against the war and against Hitler’s regime, demonstrating that Nazism was never a unanimity in Germany, as many still believe.
I have no words to describe the immense pleasure of reading such a 
remarkable book as this one, and I truly believe that everyone who enjoys an extremely well-written book with a story that deeply marks us should invest in its reading. Moreover, I can only say that Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada, published by Estação Liberdade, is absolutely unmissable.
• About the author: Rudolf Ditzen was born in Greifswald, in northeastern Germany, in 1893, the son of a respected jurist. In 1920, he adopted the pseudonym Hans Fallada, inspired by tales from the Brothers Grimm. He achieved great success in Germany and worldwide in the 1930s with the novel And now, your boy? (Livraria do Globo, 1934), which narrated the miserable condition in the country before Hitler’s rise. He passed away in 1947, a few weeks before the publication of Alone in Berlin.
Jeffa Koontz
Literary Critic
www.sagaliteraria.com.br