Alone in Berlin

A Prenzlauer Berg apartment building, 1940. Otto and Anna Quangel — a quiet foreman and his wife — receive the letter telling them their son is dead in France. They begin leaving handwritten postcards denouncing Hitler in stairwells and office lobbies across Berlin, 285 in all, while a Gestapo inspector named Escherich pushes pins into a city map trying to find them. Fallada wrote the novel in four weeks, working from the actual case file. The Berlin he maps is one of informers, ration queues, and tiny acts of defiance that the regime could not afford to ignore.