Book review: Hans Fallada’s Nightmare in Berlin follows a German couple coming to grips with life after the Third Reich

Hans Fallada’s penultimate work, translated nearly 70 years after it was written, provides a faithful account of 'what ordinary Germans felt, suffered, and did between April 1945 and the summer of that year'.

Hans Fallada’s Nightmare in Berlin is published by Scribe.

Hans Fallada wrote his last two books in the aftermath of the Second World War, but died in 1947, just months before they were published. His final work, Alone in Berlin, both revived and cemented his international reputation when it appeared in English in 2009. Despite translations in recent years of his other novels, short stories and even his prison diary, Fallada's penultimate work, Nightmare in Berlin, has never been available in English. Until now, almost 70 years after its original German release.

The novel – admirably translated by Allan Blunden – tells of a man’s struggle to emerge from the wreckage of the Third Reich. Fallada charts his protagonist’s travails, from his gaze into the abyss to his descent into its depths, and in doing so – and as outlined in the author’s foreword – also provides a faithful account of “what ordinary Germans felt, suffered, and did between April 1945 and the summer of that year”.

For the first third of the novel, Dr Doll is living in a small town in north-east Germany with his wife Alma. It is the time of “the great collapse”, with the country on its knees, the town’s residents awaiting the arrival of the Red Army, and Doll plagued by bad dreams and ground down from “years of persecution, arrest, surveillance, threats, countless prohibitions”.

Tanks roll in and the Russians appoint him mayor of the town, a role that involves rebuilding the community, but also reorganising it by rooting out Nazi activists and informers. Doll carries out his duties, eager to suppress his self-loathing and demonstrate to the liberators that there do exist some “decent” Germans.

But after a while, the Dolls decide they need a new start and so head to Berlin – only to find the city “burnt out and bled to death” and their old apartment reallocated to new tenants. Homeless and hungry, they are forced to pawn their valuables and depend on the kindness of strangers, but Alma soon falls ill and is admitted to hospital and her husband ends up in a sanatorium, addicted to morphine. So begins a waking nightmare full of dark demons, black-­market drugs and gloomy prospects.

To a certain degree, Fallada’s novel reads like an exemplar of Trümmerliteratur, or “rubble literature”, the strand of post-war fiction that dealt with broken people making sense of their ruined homeland. However, after a fashion Fallada changes direction, sharpens his focus and digs deep into ­the human psyche to explore guilt – both collective and individual – and the battle to stay sane while surrounded by chaos.

All of which sounds forbiddingly bleak. And yet Fallada's character studies and local colour – whether of gritty cityscape or lurid dreamscape – prove consistently captivating. After poking fun at rich, fat, sanctimonious burghers in his provincial town, he startles with his arresting depiction of bombed-out Berlin, a "city of the dead", and its walking-wounded inhabitants. His clear-eyed and cool-headed account of Doll's drug dependency is as sobering as his earlier tale about his own addiction, Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism.

Throughout, any humour is of the pitch-black variety, but towards the end, Fallada hints at genuine joy through fragile hope and possible redemption. Not only does Doll feel healthier, he believes that “this beloved, wretched Germany, this diseased heart of Europe, would get well again”.

Nightmare in Berlin is unfairly served by a cash-in title (the original is simply The Nightmare). But while the novel lacks the tension and high-stakes drama of Alone in Berlin, it makes up for it by offering a mesmerising portrait of shattered lives.

Malcolm Forbes is a freelance critic based in Edinburgh.