Alone in Berlin

I have just read a wonderful book. It has quite literally been lost in translation. Published in 1947 in German, it has only recently been translated and published into English.

Set during the Second World War it charts the actions of an elderly couple taking a stand against Hitler. They drop treasonous postcards around the city, slating the Fuhrer and his actions. They hope that their words will spur other people to take action against the Nazis. In reality Hitler has cultivated such a sophisticated culture of fear in Berlin, and the rest of Germany that the postcards are picked up and immediately handed in or destroyed.

The message of the book seems intially to be a dark one. The Nazis were brought down by foreign powers, not by a German resistance force, and this fact seems to make all resistance efforts even more futile. The Nazi regime was so thorough in its divisive nature that no opposition group came near to getting a firm hold (for more accounts of resistance one only has to watch the Hollywood Tom Cruise blockbuster Valkyrie).

Yet throughout the book there is a theme of good. There is a sense, and it is voiced a number of times towards the end that it is better to die with a good, honest mind and a sense of morality, than to live as a monster, or as someone that did not act against the monstrous.

Very little of our literature in England is translated. But in the last year two translations have come my way, and both had totally blown me away (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo being the other). It seems to me that foreign literature is incredibly rich, and that maybe with our British tradition of expecting everything in English we are possibly losing out.