Nightmare in Berlin by Hans Fallada
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Recovering Believers

The chaos of military defeat is a more difficult social condition than war or the most repressive political regime. Fallada’s eponymous nightmare starts in April 1945, “the time of the great collapse.” Community all but disappears, and with it the mores of civilised behaviour. Any residual bureaucracy is at best mean-spirited and at worst actively dangerous. The ethic of Do Unto Others takes on a new meaning: “it’s better to be doing than to get done!” One cheats and steals, or one dies. Loyalty, civility, and self-sacrifice are defects not virtues.

Hope and fantasies about the good times to come have a somewhat inadequate half-life in the enveloping social vacuum. Deprivation is not merely physical; the adaptation of one’s mind to a new reality is necessary: “in letting go of the lies that had been drip-fed to them all their lives as the most profound truth and wisdom, they would be stripped of their inner resources of love and hate, memory, self-esteem, and dignity.” The true cost of belief is only evident after the belief is realized fully for what it is: profound self-deception. Physical disaster might well energise a positive response. Metaphysical disaster inhibits even the will to live.

Alcohol in any form, the usual therapy in times of such stress, is scarce and subject to black market pricing. But morphine and scopladeine can be had through one’s doctor - or one’s string of doctors in one plays the system correctly, a possibility created by the chaos itself. Enough opiates have been stockpiled in the war-time health system to last for years. Scores of doctors have become their own pushers.

Drugs are more important than food; they both dull the appetite and ease the mind. One is able to lie “in a semi-waking dream, experiencing the euphoria, the rush; at last they have managed to escape the bitter reality.” There is nothing incremental or accidental about the resulting addiction: “it was better to be knocked out all at once, to not be there any more.” How unfortunate that the drugs also incapacitate the skills for staying alive.

In his Foreword, Fallada calls Nightmare in Berlin a medical report not a work of fiction. Indeed it isn’t great literature. But as a memoir of suffering and persistence it is well worth reading. The fact that he was able to write at all in the midst of the chaos and despair at a time when even in his own mind “‘German’ had become a term of abuse throughout the world,” is remarkable.

View all my reviews