Alone in Berlin

A thousand more down.

I finished Alone in Berlin last night. It's a slow burn. If you can get past the first fifty pages, where everything is a drab slog through monotonous days and the protagonist has the personality of wallpaper paste, it becomes a wrenching descent into life on the homefront in Nazi Germany. No, Otto Quangel isn't exciting; he's just the stodgy old foreman in a furniture factory, but that's what makes the story so compelling, and so dreadful. You know he's going to be devoured by the pitiless, bureaucratic regime. You know his campaign to rouse the German people to anger and action against the Nazis is going to fail. Life isn't a grand epic where everything comes right in the end and the heroes are rescued at the last instant. You know the evildoers are going to win, at least this round. He's too anonymous and too quiet. Too ordinary. But you root for him anyway, because everyone wants to believe that even the smallest person really can make a difference. No one wants to believe that their cries of defiance will go unheard and make no difference in the end, and when his do, it's a punch in the face.

I ended up loving that quiet little man with the beaky face. He didn't win, and he didn't leave the world with some grand, sweeping gesture. He lost, but he defeated them with dignity, and that counts as heroism, I think, even if it goes uncelebrated.