Every Man Dies Alone (Fallada)

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Every Man Dies Alone:

1. Discuss the observation mentioned in the book: that "half the [German] population is set on locking up the other half." What does the comment mean? How would that fact have instilled terror among the German population?

2. What is the significance of the book's title, Every Man Dies Alone? Do you agree with the title's statement?

3. Talk about what it must have been like, as an ordinary German citizen, to live with constant fear of imprisonment, torture, and death at the hands of the Nazi's?

4. Why do those who find the postcards, even if they secretly oppose the Nazi's, turn them in? Had you found a one, what would you have done?

5. When Otto Quangel conceives of the postcard idea, he admits that as small a protest as it is, "it'll cost us our lives." Anna says, "but the main thing was, you fought back." Is their decision one of bravery, true resistance, or simply despair and nihilism as a result of the death of their son?

6. Would you have been willing or able to undertake such a dangerous—and ultimately futile—project as the Quangels? Knowing that resistance against evil is futile, is one still morally bound to resist as Anna indicates? Asking a broader question: What makes ordinary people do extraordinary things?

7. The Quangels know that not only are their own lives in jeopardy, so are the lives of friends and family. Are their actions justified knowing the danger their actions bring to others?

8. Otto begins the novel as a man who withholds friendship and connection to others, except Anna. How does he change...and what brings that change about?

9. What do you think about Escherick, the Gestapo man who works to uncover the Postcard Phantom? How does he change throughout the course of the novel? What does he come to realize about the Nazi's and his role in the hierarchy of power?

10. Does Fallada do a good job of making Nazi Germany come to life? When reading did you have the sense that you were living in the midst of Berlin in the early 1940s under Hitler?

11. Talk, one-by-one, about the supporting characters in the novel: Baldur Persickes, the Hitler Youth; the elderly Jewish women terrified of being taken; Judge Fromm, the compassionate, reluctant jurist; Eva Kluge, the postal worker—to name several. Which character do you find most sympathetic...which least?

12. There has been some criticism that characters are a somewhat black and white: Otto and Anna, noble; all Nazi's absurd. Do you agree...or does Fallada do a good job of fleshing out his characters?

13. Did you come away from this book having learned something about the Nazis that you hadn't known before? What, in particular, shocked you...or horrified you most?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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