24 Quotes by Hans Fallada

Coffins and coffins, enough for everyone on the shift, enough for everyone in Germany! The men are still alive, but they are already making their own coffins.

And while I walked out again into the countryside, which was slowly growing darker and darker, it became painfully clear to me that I was played out. I had nothing left to live for, I had lost my footing in society, and I felt I had not the strength to look for a new one, nor to fight to regain the old.

Like many city dwellers, they’d had the mistaken belief that spying was only really bad in Berlin and that decency still prevailed in small towns. And like many city dwellers, they had made the painful discovery that recrimination, eavesdropping, and informing were ten times worse in the small towns than in the big city. In a small town everyone was fully exposed; you couldn’t even disappear in the crowd.

Das ist es ja, was ich immer sage: wir sind feige. Wir denken nur an das, was mit uns geschehen wird, nie an das, was den andern geschieht.

The air was thick with betrayal. No one could trust anyone else, and in that dismal atmosphere the men seemed to grow even duller, devolving into mechanical extensions of the machines they serviced.

The trembling increased, a moan of grief was heard, nothing articulate – as a bird in the night sometimes laments alone.