Everyone dies for themselves

Venue: DT Stage - They fought alone against war and fascism, armed only with postcards and ink. Hans Fallada's novel tells of a working couple in the resistance. All around them: a world that ignores tyranny, tolerates it, or supports it for its own benefit. Informer, crisis beneficiaries, figures destroyed by everyday violence — in a city, in a country that is fear-ridden between toleration and disaster. With Everyone Dies for Himself, director Jette Steckel dedicates herself to one of the great Berlin tableaux of the 20th century.

Hans Fallada is one of the most impressive storytellers of the 20th century. He writes about the unemployed and prisoners, about prostitutes, gamblers and alcoholics. He knows all these characters well, because life always pulls him back into his own abysses. Fallada is a morphinist, a wild drinker and also writes his novels as if in destructive intoxication. At the end of the war, the author was 53 years old and seriously ill — also heavily indebted and almost homeless. There he receives a pile of Gestapo files from the Communist Cultural Union and an offer to write a novel about the case recorded there.

In four weeks, almost 900 pages of manuscripts are created; it is the story of a married couple who spend two years handing out cards with anti-fascist slogans until they are arrested and executed in Plötzensee. Shortly after completing the novel, Fallada dies as a result of his addiction. Everyone Dies Alone is his last novel.