During the Second World War, a Berlin couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, waged a two-person war against the Nazi regime. Prompted by the death of their son at the Front, they embarked on a campaign of writing seditious postcards and leaving them all over the city for people to find. The cards urged their fellow countrymen to rise up against Hitler and join the German resistance. Being just little postcards, they weren’t much of a statement, maybe, but they were enough to make the authorities to sit up and take notice.
In 1947 writer Hans Fallada published Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Every Man Dies Alone), a novel about the Hampels and their eventual fate. It became a best-seller in Germany and in much of Europe. No less than Primo Levi called it “the greatest book ever written about the German resistance to the Nazis.” Oddly, considering that endorsement, it didn’t get an English translation until 2009, when it became a best-seller all over again, this time in the anglosphere.
The novel has been adapted several times, for West and East German TV, in 1962 and 1970 respectively, then as a movie starring Hildegard Knef and Carl Raddatz in 1976. In 2016 it finally made it onto the screen in English, as Alone in Berlin. Directed by Vincent Pérez (more often in front of the camera than behind it), this particular adaptation was written by Pérez and Achim and Bettine von Borries.
That name, von Borries, is usually a sign of quality – they collaborated on Babylon Berlin, for example – and there is plenty to be had here. Brendan Gleeson and Emma Thompson as the Quangels (as the Hampels were also called in the 1976 movie), for starters, and Daniel Brühl as Inspector Escherich, the man assigned to nip this display of regime disloyalty in the bud.
The film’s key strength is in its portrayal of a time of rampant ethno-nationalism and what that leads to. In one powerful scene a poor old Jewish woman, Frau Rosenthal (Monique Chaumette), who has been hiding in the block where she has always lived, is predated upon by her own friends and neighbours. Nasty. Though for the most part we’re with the Quangels, who represent the Good German – that late arrival at the Second World War movie set in Germany.
The film goes badly wrong in most other respects. It’s never really clear whether Otto Quangel is really against the Nazis or just a stickler for the truth – the regime’s lies about the progress of the war seems to be his motivation for embarking on the campaign. And watching the Quangels writing their cards and scurrying about town delivering them isn’t half as exciting as watching the wily cop trying to find out who and where they are.
We wind up, truth be told, on the side of the wrong person. The cop rather than the good guys, and it doesn’t help either that Brühl gets some light and shade into his performance as Inspector Escherich.
His is the best performance in the film. Both Gleeson and Thompson seem undone by the the film’s middlebrow ambitions and its lack of budget, and there is also the sense that Pérez has thrown in the directing towel before the film has creaked to a finish, as if getting something in the can is about as far as his ambitions stretch.
Those cod German accents used by Gleeson and Thompson seem to say it all, and some of the dialogue – “Ze hell I vill” – feels wrong, doubly wrong, anachronism piling on top of the ungainly. It just feels phoney at every step.
I watched this with an aunt, who thoroughly enjoyed it. She seemed taken aback when I told her what I thought of it afterwards – well, she did ask. She’d read the book and I hadn’t, which might explain things a bit. So, to try and see it through her eyes for a second – in short: Brühl, very good, wringing something from nothing. The vileness of such an ideology – in the figure of the helpless Frau Rosenthal – neatly portrayed. As for the rest of it, solid enough, no fireworks. Who doesn’t like a bit of Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson? On this occasion, it turned out it was me.
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
