The Germans Who Stood Up to Hitler

And the Germans who didn’t

Excerpt: "... Fallada delivers valuable insight into the varieties of mental resistance to autocracy. The quietest kinds of opposition—what we read, what we think, what we believe—can keep autocrats paranoid, distrustful, ill at ease.

Rising above cowardice can inoculate us against complicity, as some German citizens showed. And speaking out, even surreptitiously and unsuccessfully, stands in stark contrast to remaining silent. As a young woman explains to Otto before he begins his postcard counterattack, “The main thing is that we remain different from them, that we never allow ourselves to be made into them, or start thinking as they do.

Even if they conquer the whole world, we must refuse to become Nazis.”'