Throwing sand
Many years ago, back in the good old days before our country was slipping into autocracy, my book club made an unusual choice for our summer reading selection, Every Man Dies Alone, by the “prolific but psychologically disturbed” German author Rudolf Ditzen. Originally published in 1947 but not translated into English until 2009, the novel was based on the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel, who were murdered by the Nazis for writing and circulating postcards opposing Hitler and his regime.
Certainly not your typical “beach read.”
Although I recall voting against choosing Every Man Dies Alone at the time—too long (592 pages!), too heavy (Nazis!)—the book stuck in my mind. Before reading it, I’d had little sympathy for the “good Germans” who claimed they didn’t support Hitler’s government but didn’t take any meaningful steps to oppose him. Given the horrors he inflicted on the world, who really could sympathize? But through the power of storytelling, the novel offers a more nuanced portrayal of life in Germany during the war and the terror of living in a surveillance state. As it turns out, it also offers an important lesson for our current situation.
Written in just 24 days under the pen name Hans Fallada (a name inspired by a frightening story in Grimm’s Fairy Tales), Every Man Dies Alone begins on the day that a working-class couple, Otto and Anna Quangel, are notified their only son—the son who “cried when he had to go off to be a soldier,” who was always against the war—had been killed in service to the Reich. Until then, Otto claims to have just been a “simple laborer” who didn’t “want to know anything about politics.” Even so, his heartbroken wife blames Otto for doing “what they all did” and for causing their son’s death: “[T]hat’s what you’ve done with your miserable war. You and your Fuhrer!”
Deeply offended, Otto reminds Anna that he’d only voted for Hitler “the one time,” that both of them had. And later, after recalling how he’d been unemployed for four years until Hitler had “pulled the cart out of the mud” and Otto had gotten a job as a foreman at a large factory eventually converted to the production of military goods, he tries to comfort himself with the thought that he’d been misled, that until now, “[o]f course, he had believed in the Fuhrer’s honest intentions.”
As the Trump Administration undertakes a blitzkrieg seeking to destroy much of the federal government as well as the rule of law, we’re hearing a lot about voters who’d believed in Trump’s “honest intentions,” who never expected him to cut off the funding they relied on or to blow up the entire world economy. But that’s what Trump is doing. And since he currently controls most levers of power in this country and seeks to unconstitutionally take over even more, the question becomes what, if anything, one person can do about it. Especially since, under Trump, the United States is quickly moving toward becoming a “secret-police state,” with masked police in unmarked vans already sweeping people away without even the pretense of due process.
In the book, Otto is galvanized into action by a discussion with his late son’s fiancé, who reveals she’s a member of a secret resistance group trying to oppose the Nazis by telling people how they are being lied to and betrayed. Alone in Berlin, the 2016 movie version of the story starring Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson, omits the fiancé character, and has Otto explain his purpose in laboriously writing the dozens of anonymous anti-Nazi postcards he and Anna have begun to leave in various locations around Berlin. As a factory worker, Otto recognizes throwing a “little sand” will not stop any machine. But eventually, he says, if people throw in more sand and more, “the motor begins to stutter, and the assembly line stops.”
This past weekend, I was one of hundreds of thousands of people nationwide who participated in “Hands Off!” rallies protesting recent actions by the Trump administration. It’s not entirely clear whether those kinds of demonstrations will have the desired impact. Certainly, some past protests seem to have triggered the defiant, adolescent aspect of Trump’s personality, so in the short term, they might have made things worse. Even so, I can’t help but think it’s better to peacefully protest, to do something to express your outrage at a regime that is doing so much damage to so many people. Because while the protests might not directly influence Trump or his most avid followers, they might convince members of Congress or corporate leaders or other citizens to also push back against the Administration in whatever way they can. To throw their own sand.
So the motor will begin to stutter.
And the monstrous MAGA machine will finally be stopped.