The hero and heroine are convincingly unheroic. Otto Quangel is a conscientious factory foreman, hard-working, monosyllabic, miserly, with "thin lips" and "cold eyes." His courage is indistinguishable from stubbornness. He loves his wife, Anna, to whom he has been married for 30 years, but is constitutionally incapable of expressing tenderness. Anna has always been the one to "bring a bit of life to the place."

The novel begins on the day that France capitulates, with the delivery of a formulaic letter to the Quangels, informing them that their son has "died a hero's death." Lashing out in pain, Anna turns on her husband and accuses him of complicity in his son's death, by seeking only "peace and quiet." Silent Otto retreats into himself; but his inflexible nature crystallises around a secret and useless plan. He sets himself the task of writing two postcards a week denouncing Hitler and the Reich, which he drops in busy offices around Berlin.

Fallada's account was based on the transcripts of the trial of the true-life couple who inspired this novel; and none of his original readers would have expected the Quangels to go uncaught - though perhaps, like this modern reader, they desperately hoped against hope for the consolations of fiction. But Fallada's world is brutally coherent. The Quangels share their house with a terrified elderly Jewish woman, whose husband has been taken away, and with the greedy, cowardly, bullying Persickes-a drunken father and his apparatchik sons. The Persickes are not the only human hyenas circling the stricken Frau Rosenthal. A savagely satirical strand of the novel concerns the competition between various repulsive characters to despoil her flat: the characterisation is grotesque, almost two-dimensional. There may be little subtlety in the psychology; yet the world these grotesques inhabit, in which absolute power has corrupted absolutely, trickling from bloated Gestapo officials right down to drunken little sneaks, is hammered out with such passion that it is painfully convincing.