On April 8th, 1943 Otto and Elise Hampel, a working class couple from Berlin, are guillotined for leaving hundreds of postcards containing anti-Nazi messages in public places throughout the city. They, and their small everyday acts of futile resistance, are in many ways the opposite of Hans Fallada who continues to do just enough to appease the Nazi’s in order to survive under their regime. If anything he sees the Hampel’s deaths as proof that his capitulations to Nazi demands were the right course. But after the Third Reich falls and Fallada is forced to try to survive in bombed-out Berlin without money or food and with a new wife (who is also hopelessly addicted to morphine) it's the Hampels’ story that he turns to to write the first novel about domestic resistance to the Nazi’s. He writes the 550 page novel in 24 days. It’s an absolute masterpiece, and it kills him…