history and fiction

I'm reading Alone in Berlin. It's a struggle partly because of the unaccustomedly slow pace, and partly because of the hauntingly paranoid atmosphere - nobody can trust anyone. There are many parallels with the French Revolution, and other revolutions unfolding before our very eyes. It's also made me reflect once again on the value or otherwise of fiction as opposed to an historical account. I think it's all to do with what a fiction writer sees. In probing for motive and connections, in the freedom to translate an historical incident into the multi-layered context of a novel in which all the characters are playing out (blindly in some cases) their own destinies, their own private preoccupations, which in the end turn out to be connected, a new, clearer, more emotionally charged light is shone on events. Fallada gives us a portrait of a city, and its people in the grip of Nazi repression that had an emotional energy all the more terrible for being charged with a novelist's creative perspective.

I also reflect on communication and revolutionary pace. In the French Revolution they had paper and word of mouth, in wartime Berlin the telephone. Now...