[2] Fallada, who had many personal problems, including morphine addiction, had been both institutionalized and incarcerated during the Nazi era after shooting a gun in the direction of his ex-wife during a dispute.

[2][6] As a result, he lived through all years of fear, distrust and danger in the daily life of wartime Berlin[2][5] and the psychological aspect of the Hampels' story intrigued him.

The book conveys the omnipresent fear and suspicion engulfing Germany at the time caused by the constant threat of arrest, imprisonment,[2][3] torture and death.

Escherich, a Gestapo inspector, must find the source of hundreds of postcards encouraging Germans to resist Adolf Hitler and the Nazis with personal messages such as “Mother!

The Führer will murder your sons too, he will not stop till he has brought sorrow to every home in the world.”[6] Escherich is under pressure from Obergruppenführer Prall to arrest the source or find himself in dire straits.

[2] Eventually, Escherich finds the postcard writer and his wife, who turn out to be a quiet, working class couple, Otto and Anna Quangel.

Then followed publishing in Dutch (Kroonder, Ieder sterft in eenzaamheid) and Finnish (Mantere, Kukin kuolee itsekseen) in 1949, Polish (Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej, Każdy umiera w samotności) in 1950,[13] and Romanian (Editura pentru literatură și artă, Fiecare moare singur) in 1951.

In 1975 an Albanian translation saw the light with the title changed into "We needed to fight differently" (Duhej te luftonim ndryshe, Shtepia Botuese Naim Frasheri).

The earliest adaption was the West German television film Jeder stirbt für sich allein (1962) directed by Falk Harnack which aired on station SFB.

[15] In 1970, an East German television miniseries Jeder stirbt für sich allein was directed by Hans-Joachim Kasprzik and produced by DEFA.

The West German film Jeder stirbt für sich allein was directed by Alfred Vohrer in 1975, released internationally in English as Everyone Dies Alone in 1976;[16] and in 2004, it was produced as a three-part television miniseries in the Czech Republic.