Depicting a society gone mad - Every Man Dies Alone

"Every Man Dies Alone" does increasingly remind me of a Pynchon novel, and not just the trope of the Gestapo mapping the city (Berlin) by places where the anti-Fuhrer post cards have turned up, similarly to the bomb strike maps of London in Gravity's Rainbow. No, it's the tone and theme, particularly in part 2 (The Gestapo), in which the inspectors have to make an arrest in the post-card case and go after someone, Enno Kluge, whom everyone knows is not the perpetrator but he's guilty of something and a convenient victim. Kluge is such a feckless sort, a useless everyman, gambler and womanizer and coward - yet somehow, as all remark, he is take in by any number of women. He steals from them, lies to them, cheats on the them, but because of his weaknesses they take pity on them. In the greatest twist, the very fact that he's pursued by the Gestapo becomes the center of his allure: How can I turn him out and into their hands, his current squeeze, Hetty, asks herself. In a way, the novel in part two moves off the theme of the German resistance and the Nazi horrors, it's more of a Kafkaesque or perhaps Orwellian story of man against the state. But whereas Kafka and Orwell are more surreal, dreamlike, dystopian, Fallada's novel is built on the foundation of a real horror - we also know he's depicting a society gone mad, in which people lived in fear - not just the Jews but everyone, spies everywhere, the SS and Gestapo brutal and cruel, and in the service of nothing.