The strangeness of Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone

The end of the 2nd section (The Gestapo) of "Every Man Dies Alone" is enigmatic (or maybe it was me) and a little difficult to follow but essentially the snitch Borkhausen tracks down the suspect Enno Kluge (Gestapo inspectors are after him, suspecting he's the guy distributing post cards that malign the Fuhrer) and instead of turning him in to the Gestapo he wrests a bribe from Enno's girlfriend Hetty, then double-crosses them and calls in the Gestapo. When inspector Escherich catches up with Enno he somehow - this is the part I couldn't quite follow - taunts Enno into killing himself. So now the false suspect - everyone knew Enno was incapable of distributing these cards but they need to arrest someone - is gone and the attention will revert to the actual perpetrator, Otto Quangel, in Part 3. Part 2, exciting as it is in many ways, doesn't seem so much like the vaunted novel of German resistance - it's more of police procedural that could happen anywhere - except that beneath all the cat-and-mouse there runs a subcurrent of terror. The only reason the police are after Enno is the pressure to make an arres to look good to the superiors - Himmler et al. - who ultimately are complete thugs and terrorists. So beneath the veneer of a smoothly functioning society, even a smoothly functioning underworld of hookers and pimps and touts, lies the Nazi tyrranny. The strangeness of Fallada's novel is that it depicts a society that in some ways is quite normal and in other ways is a complete insanity - everyone's terrified, the state can and does observe and control every aspect of life and thought - and almost no one actively resists. In some ways, it shows the Germans as horrible cowards, but in other ways you understand that most people are just trying to survive and live their lives - it shows them as frighteningly ordinary, too much like us.