As Hans Fallada's English biographer I would like to point out that it is simply not true that he "accepted a commission from Goebbels to write a novel glorifying" the rise of the Nazi party (Alone in Berlin is morally compromised, Letters, 11 January). Fallada's decision to stay in Germany did, of course, entail compromises, including altering the end of Iron Gustav in 1938 at Goebbels's behest. He paid for that decision with bouts of depression, a series of nervous breakdowns, a spell in a psychiatric prison and an early death in February 1947.

Fallada was neither a Nazi nor a c ommunist but a chronicler of the lives of ordinary men and women in a turbulent period of German history.

The point made in Alone in Berlin is the importance of every act of resistance to tyranny, whether by groups or individuals. Fallada was all too aware of his own inability to go beyond individual acts of resistance. In his last letter to his mother he wrote: "I know I'm weak, but not bad, never bad. But that's no excuse. It's poor enough at fifty-three to have become nothing more than a weak man, to have learned so little from my mistakes." This awareness is Fallada's saving grace and what prevents him or Alone in Berlin from being "morally compromised".

Professor Jenny Williams

Dublin City University

• Thankfully most of us do not need a university professor to decide whether an author's work is third-rate; we make up our minds after reading the book. For me the strength of Fallada's book is its portrayal of the moral decay which takes hold within an authoritarian state; and the strength of character a minority of individuals possess when they decide to resist. Fallada's novel does not centre on organised resistance but small individual acts of opposition to nazism, which nevertheless – if exposed – could result in the perpetrators' death. That his heroes were ordinary working-class people, for me, made the book all the better.

David Cesarani's suggestion that Alone in Berlin offered Germans an alibi for their complicity in nazism is not only wrong but cruel; tens of thousands of Germans like Otto and Elise Hampel, whose story the book is loosely based on, carried out countless small acts of resistance, often paying with their lives or with long terms of imprisonment. Theirs is a story which often went untold outside Germany. Reading David's letter, I do wonder if the reason for this is because these were mainly working-class people, whereas the Nazis' core support base were the lower middle class and the middle-class professions.

Mick Hall

Grays, Essex

• David Cesarani is right: Hans Fallada was morally compromised. He didn't leave Germany as many other great German writers did. He tried to live within the Nazi system. But I wonder whether even Klaus Mann could have written Alone in Berlin: simply because he wasn't there. Fallada writes from the inside; he knows that filthy, dangerous world of Nazi Germany very well. And yes, he wasn't a hero like the Scholl siblings or the members of the Baum group. But should we only value books written by authors of undoubted moral purity?

Surely the book must speak for itself and be judged on how well it conveys the reality of people's lives at a time when things went very well, as Cesarani rightly says, for those who weren't Jews, or mentally ill, or socialists, or just didn't step out of line. But what Fallada portrays is a couple of little people standing up, ineffectually, against a system that crushes them mercilessly, as it crushed the Baum group, as it crushed Hans and Sophie Scholl. He portrays the reality of Nazi terror, and, as Helen Dunmore rightly says (Rereading, Saturday review, 8 January), shows the terrible isolation of those who acted "when everything in the Quangels' society tells them that … they must not".

Leslie Wilson

Reading, Berkshire

• David Cesarani's response to Helen Dunmore was a useful contribution to the debate. But I feel he lost objectivity in describing Alone in Berlin as "third-rate novel by a second-rate writer". I am rather enjoying it. Whether this will diminish when I reach "the tinny-sounding encomium to a socialist future that ends the novel" remains to be seen.

John Hunter

Cambridge