A Stranger in My Own Country Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  The 1944 Prison Diary Notes

  The 1944 Prison Diary

  The genesis of the Prison Diary manuscript

  Chronology

  Index

  End User License Agreement

  A Stranger in

  My Own Country

  The 1944 Prison Diary

  HANS FALLADA

  Edited by Jenny Williams and Sabine Lange

  Translated by Allan Blunden

  polity

  First published in German as In meinem fremden Land. Gefängnistagebuch 1944

  © Aufbau Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin 2009

  This English edition © Polity Press, 2015

  The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut London which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs

  Polity Press

  65 Bridge Street

  Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

  Polity Press

  350 Main Street

  Malden, MA 02148, USA

  All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8156-6

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fallada, Hans, 1893-1947.

  A stranger in my own country : The 1944 Prison Diary, 1944 / Hans Fallada. pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-7456-6988-5 (jacketed hardback : alk. paper) 1. Fallada, Hans, 1893–1947--Diaries. 2. Authors, German--20th century--Diaries. 3. Authors, German--20th century--Biography. 4. Prisons--Germany--Neustrelitz--History--20th century. I.nTitle.

  PT2607.I6Z46 2014

  833’.912--dc23

  [B]

  The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

  Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

  For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

  Introduction

  On 4 September 1944 Hans Fallada was committed to the Neustrelitz-Strelitz state facility, a prison for ‘mentally ill criminals’ in Mecklenburg, some seventy miles north of Berlin, where he was to be kept under observation for an indefinite period of time. His fate was entirely uncertain.

  This was not the first time that this son of an Imperial Supreme Court judge found himself behind bars. In 1923 and 1926 he had already been jailed for six months and two and a half years respectively on charges of embezzlement. In both cases his drug addiction had been a key factor. In 1933 he had been accused of involvement in a conspiracy against the person of the Führer, and had been taken into protective custody for eleven days. In the autumn of 1944 the charge was a different one: Fallada was accused of having threatened to kill his ex-wife on 28 August 1944.

  The divorce had been finalized on 5 July 1944. Yet the couple continued to live together, with others, on the farm in Carwitz: Anna (Suse) Ditzen in the house with their three children, her mother-in-law and a constantly changing number of bombed-out friends and relatives, Hans Fallada in the gardener’s flat in the barn. On that Monday afternoon at the end of August the heavily intoxicated Fallada fired a shot from his pistol during an argument. Anna Ditzen took the gun away from him, threw it in the lake and alerted Dr Hotop, the doctor from the neighbouring town of Feldberg. Both Fallada and Anna Ditzen later testified that the gunshot was not intended to kill. Dr Hotop sent the local police constable to escort his patient to Feldberg to sober up. The matter might have ended there, but the story came to the ears of an over-zealous young prosecutor. He insisted on having Hans Fallada transferred to the district court in Neustrelitz for questioning. On 31 August the accused was ordered to be ‘temporarily committed to a psychiatric institution’. On 4 September the gates of the Neustrelitz-Strelitz state facility closed behind Hans Fallada. He was placed for an indefinite period in Ward III, where insane or partially insane criminals were housed. It looked like the end of the road for him: an alcoholic, a physical and mental wreck, an author who was no longer capable of writing.

  Yet Fallada used his time in prison to recover from his addictions – and to write. As early as 1924, when he was in prison in Greifswald, he had kept a diary as a form of self-therapy. So now he requested pen and paper once more. His request was granted. He was given ninety-two sheets (184 sides) of lined paper, approximating to modern A4 size. As well as a series of short stories, Fallada wrote The Drinker. On 23 September, noting that his novel about alcoholism remained undiscovered, he was emboldened to start writing down his reminiscences of the Nazi period. He was one of ‘those who stayed behind at home’ (as distinct from those writers and artists who went into voluntary exile when Hitler came to power): he spent the years of the Third Reich in Germany, for the most part in rural Mecklenburg, where he ‘lived the same life as everyone else’. Now he wanted to bear witness. Here in the ‘house of the dead’ he felt the time had come to settle personal scores with the National Socialist regime, and also to justify the painful compromises and concessions he had made as a writer living under the Third Reich.

  In the autumn of 1944 the catastrophic war was entering its final phase, and the collapse of Hitler’s Germany was clearly imminent. The Allies were approaching from all sides, American troops were at the western frontier of the German Reich, while the Red Army was advancing towards East Prussia. At the same time the Nazi regime was stepping up its reign of terror and tightening its stranglehold on the German people. In committing his thoughts and memories to paper, Fallada was now putting his own life at risk.

  Surrounded by ‘murderers, thieves and sex offenders’, always under the watchful eye of the prison warders, he wrote quickly and frenetically, freeing himself, line by line, from his hatred of the Nazis and the humiliations of the past years. He proceeded with caution, and in order to conceal his intentions and save paper he used abbreviations – ‘n.’ for ‘nationalsozialistisch’ (National Socialist), for example, and ‘N.’ for ‘Nazis’ or ‘National Socialism’ – while the minuscule handwriting was enough in itself to deter the prison warders. But Fallada went further in his efforts to ‘scramble’ the text, turning completed manuscript pages upside down and writing in the spaces between the lines. The highly compromising notes, part micrography and part calligraphic conundrum, became a kind of secret code or cryptograph, which can only be deciphered with great difficulty and with the aid of a magnifying glass.

  On 8 October 1944, a Sunday, Hans Fallada was allowed out on home leave for the day. He smuggled the secret notes out under his shirt.

  The 1944 Prison Diary

  (23.IX.44.) One day in January 19331 I was sitting with my esteemed publisher Rowohlt2 in Schlichters Wine Bar3 in Berlin, enjoying a convivial dinner. Our lady wives4 and a few bottles of good Franconian wine kept us company. We were, as it says in the Scriptures, filled with good wine, and on this occasion it had had a good effect on us too. In my case you couldn’t a
lways be sure of that. The effect wine had on me was entirely unpredictable; generally it made me belligerent, self-opinionated and boastful. But this evening it hadn’t, it had put me in a cheerful and rather jocular, bantering mood, which made me the ideal companion for Rowohlt, who is increasingly transformed by alcohol into a huge, two-hundred-pound baby. He sat at the table with alcohol evaporating, in a manner of speaking, from every pore of his body, like some fiery-faced Moloch, albeit a contented, well-fed Moloch, while I regaled everyone with my jokes and anecdotes, at which even my dear wife laughed heartily, even though she had heard these gags at least a hundred times before. Rowohlt had by now reached the state in which his conscience sometimes directs him to make a contribution of his own to the general entertainment: he would sometimes ask the waiter to bring him a champagne glass, which he would then crunch up between his teeth, piece by piece, and eat the lot, leaving only the stem behind – to the horror of the ladies, who couldn’t get over the fact that he didn’t cut himself at all. I was present on one occasion, though, when Rowohlt met his match in this quasi-cannibalistic practice of glass-eating. He asked the waiter for a champagne glass, a quiet, placid man in the company did the same. Rowohlt ate his glass, the placid man did likewise. Rowohlt said contentedly: ‘There! That did me good!’ He folded his hands across his stomach, and looked around the table with an air of triumph. The placid man turned to him. He pointed to the bare stem of the glass that stood on the table in front of Rowohlt, and taunted him: ‘Aren’t you going to eat the stem, Mr Rowohlt? But that’s the best part!’ And with that he ate the stem himself, to gales of laughter from the assembled company. Rowohlt, however, cheated of his triumph, was furious, and he never forgave the placid man for this humiliation!

  But appearances could be deceptive with Rowohlt: even though he sat there like a big, contented baby, with eyes half-closed as if he could barely see a thing, he was actually wide awake and right on the ball – scarily so, when it came to figures. Not realizing this, one time when I was strapped for cash I thought to pull a fast one on him in this baby state and negotiate a particularly favourable contract with him. I can still see us both sitting there, scribbling endless columns of figures on the menus. The contract was finally agreed in something of a boozy haze, and I was laughing up my sleeve at having finally put one over on this sharp businessman. The end result, of course, was that I was the one who’d been suckered – and how! Afterwards Rowohlt himself was so horrified by this contract that he voluntarily gave back most of what he had taken from me.

  But on this particular evening there was no eating of glasses or transacting of business. The mood on this particular evening was one of satisfied contentment. We had done full justice to Schlichter’s wonderful chilled salads, his bouillabaisse, his beef stroganoff and his peerless mature Dutch cheese, and with the wine we had taken the odd sip of raspberry brandy to warm our stomachs. Now we were gazing at the little flames of the alcohol burners under our four individual coffee machines, heating up our Turkish coffee while we sat back and savoured another mouthful of wine from time to time. We had every reason to be pleased with ourselves and with what we had achieved. True, Little Man – What Now? had already peaked as an ‘international best-seller’;5 like every international best-seller, it had been succeeded by something else that did even better, and I can’t remember now if it was Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth6 or Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind.7 In the meantime I had written Once We Had a Child, which the public didn’t like, although the author liked it very much, and now I was working on Jailbird.8 Maybe Jailbird wouldn’t be a new international best-seller either. But give it time – all in good time. It was the easiest thing in the world to create an international best-seller; you just had to really want it. For the present I was busy with other things that interested me very much: if it interested me one day to have an international best-seller, then I could easily manage that too.

  Listening to these remarks, which were more drunken ramblings than seriously intended, Rowohlt nodded like a Buddha and seconded my words with an occasional ‘Quite so!’ or ‘You’re absolutely right, my friend.’ Our good lady wives were by now rather tired of hanging on the lips of the famous author and his famous publisher and imbibing words of pure wisdom, and were now talking in whispers at the other end of the table about housekeeping matters and bringing up children. The coffee, giving off its rich, intense aroma, was slowly starting to drip into the little cups positioned beneath the spouts . . . Into this supremely relaxed and contented scene there now burst an agitated waiter, to remind us that beyond our perfectly ordered private world there was a much larger outside world, where things were currently in a state of real turmoil. With the cry ‘The Reichstag is burning! The Reichstag is burning! The Communists have set fire to it!’ he dashed from room to room spreading the word. That certainly got the pair of us going. We leapt from our seats and exchanged a knowing glance. We shouted for a waiter. ‘Ganymede’, we cried to this disciple of Lucullus. ‘Fetch us a cab right now! We’re going to the Reichstag! We want to help Göring play with fire!’ Our dear wives blanched with horror. Göring had probably only been in the government for a few days,9 and the concentration camps had not yet entered the picture, but the reputation that preceded the gentlemen who had now seized control in Germany was not such that one could mistake them for gentle lambs meek and mild. I can still see it all in my mind’s eye – a confused, anxious, and yet ridiculous scene: the two of us seized with a veritable furor teutonicus, looking straight into each other’s eyes and shouting that we absolutely must go and play with fire ourselves; our wives, pale with terror, frantically trying to calm us down and get us out of this place, which was reputed to be Nazi-friendly; and a waiter standing at the door, hurriedly writing something on his pad – an extract from our manly declamations, or so we assumed from the amused applause. Eventually our wives succeeded in steering us out of the door, onto the street and into a cab, under the pretext, I assume, of going with us to see the burning Reichstag building. But we didn’t go there all together; first we took Rowohlt and his wife home, then our car headed east out of town, to the little village on the banks of the Spree10 where my wife and I were living at the time with our first son. Meanwhile my wife’s soothing words had calmed me down to the point where, when we drove past the Reichstag, I could look into the leaping flames of the burning dome – that sinister beacon at the start of the road that led to the Third Reich – without feeling any incendiary cravings of my own. It’s a good thing we had our wives with us that evening, otherwise our activities, and very possibly our lives too, would have come to an end on that January day in 1933, and this book would never have been written. We also heard nothing more about the head waiter and his furious scribblings, although his spectre haunted us for several anxious days: he was probably just making a quick note of the bills for his tables, since all the customers were then getting up to leave.

  (24.IX.44.) This little episode says a great deal about the attitude with which many decent Germans contemplated the advent of Nazi rule. In our various journals – nationalist, democratic, social-democratic or even Communist – we had read quite a bit about the brutality with which these gentlemen liked to pursue their aims, and yet we thought: ‘It won’t be that bad! Now that they’re in power, they’ll soon see there is a big difference between drafting a Party manifesto and putting it into practice! They’ll tone it down a bit – as they all do. In fact, they’ll tone it down quite a lot!’ We still had absolutely no idea about the intractability of these people, their inhuman cruelty, which literally took corpses, and whole heaps of corpses, in its stride. Sometimes we had a wake-up call, as when we heard, for example, that a son of the Ullstein publishing family, when they came to arrest him,11 had asked if he could brush his teeth first; perhaps his tone had been a touch supercilious, because they promptly beat him half to death with rubber truncheons and dragged him away. People were being arrested left, right and centre, and a surprising number of these detainee
s were ‘shot while trying to escape’. But we kept on telling ourselves: ‘It doesn’t affect us. We are peace-loving citizens, we have never been politically active.’ We really were very stupid; precisely because we had not been politically active, i.e. had not joined the one true Party and did not do so now, we made ourselves highly suspect. It would have been so easy for us; it was in those months from January to March ’33 that the great rush to join the Party began, which earned the new Party members the scornful nickname ‘March Martyrs’. From March onwards the Party put a block on new membership, making it conditional upon careful vetting and scrutiny. For a long time the ‘March Martyrs’ were treated as second-class Party members; but the distinction became blurred with the passing years, and the March Martyrs for their part did all they could to demonstrate their loyalty and reliability. In fact, most of the Nazis who were later described as ‘150 per cent committed’ came from their ranks; in their zeal they sought to outdo the older Party members in the ruthlessness with which they enforced the Party line – as long as such measures didn’t affect them, of course. I shall shortly have occasion to speak about some of these fragrant flowers, whose acquaintance I was soon to make.

  Strictly speaking, Rowohlt and I had every reason to be very careful indeed: we were both compromised, he more than I, but compromised nonetheless, and that was quite enough for the gentlemen in power, who didn’t bother with the finer nuances. They have always ruled by brute force, mainly by the brutal threat of naked physical violence, intimidating and enslaving first their own people, and then other nations. Even the relative subtlety of the iron fist in the velvet glove is too sophisticated for them – way beyond their powers of comprehension. All they ever do is threaten. Do this, or we’ll cut your head off! Don’t do that, or we’ll hang you by the neck! These utterly primitive ideas constituted the sum total of their political wisdom, from the first day until what will hopefully soon be the last.