A Stranger in My Own Country

by Hans Fallada

  ‘Wastepaper basket, Suse!’ I said. ‘Why are you getting so worked up? That woman must be mad – remember her eyes! No, not a word, straight into the wastepaper basket!’

  The weeks passed, and again we forgot about the Sponars. What reason did we have for thinking about an old, impoverished woman, who was thinking back on her wasted life with hatred and fury? We had enough worries of our own! And then another envelope arrived from her, this time without the black border, and this time with no note or letter, but enclosing a photograph of our eldest son, which Suse had given to the Sponars perhaps, or left behind by mistake when we moved house. Just the photo – so now she was returning our gifts! I looked more closely at the photograph – and saw that she had pricked out the child’s eyes with a needle!

  I hope my memory doesn’t deceive me: Suse never saw this desecrated picture, I was able to burn it behind her back. It’s such a long time ago, we’ve certainly never talked about it: the name Sponar was never spoken between us again. But the strange thing is, I am almost glad, now, that this woman perpetrated this final and supreme act of infamy. For by doing so she justified all the feelings of hatred that I harboured for her and her husband, and she justified in advance the words that I have written about her here. Perhaps she will still be living, a very old woman, when this book is published; I should like to think that she will still be able to read it with all her mental faculties. This is the obituary that I am dedicating to her and her husband. And with that I dismiss the pair of them from my life, a closed chapter as far as I am concerned, way beyond love, hatred and forgiveness!

  In the preceding pages I have told the life story, or what I know of it, of my friend Peter Suhrkamp, whom I have not seen for many years. Now I’d like to write something about my esteemed publisher Rowohlt, who has also been a wonderful friend to us. We had to manage without him for many a long, hard year, but at least we do see him now from time to time. He too has been tossed and tumbled by the waves, and like the rest of us he didn’t escape the brown tide entirely unscathed. Sometimes it was hard to believe that this man, who always described himself as a survivor who always bounced back, would ever get back on his feet again. But lo, he lives! If my information is correct, he is currently swanning around in the lovely little village of Kampen on the island of Sylt, fanned by glorious sea breezes and doing . . . absolutely nothing for the total war effort.

  I’ve already said that he was just as reckless and just as fearful as I am. But as he met up with at least a dozen people every day, doing business with them, chatting away, sharing news (and what kind of news was there in those early years other than about the Nazis!), it was inevitable that he ran far greater risks than someone like me, living a quiet life out in the country and often seeing nobody for ten days at a time. There are many stories about him from this time, and it’s impossible to recount them all. But one of them shows very well how this inveterate gambler, who all his life played every book like a hand of cards, how he also liked to play with fire. In the early days after the seizure of power, when so much had to be overturned and then reorganized again, the Reich Chamber of Literature issued a ruling allowing Jewish authors and Jewish translators to carry on working for the time being, on condition that they had a so-called ‘exemption certificate’, which was issued by the RCL. This policy was intended as a transitional arrangement, to provide protection against excessive losses for publishers who had many such works in progress at the time. Now we had a Jewish translator in the office called Franz Fein,81 who was a brilliant translator; nearly all the translations of Sinclair Lewis’s works, for example, must have been done by him.82 Old Rowohlt was a firm believer in loyalty, and he had no intention of getting rid of Franz Fein. So he just let him carry on translating. A week later a warning letter arrived from the RCL, noting that the Rowohlt publishing house was still employing the translator Franz Fein, who had no exemption certificate, and requesting that he no longer be employed in future. Rowohlt put the letter on his ‘compost heap’, where all the letters that he didn’t want to answer ended up, and carried on employing Franz Fein as before. The next letter from the RCL was more threatening in tone: on pain of a fine of so many marks, the Rowohlt publishing house was forbidden to continue employing the Jewish translator Franz Fein, who had no exemption certificate. This letter likewise landed on the compost heap, and Franz Fein carried on working. The final letter from the RCL was a hammer blow: a fine was imposed, and Rowohlt was summoned to appear before the German publishers’ court of honour. At this point Rowohlt decided to respond. His reply consisted of a single sentence: ‘The translator Franz Fein is permitted to work in accordance with exemption certificate No. 796. Heil Hitler.’ The people at the RCL had failed to check their own records properly before writing their letters. Such ‘triumphs’ were royally celebrated in the office, of course, and we told everybody about them, but in the end they were – like my own aforementioned letter to Dr Goebbels – dearly paid for. Nothing was forgotten, everything was noted down, and the pile of small snowballs grew until it became a huge, crushing avalanche!

  There was one time early on when Rowohlt narrowly avoided coming to grief only because of the unwonted urbanity of a Gestapo official. There was another government order requiring anyone who received letters, flyers or suchlike containing seditious material, whether anonymous or signed, to forward the same immediately, together with the envelope, to the RCL or the nearest Gestapo office, and not to show it to anyone. In the early years high-profile authors and publishers did indeed receive quite a few such letters, though later they stopped completely; there was just one man, apparently from southern Germany, who carried on regardless, unleashing a stream of diatribes against Dr Goebbels. In actual fact this worthy was a full-blown Nazi sympathizer; it was just that Dr Goebbels had aroused his particular ire, and he accused him of terrible things, one of which was the wrecking of the German language. But apart from this buffoon the letter-writers eventually realized that their letters were pretty pointless. I’m sure it was all very fine to be sitting in Paris or Prague and exhorting us German writers to engage in active resistance against the Nazis: ‘Refuse to obey them! Sabotage their initiatives! Call the people to arms! The fate of Europe lies in your hands, you are the spirit and soul of Europe!’ And so on – there was plenty more of this tripe, written from some safe haven. It all sounded fine and dandy, as I say, but to commit suicide cheered on by a bunch of émigrés did seem somewhat pointless to me. So I always bundled up this kind of stuff without the slightest regret and sent it on to the RCL like a good boy. It was such rubbish that I was never even tempted to show it to anyone else. My good friend Rowohlt took a rather more casual view of such letters, but then he received others of more substantial import. One day a gentleman from the Gestapo called to see him. We had moved on from the time when such a visit would throw one into a blind panic. The gentlemen from the Gestapo had already descended upon the publishing house for all kinds of different reasons: to search for Einstein’s Die schlimme Botschaft83 in the attic, to confiscate the works of Emil Ludwig, to purge the poems of Joachim Ringelnatz84 – you name it! So it did not strike terror into the heart any more, but it did still make you a little jumpy, as though you were on your guard: what’s up this time? The Gestapo man sat down across from Rowohlt, all very friendly, and asked him if he was aware of the government order stating that anonymous communications containing seditious material, etc., etc. Rowohlt was all cooperation and compliance: of course he knew about the order, and on receipt of any such scurrilous pamphlets he had of course, etc., etc. ‘And what about the Pope’s Encyclical on the Genetic Health Law, which you received a week ago?’ inquired the official softly. Dear old Rowohlt flushed bright red. Thank God he wasn’t foolish enough to deny receipt. ‘Good Lord!’ he cried, ‘didn’t I send that back? I could have sworn I did! Let me just have a look . . .’ He began to rummage in his compost heap. (His consternation was made much worse by the knowledge that this encyclical, for which he was se
arching so diligently and fruitlessly, was sitting in his breast pocket – it was too good, after all, not to share with one’s friends!) ‘Or’, he went on, ‘did I chuck the thing straight into the wastepaper basket in my annoyance?’ And he made as if to upend the wastepaper basket. ‘Leave it, leave it!’ said the official with a wave of his hand, having watched his rummagings with an air of languid interest. ‘It’s just a warning, Mr Rowohlt, a final warning. I would advise you to be very careful.’ He smiled at the big, burly publisher, who had gone puce in the face. He added innocently: ‘We send these things out ourselves from time to time, just as a test, to separate the sheep from the goats.’ And with that he left. ‘From now on I’m going to be a sheep and only a sheep!’ swore Rowohlt for the hundredth time. ‘These fellows are too smart for me!’ But that was just him talking. We were both of us incorrigible. So one snowball after another was added to the pile – the avalanche was getting quite sizeable already – and we still had no idea. Well, perhaps that’s not entirely true. We were surprised that the Rowohlt publishing house had been allowed to carry on, that it had not simply been shut down. Not only pro-Jewish but decidedly anti-Nazi: how much more compromised did the company need to be? What kept it alive, I think, was its high standing abroad. Rowohlt Verlag had always been uncommonly successful with its foreign publishing deals. Its reputation abroad actually stood much higher than its domestic significance warranted. Here it was never ranked among the country’s top publishing houses. Its publishing director was far too wayward for that, as I said before, and he didn’t follow a clear, straight line in his publishing program, as Dr Kippenberg85 famously did with his Insel Verlag; instead Rowohlt the gambler looked upon every newly published title as a new card in the game, hoping with excited anticipation that each one would turn out to be a winner.86 So I really do believe they allowed the company to survive just because they were afraid to kill it off with the eyes of the world watching. (In those early days the Nazi movement still cared about the feelings of the outside world – when less important things were at stake.) And then they thought: ‘The business will just die a natural death.’ It had been forced to give up most of its authors, including such widely read writers as Emil Ludwig. And the authorities were always making life difficult for the company. It would soon cave in. The obituary would read: ‘Died peacefully in its sleep, due to declining physical powers.’ It is a tragedy, and particularly so for me, that in the end Rowohlt came to grief not because of his own recklessness, but because of his author Fallada. Since the Nazis came to power I had written a whole string of books. They had not been particularly successful, apart from Jailbird, perhaps, which might have become a sales success if they had not banned its reprinting. In the Third Reich it was not permitted to think and write about convicted offenders with compassion. But then I wrote Wolf among Wolves,87 fired by the old fervour again, I wrote without looking up from the desk, I wrote without looking to left or to right. This was a story, and these were characters, that absorbed all my attention for months!

  I remember very well the discussions we had prior to the book’s publication. The big question in our minds was this: ‘Can we dare to publish this novel, or should we not risk it?’ In the Third Reich the situation was that there was no pre-publication censorship as such. Anything could be published, but the author and publisher answered with their heads for the book’s reception. But whether it would be well received or badly received was totally unpredictable. There were so many authorities involved, and it all depended on which of these authorities pronounced first. If the first review appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter, and it was negative, then it didn’t matter how positively the officials at the Propaganda Ministry – or as we called it, the ‘Propami’ – thought about it: the negative Party line was now firmly established, and nothing could change it.

  But nobody could predict how the Party top brass would react to mention of the Black Reichswehr88 and the portrayal of so many dubious characters,89 including a sex murderer.

  We dithered for ages, and in the end the matter was decided by a report written by a courageous man, an editor by the name of Friedo Lampe,90 and a worthy successor to Paulchen. In his report he wrote: ‘If the Rowohlt publishing house is brought down because of this book, then it will have been brought down by something that is worth being brought down for!’ Wolf among Wolves duly appeared, and it was a great success, not least in the Party press. Once again, the outcome was entirely unexpected. But for Rowohlt Verlag this very success proved a disaster. All those gentlemen who had waited for far too long to see the company’s demise suddenly saw its survival assured. But this was unacceptable to them. The real reason, the success of Wolf, could not be spelled out, so some pretext had to be found to get rid of this indestructible Rowohlt, who just kept on bouncing back . . . They actually came up with two pretexts. Rowohlt had published a biography of Stifter91 by a certain Urban Roedl, an Austrian with an impeccably Aryan name. Now it was claimed that this Urban Roedl was in fact a closet Jew, and that Rowohlt had known about it all along. Rowohlt denied it all vehemently, of course, and it would have been difficult to prove that he’d known about it in secret. But then they brought up the other matter, and here there was no room for denials or cover-ups, whatever the extenuating human circumstances. But then no Nazi agency ever had much time for humanity. There had long been a ruling that excluded Jews from the management and curation of our ‘German cultural heritage’ – a ruling so elastic that they even invoked it to kick the Jews out of the antiques business. All publishing houses had accordingly been instructed to fire their Jewish employees. Rowohlt too had been forced to do so. Now for many years we had had an older Jewish woman in the office, known as ‘Plosch’ for short,92 whose salary was her only income and who also used some of it to help out some impoverished relatives of hers. Rowohlt had to let Plosch go, which he did, but then he did something that was classic Rowohlt: he continued to find work for the sacked employee as an anonymous temp in a little back office. But then someone informed on her, as someone always did, Rowohlt received a formal warning, and the temporary job came to an end too. At the time Plosch was in a terrible situation: her brother, in despair at the plight of the Jews in Germany, had committed suicide. Taking away the woman’s job and source of income at a time like this was tantamount to condemning her to the same fate. Rowohlt found a way round this by dictating letters to her in the evenings after the office closed and on Sundays. But no matter how secretively they went about their business, the Nazi spy had been even more secretive. My publisher was hauled before the court of honour and expelled from the German publishing profession in disgrace. The right to have charge of our ‘German cultural heritage’ was denied to him in perpetuity. ‘You have besmirched the honour of the German publishing profession!’ Thus wrote that swine Dr Goebbels in the letter confirming his expulsion – the same Dr Goebbels who never thought twice about besmirching the honour of any man or any woman if it suited his purposes or appetites! But now I had lost my truest friend and adviser. Yes, I found other good publishers in time, and I’ll have occasion to talk about them later. But never again will I open letters from publishers with the same pleasurable anticipation as I did back then, when they came from dear old Rowohlt. You could hear the man himself in every line he wrote, with his boundless energy, his indestructible optimism and his irrepressible audacity! His sense of fun, his compassion, his ready wit – all that was gone from our lives, gone forever. We had grown older, we weren’t making any new friends, and the old ones were gradually crumbling away – how many we were destined to lose over the next few years! In this way too, life under the Nazis became progressively more impoverished. Oh, how they bled us dry! How they robbed us of every joy and happiness, every smile, every friendship! And then they plunged us into this most disastrous of all wars, they conducted their victorious Blitzkriege (Hitler’s latest work: ‘Thirty years of Blitzkrieg’), they destroyed our cities, destroyed our families – yes indeed, these were and are
the true guardians of our ‘German cultural heritage’. Even after this devastating verdict there was of course no actual need for Rowohlt to leave Germany. He could do whatever he wanted, just as long as he did not lay a finger on our ‘German cultural heritage’. He could sell flour if he wanted, or elephants, or even paper, or else he could simply retire on a private income. And I’m sure he planned to do one or other of these things. But then there was his wife – and then came the Reich Day of Broken Glass. Rowohlt’s wife, his own third Reich, was a German-Brazilian by birth, and most of her family were still living over in Brazil. She was the lady who, after the Nazis had seized power, had over-compensated for the bad impression made by her husband by giving an enthusiastic Hitler salute to everyone she met – until her little daughter so thoroughly embarrassed her in public. But it was not long before the mother herself tired of giving the salute; she was no actress, and ‘that gang’, whose deeds she heard about every day from her husband, just made her sick, as she put it. She was afflicted with an anti-Nazi sickness of a very acute type. She simply could not stand or stomach those people any more. She sometimes yelled at her husband that it was shameful the way he let these bastards walk all over him; she insisted that they call it a day and emigrate to Brazil, to a decent country with decent swamps and decent pigs and monkeys! She had these outbursts from time to time – a tiny little woman who turned the scales at 50 kilos. But incorruptible with it! And then came the Reich Day of Broken Glass.93 Among the many outbreaks of ‘spontaneous popular disapproval’ that were such a feature of the Third Reich, this one is perhaps already half forgotten. The Party high-ups felt – and the people then of course also felt – that the Jews were still being treated far too leniently, that things were not progressing nearly fast enough with the Jews. Perhaps they wanted to show the outside world what the German people thought of the Jews: and so one fine Sunday tens of thousands of windows in Jewish shops and homes were smashed: the Reich Day of Broken Glass! It really was a beautifully orchestrated outburst of popular anger, and it was just a shame that the Jews had known about it for a week beforehand. The publishing house’s former legal adviser, for instance, felt that his home in the west end of the city was too much at risk, so he lowered the shutters and took himself off with his wife and child to a Jewish friend in Nikolassee, who owned a villa there in a quiet street surrounded by solidly Aryan villas. He thought he would be safer there. But sadly it was a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. His home in the old western part of the city escaped unscathed, but the Jewish villa in Nikolassee had curiosity value: as just one of relatively few in the area, it not only had its windows smashed, but suffered a bit of light looting as well, and its occupants were hauled off to police headquarters on Alexanderplatz94 as ‘conspirators’, where they were held for a considerable time before being allowed to return home.