A Stranger in My Own Country

by Hans Fallada

  Fallada reclaimed his reputation as a significant writer. It was, as the Prison Diary shows, a painful process. His hatred of the Nazis finally found an outlet: ‘They are frightened of the individual and individuality, they want the shapeless masses into which they can drum their slogans.’ The brutal candour of the notes put the author’s life at risk, and in all its contradictions, sudden mood swings, crass judgements and errors it is both taxing and revealing for the modern reader. Fallada sought to exorcize the oppressive past by casting it in literary form. With supreme mastery he plays with that past, making contemporaries and colleagues such as Ernst Rowohlt, Emil Jannings, e.o. plauen and Peter Suhrkamp into the ‘heroes’ of his story, inventing dialogue and inner monologues for them, embroidering and embellishing scenes. Memory and imagination merge, fiction and truth are conflated. And raw emotions are constantly erupting into the text, wildly erratic and ambivalent in the extreme: hatred and sadness, hope and fear, self-pity and self-recrimination, discerning insight and blindness. The Prison Diary stands before us not as the documentary record of a controlled and sustained process of thought and reflection, but as the testimony of a highly conflicted personality, damaged by Nazi terror and trapped in the internal contradictions of his own actions.

  This ‘unpolitical writer’ is here making his first profession of political faith. It is revealing and instructive – but it fails to convince. Fallada is one of that group of artists who did not leave Germany during the Nazi years. So his memoir sets out to justify his actions. With his ‘catalogue of sins’ as a writer he finds himself the target of accusations and reproaches. His account reveals the bitterness and contradictions of those artists who felt they had no choice but to ‘stick it out’ in Germany and do what they could to defend the great German ‘civilized nation’ against the primitive violence of ethnic nationalism and racism. Like Ernst Jünger, Fallada believed that he had shared in the ‘tragedy of his people’. Those who emigrated, fleeing into ‘comfortable’ exile, were ‘slinking away to a life of ease’ in the country’s ‘hour of affliction and ignominy’. He claimed to have thought about emigrating on several occasions, and had packed his suitcases more than once: but in 1938, when the family had made all the necessary preparations to travel to England via Hamburg and was ready to go, he simply could not bring himself to leave Germany. And so he stayed – for ‘the trees and the bees’. As a writer, he said, he could not imagine living anywhere except Germany, and ‘probably couldn’t do it anywhere else’. Fallada paid a high price for staying, as these notes from 1944 testify.

  The phrase ‘inward emigration’ was coined by Frank Thiess as early as 1933 – he too rejected the idea of German exile from the outset. After 1945 the rift between the émigrés and ‘those who had stayed behind at home’ grew deeper. The claim made by Thiess – that by ‘sticking it out’ in Germany he had acquired a ‘rich store of insights and experiences’ – culminated in the imputation that it had been harder ‘to preserve one’s identity here than to send messages to the German people from over there’. This egregious defamation of German authors in exile elicited an unusually sharp riposte from Thomas Mann. He argued that the literature of ‘inward emigration’ had forfeited any claim to the status of resistance literature. ‘It may be superstition, but in my eyes any books that could be printed at all in Germany between 1933 and 1945 are less than worthless, and not the kind of thing you want to pick up. The smell of blood and infamy clings to them. They should all be pulped.’

  However, writers like Ricarda Huch and Ernst Barlach can claim with some justification to be practitioners of ‘inward emigration’, since they took a public stand against National Socialism. But what of Hans Fallada? Did he seek to offer any kind of ‘intellectual opposition’ to the prevailing ‘spirit of evil’? Certainly, in a novel such as Wolf among Wolves, he gave readers a work of fiction that did not conform in any way to the tasteless triumphalism of approved Party literature. Nor is there any doubt about his aversion to fulfilling the regime’s expectations. And yet he is compromised by the revised ending to Iron Gustav, rewritten along the lines suggested by Goebbels. Indeed, Fallada found himself having a lot more to do with Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry than he was comfortable with – as the Prison Diary also attests. So we see the author who was celebrating in ‘Schlichters Wine Bar’ in February 1933 turning up five years later in the Hotel Kaiserhof, where the Nazi state held court, and where Fallada now took part in discussions about a proposed project with the ‘National Actor’ Emil Jannings. The claim of the authors who had ‘stayed behind at home’ that they had opposed the regime, even if their opposition had to be read between the lines of their texts, was dismissed early on by Thomas Mann as a strategy doomed to failure.

  Fallada too misread the political situation and his own role in it. And he vilified the émigré writers. He claimed he would rather perish with this ‘unfortunate but blessed nation’ than ‘enjoy a false happiness in some other country’. He defended himself against his critics in exile by lashing out at them, deploying the standard arguments used to justify ‘inward emigration’. The idea that artists had a special role and a special responsibility for the sorely afflicted country also surfaces in the diary of Wilhelm Furtwängler. In 1945 he writes: ‘Here I was able to do more for the true Germany, and thus for peace and the arts worldwide, than anywhere else.’ In Fallada we read: ‘[. . .] not everything has lost its savour [. . .] we were the salt of the earth.’ A proud boast, and a foolish one. Like Furtwängler, Fallada invokes Germany’s cultural heritage and celebrates the nation that produced Goethe and Beethoven: ‘I love this nation, which has given [. . .] imperishable sounds to the world.’ The exhortations of the émigrés to engage in active resistance are decisively rejected by Fallada: he refuses to ‘commit suicide cheered on by a bunch of émigrés’. Here too he is following the standard line of argument used by ‘those who stayed behind at home’. Thus in 1945 Frank Thiess asserted that it had been a great deal harder to live through the ‘German tragedy’ in Germany than to pass comment on it from the ‘boxes and orchestra seats of other countries’.

  Above all else, the Prison Diary documents the failure and the growing despair of an unpolitical writer. The fact that his own notes fail to satisfy him in the end, that he finds them ‘without merit or interest’ even (he has ‘no great revelations’ to make), undoubtedly has something to do with his inability to analyse National Socialism critically. Political reflection was not Fallada’s forte – and there is no reason why it should be. He tells us that he has never thought in terms of Jews and Aryans, that Jews had always been part of ‘an entirely random mix’ of friends and acquaintances. When he was arrested by the Nazis in 1933, a female Jewish friend was staying in the house. The way he describes the situation shows how he failed to grasp the very real danger. He says he has not wasted mental energy on such things as ‘learning to tell the difference between all these silly uniforms’. Was it a ‘Standartenführer’ who arrested him on that occasion? ‘A “Rottenführer”? A “Scharführer”? I’ve no idea.’ All that mattered to him was that ‘a good old country policeman’ was there too, ‘wearing the familiar green uniform’, who could at least be expected to see that things were done in a ‘legal’ manner. After his release from protective custody at the end of April 1933 Fallada notes that they are still ‘entirely unpolitical people’, and many things are just a ‘closed book’ to them: he has no idea ‘what the lawyer and the district council leader talked about in private, regarding conspiracies against the person of the Führer, good and bad political jokes, and Mr von Salomon.’

  His political innocence and ‘naivety’ are also evident in another area. Shortly after the Nazis seized power in 1933, Fallada moved into a ‘Jewish’ guesthouse, and, as he puts it, ‘gaily started sending out’ his letters from there. His friends warned him that his imprudent behaviour – ‘given the growing number of spies and informers’ – was tantamount to suicide, but he blithely dismisses their concerns: ‘But I l
ike it there! If they ban Aryans from living in Jewish guesthouses, then I’ll move out. But until then, I’m staying put!’

  While anti-Semitism now became de facto government policy, and the Jews were discriminated against, humiliated and persecuted, Fallada, who describes himself as a ‘philosemite’, makes a few observations that ‘give me pause’. The Jews, he writes, really do have ‘a different attitude to money’. Fallada comes out with anti-Semitic remarks despite himself, describing the typical ‘Jewish’ face in terms redolent of a caricature in Der Stürmer, and characterizing someone as ‘a little, degenerate Jew’. He writes about the ‘deep instinct for quality that so many Jews have’, their capacity for self-irony, in which they ‘so excel’, and he is fiercely critical of the anti-Semitic propaganda of the National Socialist regime, which he says ‘had always sickened’ him – and which nevertheless dictates the terms of reference for his own arguments. The ‘unpolitical’ writer was becoming politicized without even noticing it. When he reluctantly accepts a commission from the Propaganda Ministry in 1941, he does so under the dubious premise that if he does it at all, then he will write a ‘non-anti-Semitic, anti-Semitic novel’.

  He makes no secret of the fact that he despises the Nazis. He attacks their viciousness and inhumanity with utter disgust and growing hatred, calling them ‘brutal’, ‘primitive’, ‘thugs’, ‘an entrenched gangster culture’. In his description of an ‘archetypal SA visage’ (with ‘that thick neck with its six or seven rolls of fat’) he voices an emotive rejection that ‘had absolutely nothing to do with politics’. And Fallada writes very movingly of the victims of the Nazi dictatorship, one of whom was the music teacher Sas, who was arrested for illegally keeping a portable printing press in his house, and then had to endure endless torments until he was finally hanged in Plötzensee prison. An ‘everyday story of German life’, as Fallada puts it.

  In May 1945 Fallada was back at work on his notes, which he had written only a few months previously at the risk of his life. He now wanted to adapt his memories and experiences to the changing times. The Red Army had entered Feldberg, and the town was under the control of the Soviet town major. Fallada was revising and editing his account, because now, finally, he saw a real prospect of getting it published. His proposed title was ‘The undesirable author – My experiences during twelve years of Nazi terror’ – even though the work has little to say about the struggles of the ‘undesirable author’. But in May 1945 it seemed desirable, indeed necessary, to give the text sharper political definition. The foreword he wrote for it reads like a mission statement for the task of revision and emendation he is about to undertake: ‘These reminiscences clearly bear the traces of the circumstances in which they were written. Constantly interrupted and laid aside, concealed from the gaze of the prison warders, they were never going to be a work of calm contemplation. They are not serenely detached, but sad, angry and full of hatred; I have suffered too much. They are driven solely by the single-minded resolve that kept me going for twelve years: the resolve to root out every trace of Nazism from this unfortunate German nation, which has brought calamity upon nearly all of Europe through its deluded faith in the crazed “Führer”. Never again must anything like Nazism be visited upon mankind; these reminiscences, which show that everything Hitler did, big or small, was rotten to the core, may hopefully help to prevent that happening.’

  With these words Fallada began to transcribe his notes on 9 May 1945, the day after the war ended. 136 pages of the typescript he prepared have survived, amounting to approximately half of the original hand-written pages. The text breaks off in mid-sentence partway through the entry for 30 September 1944. It is impossible to say now whether Fallada stopped work at this point and never resumed, or whether he finished the text and the remaining pages have simply gone missing. At all events, the surviving typescript shows significant changes in content and style. There is a very obvious attempt to emphasize just how much Fallada hated the Nazis. So the ‘ruthless men’ of the manuscript now become ‘ruthless thugs’. Similarly Fallada makes more of his own sufferings at the hands of the Nazi dictatorship. In the first version Fallada had to wait ‘five or six days’ for a response from his lawyer when he was arrested in 1933; in the typescript this has been stretched out to two weeks. And there is also a marked shift in his attitude towards the German people: in September 1944 he speaks of this ‘unfortunate but blessed nation’, but in May 1945 he takes a much more distanced and pessimistic view, referring only to ‘this unfortunate nation’. Fallada also radically revised the memorable portrait of his publisher and friend Ernst Rowohlt. As well as adding further details, he paints an even more favourable picture, in order to do his old colleague a good turn – in 1945, as a former member of the NSDAP, Rowohlt was facing a denazification tribunal. So Fallada emphasizes Rowohlt’s international standing and praises his ambitious publishing list, which included many foreign authors and a number of Jewish ones.

  There were other changes besides. The anti-Semitic remarks are toned down in the typescript intended for publication. The assertion that the Jews have a ‘different’ attitude to money is now contextualized as a ‘first impression’, which on mature reflection he rejects as mistaken. The power of National Socialist propaganda, he belatedly realizes, has influenced even the staunchest opponents of Nazism. What was intended as a criticism in the autumn of 1944 – that it was the Jews themselves who had ‘erected this barrier between themselves and other nations’ – now gives way to a recognition that the Jews were right to stick together in their hour of danger. After all, 95 per cent of Germans had elected the Führer and supported his policies, so ‘why should the Jews, whose lives were constantly in danger, believe that we happened to belong to the other five per cent who had rejected him?’ The later toning-down and revision of anti-Semitic remarks undoubtedly stemmed in part also from the new revelations about the horrific scale of the Holocaust. The reports from the concentration camps and extermination camps that were gradually emerging showed for the first time the full extent of the persecution and the enormity of the crimes that had been committed.

  In May 1945 Fallada found himself in a changed situation, both personally and politically. The new revelations and discoveries were incorporated into the typescript. Sometimes whole passages were excised in the course of revision. Fallada was becoming increasingly aware of his own political naivety. In the autumn of 1944 he still took the dubious view that it was not the Germans ‘who did the most to pave the way for National Socialism’, but rather the French and the British. In May 1945 he acknowledged self-critically that he was ‘a perfect example of the political folly of the Germans’, who hoped in their millions that ‘it wouldn’t be so bad’, and in the end learned to their cost that things had turned out a great deal worse ‘than anyone in their wildest fantasy could possibly have imagined’. So in May 1945 he chooses to emphasize the political ‘naivety’ of the Germans rather than dwell on their ‘attitude’ to National Socialism, seeking thereby to defend his fellow countrymen – and himself.

  A portion of the typescript, the first section of the notes from the Reichstag fire to Fallada’s arrest at the beginning of April 1933, was revised and edited in 1945 under the Soviet military administration and published in the Tägliche Rundschau under the title ‘Celebrating Easter 1933 with the SA’. Fallada edited the text down for print, cutting the portrait of the conservative Ernst von Salomon to a minimum and condensing the story of the Sponars, whose name was changed to ‘Donner’. Published in serial form in November and December 1945, the text served above all to present Fallada as a victim of the Nazis.

  But let us now return to the original, hand-written version. The Prison Diary of 1944 begins as an apologia. Fallada feels compelled to explain why he chose to ‘stick it out’ in Germany. He wheels out a series of friends and contemporaries such as Rowohlt and e.o. plauen in order to show by their example – vicariously, on occasion – the trials, perils and struggles endured by those who stayed be
hind at home. As the example of Peter Suhrkamp shows (see note 67), the account he gives can sometimes be clouded by errors and personal animosities. Subjective assessment and stylization occasionally win out over the true facts. But Fallada’s reckoning with the past documents a growing disillusionment and resignation. At the beginning Fallada draws a clear distinction between the good Germans and the Nazi mobsters, between victims on the one hand and perpetrators on the other. But from the experiences he recalls and the stories he tells, a picture gradually emerges of a nation of fellow travellers, cowards and informers. Decent men and women are sold down the river.

  ‘We had had enough of fighting these losing battles, which, as people without rights, we could never win’, writes Fallada of the events of autumn 1933, when he had to flee to Berlin at a moment’s notice after his arrest in Berkenbrück. For the first time in his life he had suffered ‘a patent injustice’, having lost the roof over his head after being denounced: ‘Child that I was, I still didn’t get it: since January 1933 Germany had ceased to be a country under the rule of law, and was now a police state pure and simple.’ But even in Carwitz, his place of refuge, the suspicions and accusations continued. Quickly identified as a man who hated the Nazis, the author was kept under close watch by the villagers. For the first time Fallada writes openly about everyday life in National Socialist Germany, where someone like the village mayor is described as ‘this pitiful scrap of a human being [. . .] in all his wretchedness’.

  The nation that he began by defending has become alien to him; the country, his homeland, no longer seems like home. And his hopes for a possible new beginning, for a peaceful and civilized Germany, have vanished. The feeling of resignation culminates in a final, escapist dream vision: the sheltering cave beneath his own house. ‘In my dream I construct a passageway from the cellar of our house [. . .] descending deep down into the earth, and I seal it off with nine secret doors, invisible even to the most practised eye [. . .]. But this is no hideous, dark tunnel of bare earth: an elegant flight of stone steps leads downwards, the walls are covered with stars and electric lights are built into the vaulted ceiling. At the bottom you enter a fine antechamber, stepping straight from that into the vast living and working space, twenty metres below the ground.’ Fallada imagines his ‘underground palace’ in increasingly elaborate detail – his metaphor for ‘hibernating’ through the winter of National Socialism. A final bastion against the trials and impositions of the age: a desperate idyll. But it all ends in a bitter guilty verdict: ‘Buried alive. How could you do it? How could you do that to your children?’