A Stranger in My Own Country

  He had made his decision, and he was just the man to act on it there and then and never look back. He started to write those cautious, clever, if somewhat dull essays, in which a man discovers National Socialism and makes its ideas his own, progressing by degrees from the position of cautious observer to follower and admirer. Hitherto he had stepped in to handle matters with the appropriate Reich and Party authorities only when asked to do so, but now he wanted to be in charge of all such negotiations, and before long he was the public face and voice of the great publishing house, representing it at all important meetings. Of course, this didn’t happen without fierce internal struggles, the staff hated this parvenu, this legacy-hunter. ‘I’m living among murderers’, he once said at the time. But he had what it took to live among murderers, he could kick and bite with the best of them, he could be razor-sharp and brutal, he was not afraid of anyone. And on top of that he had the old man behind him, who needed him, who could not live without him. Once Peter Suhrkamp understood this, once he realized how utterly dependent on him the old Jew was, he exploited his power ruthlessly – not least against the old man himself. There are some really shocking reports, reports of senseless torments, so bad that I don’t know what to believe. So many terrible things have happened since then in Germany, and in the last few years we have become so desensitized to horror: anything is possible under such a leadership, which always expects the worst of people.

  I can see him sitting there, Peter Suhrkamp, always wearing very fine shirts and dressed in a dark suit, I can see him sitting in his office outside the anxiously guarded inner sanctum of the old Jew. He is in a bad mood, having had to spend the whole day dealing with the intrigues and back-biting of his colleagues – and now the old man has overruled him in some important matter. He reflects for a while, hesitates, and then reaches for the telephone and calls the old Jew. He has disguised his voice, and now barks brusquely at the old Jew, summoning him to Gestapo headquarters for questioning the next day. He quickly replaces the receiver and goes back to studying the papers on his desk. And now the connecting door to the next office is flung open, the old man is standing in the doorway, tearing his hair in a state of total despair, already facing the firing squad in his mind. He begs his young friend to help him, but he is sullen, letting the old man know that he has done him an injustice by overruling him. How he torments him! How he makes this poor, sick creature suffer and groan! And then he gives in, he promises to get the matter sorted out, deferred at least – and pulls off a miracle: the Gestapo, the most implacable and unrelenting agency of the German state, cancels the interrogation!

  And this didn’t happen just the once, it happened several, many times, until the old man was reduced to a puppet, who said yea and amen to everything. To everything that Peter Suhrkamp wanted. And while this was going on he was consolidating his position, feeling his way forward, speaking with the financial backers; everything else was just a matter of skilful management. And skilful he was: when the old man finally lay dead, free at last from all his tormentors, he was the designated heir. To begin with he was just the acting manager, and then he was formally named as the new head of the company. He acquired shares, he married a wealthy woman (the fact that she was older than him, and drank, didn’t trouble him); the years passed, and the day came when the name of the dead Jewish publisher was expunged, and his name was put up in its place: the dream had become reality, the hungry student begging for work had become a powerful man, master of millions. But had he completely forgotten the dream that he had dreamt back then, when he was tending his father’s sheep on the moor, with Hebel’s homespun Tales from the Calendar in his pocket, stories as simple in their message as the lines of the song that begins: ‘Be truthful and honest in all that you do . . .’?75 Had he forgotten all that? The dream had not forgotten him, and now it rose up against him. When all was said and done he was a farm boy from Oldenburg, and made of different stuff than the gentlemen who now ruled the land. He had ingratiated himself with them when it suited his purposes, he’d become a reliable Nazi, because it was the only way to gain advancement; he had purged his publishing house of all Jewish and pro-Jewish authors, and had become a model Nazi. And as a result of all this he had come to hate the Nazis with a passion. He had sat with them and drunk with them and laughed, actually laughed at their witless jokes, their tedious bragging, and had applauded it. With them he had ruined people’s lives without a twinge of conscience, and at their behest he had elevated some dreary scribbler into a literary god, arrayed like Apollo himself. But back home, hidden away in a corner, lay ten or twelve pages, covered with tiny, neat handwriting – and they had risen up against him. That he had once aspired to something like this now became more important to him than all the success he had ever achieved. Oh, how he loathed them, how he longed to spit in their stupid, vacuous faces and tell them straight out for once what he really thought of their empty slogans! But he could keep his own counsel: not for nothing did his face resemble a skull, and many things were buried inside that head of his.

  So how did it happen that at some point he did let something slip? Perhaps he was drunk, or perhaps even he needed a confidant eventually, someone to whom he could unburden his heart of the hatred he felt inside. And this confidant then reported him to the authorities. I don’t know. I just heard that he said too much, that he was arrested for treason, and that for all I know he is already dead as I write. Hanged by the neck. And it was all for nothing: the years of hunger and privation, the long, grey road, the struggles, the shameful treatment of the old Jew – all for nothing! All for nothing the betrayal of his own ambitions – what shall it profit a man,76 if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Oh, if only I were still tending the sheep on my father’s moorland!

  And this was the same man – just to touch briefly here on this aspect of his character – who came to me shortly after the Nazis took power and said: ‘Listen, Bertolt Brecht is hiding out at my place;77 I’ve got to get him across the border into Czechoslovakia tonight, and we’re collecting money for him. How much can you give? You’ll probably never get it back again.’ Bertolt Brecht had only escaped arrest by a miracle. It’s well known, of course, that the librettist of the Threepenny Opera was particularly unpopular with these gentlemen. But like the rest of us, he had no idea how much danger he was already in. He had slept soundly, drunk his breakfast coffee, and had then gone across the street just as he was, without hat and coat, to get a quick shave. When he emerged from the barber’s again, there was a car parked outside his apartment building, one of those nice big cars used by the police. And there were sentries posted in front of the building. It was a five-storey apartment block, with multiple occupants, but Bertolt Brecht had the distinct feeling that this early-morning visit had to do with him. He gazed thoughtfully for a moment at the car and the sentries before turning on his heel and walking away, deep in thought, towards a very uncertain future, with no hat or coat and just a handful of coins in his pocket. He finally ended up at Peter Suhrkamp’s place – and he was just the man to bring an adventure of this sort to a happy conclusion. He sketched out an itinerary, he collected money, he dug up an old car from somewhere, and he drove off at the wheel with Bertolt Brecht on board. How he managed it, I don’t know, but he got him safely across the border. He was risking his job, his future prospects, even his life, in order to help a man to whom he was not personally close, and for whose literary work, given his own predilections, he can’t have had much time. That’s the sort of man he was, Peter Suhrkamp, the legacyhunter: no worse than that, but no better either. Much like the rest of us, in fact.

  It’s probably better that I recount this last commendable deed of Peter Suhrkamp here, before reverting to my account of my own experiences. I’m rather sorry that the flow of the narrative led me to jump ahead and recount the rise of Peter Suhrkamp first. For us, back then, he was our friend and saviour. We admired him, and we put our complete trust in him. And what he did for us was fully deser
ving of trust and thanks. First of all he got us both out of our elegant guesthouse and shipped us off to a small country sanatorium in the Mark of Brandenburg, where we found peace and quiet, sun, and the green outdoors, where our boy could play properly again, and where we didn’t just waste our days killing time, but took rest cures in the grounds and swallowed little potions that made us believe we’d acquire nerves of steel. And then, when I was finding it impossible to write during those months of inner turmoil, he set me a specific task: he sent me off to look at villas, cottages and small farms. I was told I should buy something else, a place where I could write and that would give us a project to work on. I protested that I had no more money and that I needed to sort out the business with the Sponars first, but to no avail: he was unrelenting. He insisted that I should buy something, and so in the end I did. I have already written about this in another book.78 And he took it upon himself to arrange the business with the Sponars, even turning it into a victory of sorts for me. He came up with a very simple idea, which neither I nor any lawyer had thought of: he went and sold on my mortgages to someone else. Yes, I lost money on the deal, and it was not exactly chicken feed either, but at least I was no longer tied to this beastly property. For the Sponars the sale had one very disagreeable consequence. Hitherto, needless to say, they had never had any intention of paying me interest on the mortgages; they had simply pocketed my rent and lived very well on it. And schmuck that I was, I was powerless to do anything about it. But a big bank, even under the Nazi regime, is not powerless: the back interest now had to be paid and the ongoing interest payments had to be kept up, and all the rent money I paid to the Sponars now went to the bank to cover these costs.

  Meanwhile the twins had been born, and the younger of the two girls died a few hours after the birth. There was a very specific medical reason for it, which had nothing at all to do with the agitation and stresses suffered during the pregnancy; and yet I was never able to let go completely of the idea that the Sponars were partially responsible for this misfortune, the Sponars and everything that went with them – the hated brownshirts and the protective custody and my wife’s long trek through the night to reach the little town of Fürstenwalde. It’s unfair to think like this, and I have no evidence to support such a view, but I still say: they are partly responsible. Things would not have worked out this way, and our little girl would still be alive today, if we had been allowed to carry on living in peace and contentment, if this wretched Nazi takeover hadn’t occurred!

  In the meantime we’d found the house in the country79 where we wanted to live from now on, a secluded house by the water, and now it was a matter of retrieving our furniture and other things that were still being held by the Sponars as ‘security’ for their claims. Here too our friend Peter Suhrkamp proved to be our saviour. He boldly drove back to our old village to conduct negotiations, and instead of going to see the poor ‘fellow German national’ whom I had so wronged, he went straight to the man who really mattered, the building contractor Gröschke. That was a nerve-wracking day for us! We could not relax at all, I for one was pacing up and down the whole time, I couldn’t settle to anything, and pestered my tired and sickly wife with a thousand fears and misgivings. I pictured our negotiator already under arrest, and could well imagine the evil and malicious Gröschke, how furious he must be about the sneaky sale of the mortgages! The waiting was agony . . .

  Then our friend returned, and as was his wont, he told us nothing at first, but instead made very free with his criticisms, particularly of me. He had already heard from the nurse how restless I had been, how I had been pestering my wife, and also that I’d been drinking alcohol again, and now I really got it in the neck! It was a case of once a teacher, always a teacher with him, and he could be really acerbic and downright scathing when playing that part. Sometimes I fought back, because it really went against the grain, as a forty-year-old man, to be told off like a naughty schoolboy! But on this occasion I kept my mouth firmly shut, since any argument on my part would have just delayed his report on what he had accomplished. And so after we had been hauled over the coals and given a thorough drubbing, he finally got round to telling us what had happened.

  (29.IX.44.) It had all gone remarkably well, as it turned out. The sale of the mortgages and the resulting loss of the rent payments had not caused tempers to flare, as I had feared, but had made them pause and reflect. They were prepared to make the best of a bad job and negotiate. And so they had talked money, finally agreeing on a figure that satisfied all outstanding claims from the Sponars and secured the release of my furniture. It was still extortion, it was still an injustice, and it was still a tidy sum; but it was something we could live with, viewing it as the penalty to be paid for an act of great folly.

  And then I see before me the bright, sunny summer morning: the stunted pine trees through which my wife once fled through the night are already giving off a subtle scent of resin. The two brightly painted removal vans come to a halt on the brown gravel road in front of the villa. The removal men are carrying the items of furniture out of the house one by one. Inside the packer is going about his business – this is just a removal job like any other for him, with nothing to indicate the story that lies behind it. The Sponars are nowhere to be seen. My presence is completely superfluous, but my friend Peter Suhrkamp insisted that I should be here, that I should show my face here again, for the sake of the removal men, but also for myself. As I said: once a teacher, always a teacher, and one has to do one’s homework, however tiresome it might be. My homework was to show my face here again. And now comes the hardest and most hateful part of all! He taps me on the shoulder: ‘Right, then. Let’s go!’

  ‘Fine’, I say, throwing away my half-smoked cigarette and lighting up another one immediately. We start walking. ‘Take it easy’, says Peter Suhrkamp, ‘He won’t arrest you a second time!’

  ‘No, no’, I reply. ‘Of course not.’

  We go into the house, the pretentious product of a country builder’s fancy. We enter a room that is half parlour, with upholstered seating, and half office, with a roller blind. I am introduced to the tall man with the curiously small, hard head. He greets me pointedly with a ‘Heil Hitler!’ I return the greeting, cursorily. Mr Gröschke is in his shirtsleeves, the sleeves of his brown shirt. ‘Time to count out the cash, Fallada’, says Peter Suhrkamp. And to the local Party branch leader: ‘Well, it’s all turned out a bit differently from what you expected, Mr Gröschke.’

  This is a direct challenge, but Gröschke replies matter-of-factly: ‘We’ll be converting the first floor and the attic into small apartments, and that way the house will cover the interest payments.’

  ‘And you’ll get a nice little contract out of it’, replies Peter Suhrkamp with a grin. For a moment they both look at each other, and then they both smile. A very knowing smile. ‘Oh well’, says Mr Gröschke, ‘when it’s for a friend – !’ He quickly counts the banknotes, nods and puts them in a small cashbox. Somewhat surprisingly he then goes on: ‘Why shouldn’t one do business with a friend occasionally – ?’ They smile once more; I am quite certain that the Sponars won’t get to see much of my money. But that’s the kind of man he was. This was the man at whose bidding I was supposed to be shot ‘while trying to escape’, who had caused us so much anguish, who had made our lives a misery for a while. That was him. A kind of vulture – with a small, shrivelled head and a long, thin, wrinkly neck. ‘Well now, was that so bad?’ Peter Suhrkamp asks me, when we are standing outside again on the sunlit street. ‘Was it worth staying at home on that account? You’d have felt ashamed of yourself for the rest of your life, Fallada!’ I say nothing.

  We stay and watch the brightly painted furniture vans start up, the road surface is too soft, they need to be towed off. But then they are on the metalled road to Fürstenwalde, where the contents are to be shipped on to Mahlendorf.80 The little village of Berkenbrück with the Sponars and its brownshirts is finally behind me. And in Mahlendorf we’ll go ab
out things very differently. There we’ll get in with the local community leaders and Party bigwigs from day one! (How that turned out we would learn to our cost in due course!)

  The months passed and we were now living in Mahlendorf. A year went by, and we were well into the second year, still living in Mahlendorf, happy for the most part . . . We had almost forgotten the little village of Berkenbrück and the Sponars. Sometimes, when I was out walking with the dogs, it seemed almost incredible that we once lived in a house overlooking the Spree, and that river steamers used to sound their horns beneath our windows. Our son had long since forgotten it all. And then we got a reminder. A letter with a black border arrived in the post: an actual obituary notice. ‘He has passed away in his 80th year, Emil Sponar’, etc., etc. ‘“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall see God.” In profound sorrow, Friederike Sponar.’

  However, this news did not reach us from the little village of Berkenbrück, it came from Berlin, from the east end of the city, and one of those long, overcrowded streets that are swarming with people like a beehive swarming with bees in the summer. Yes, of course: the safeguard against foreclosure had been abolished, the Sponars were not able to carry on living in a comfortable villa at the expense of their creditors; in their old age they had to move to a place where people lived cheek by jowl. Should we pity them? Do we have to? The card landed in the wastepaper basket – the Sponars meant nothing to us any more. They had hurt us very deeply once, but that was forgotten now. There is so much one has to forget in this life! Rest in peace, old man!

  Four more weeks passed, and then another letter with a black border arrived in the post. Could it be that the queen had followed her husband so quickly to the grave? But no, she was still alive, in fact she was writing to us, writing to us in her large, firm handwriting. We had offended her: ‘I have waited week after week for a word of condolence for the passing of my dear husband . . . He was a good man, he meant well by you. What he did was his duty, as a loyal follower of the Führer . . .’