A Stranger in My Own Country

  The lascivious snoopers held out at the window from 9.30 in the evening until 4.30 in the morning; even when the lights had gone out they stayed on – for there were still words to be heard, kisses to be counted and sighs to be recorded. The mayor justified this refusal to leave by claiming that he intended to confront the two adulterous soldiers who were abusing the wives of fighting men, and report them to their commanding officer. But when the two soldiers appeared at first light and hurried off through the village towards their estate, our hero, needless to say, didn’t even have the courage to go up and speak to them. Instead he comforted himself and the others waiting with him with the thought that at least they knew who was involved, and that it was perhaps best not to get into an altercation right now, at this early hour of the morning. If the story so far gives ample insight into the dark depths of this exceptionally nasty character, then what he did next must condemn him even in the eyes of those whom he represented: the Party faithful. Or it should have: but they kept him on and allowed him to operate – to the greater glory of the Führer and the Party. The thing is, Stork did not summon the women to him and give them a warning, but left them to find out about the nocturnal spying activities from village gossip. Instead of speaking to them, he sat down and wrote a long letter to the husband serving at the front, in which he ‘felt duty-bound’ to inform him of his young wife’s behaviour, taking care to assure him that he was not just passing on idle gossip, but that he, the mayor of the village, had personally witnessed these things. What the poor fellow, who was in love with his wife and fighting for his life on the Eastern front, went through when he read this letter we shall never know. But he was killed seven or eight weeks later. In the end, what dealt him the mortal blow was not a Russian bullet but the unbelievably cruel letter from the Nazi mayor; his wife heard nothing more from him after he received that letter. Vicious and cowardly people have always existed in the world, but it is the peculiar prerogative of the Nazi Party to have deliberately used such people as an instrument of their rule, promoting them to high office and inciting them to enslave their fellow citizens, giving them encouragement and rewards. Filth at the top and filth at the bottom, and everything plastered with empty slogans in which divine providence features prominently.

  My family and I would have got off too lightly if Stork had been content to leave it at the minor torments I mentioned earlier. I hadn’t spoken to him for ages, and if there was any business between us, my wife took care of it. I knew he hated me, and he had said often enough that he would get me one day. Fate dealt him one or two very good cards, and for weeks and months on end it looked as though I really was done for. During the war I had taken on an old gardener,159 a man of nearly seventy, but still very glad of the work, well recommended by his former employers and personable enough in his demeanour. For a while things went very well with this man, we were well satisfied on both sides, and my wife and I were already saying how fortunate we were to have found such a good worker – when the problems began. The old gardener seemed to have taken against one of our young girls, and every time she brought him his meal there was always something wrong; sometimes he claimed he’d been given margarine instead of butter, and then the complaint was that she’d eaten the salami off his plate. (Which didn’t make a lot of sense, since she had access to the whole salami, and therefore hardly needed to help herself to the slices on his piece of bread.) A few days later he had to wait five minutes for his supper, but instead of waiting he left and went home hungry. Next morning he showered me with angry reproaches. I let him carry on working and going without food. I tried to reassure him, and I succeeded once, twice; but the third time there were angry words from me too, he threatened me with a mattock, and I fired him on the spot. He went straight to the mayor and denounced me. He accused me of a whole series of offences and crimes contrary to wartime economic regulations: I was said to have claimed double my allocation of ration cards, bought and sold grain illegally, obtained coal entitlements by fraud – there were eight charges in all.

  When this war began, my wife and I, who had both gone hungry in the previous war, had sworn that we would do everything possible in this war, including things that were strictly forbidden, in order to put food on the table for our children and ourselves, and that’s exactly what I had done. It was not my war they were fighting, I did not wish Hitler’s armies to be victorious, so I had not the slightest reason to respect the economic needs of this war. In short, the old snooper and spy had observed correctly: I had indeed committed all the offences and crimes that were now laid at my door, and a long prison or jail sentence now seemed certain. I need hardly add that these denunciations were grist to the mayor’s mill. He sprang into action, interrogated half the village, and told everyone that Fallada was now going to jail. But I had not been idle myself, having got wind of this denunciation almost before it happened. I had spoken to my suppliers and agreed on our stories: we admitted everything that could not be denied, but contrived to cloak it all with a mantle of innocence. Meanwhile I had written to the old gardener’s previous employers and asked for information about him – something I really should have done before hiring him. What lay behind those glowing references, it now turned out, were sundry attempts to offload a vexatious employee onto others by singing his praises. Every time he had been dismissed for making defamatory allegations; every time he had conceived a furious hatred for some female or other; every time he had harboured absurd suspicions against these girls or women; and every time he had ended up, as a long-standing Party member, by denouncing his employer to the authorities. The surmise of one particular employer, that the old man was suffering from advanced hardening of the cerebral arteries and was half-cracked, was particularly opportune: I made application for the ‘sick’ informer to be examined by the local medical officer.

  I’ve told far too many stories already, so I won’t go into great detail again. Suffice it to say that the battle went on for years, with interrogations, reports, house searches, claims and counterclaims. I fought the battle with utter determination, not for a single moment deterred by the thought that I was indeed guilty according to the strict letter of the law. I saw myself as innocent, and the laws passed by this criminal government could never have any authority whatsoever over me. By their definition, what I thought, and often enough said, ranked as high treason, and yet I knew that I was a decent man and a better German than the lot of them. But more than anything I did not want to hand them the right to haul me up before their courts as a delinquent caught in the act, to pass sentence on me in the name of a fraudulent legal system, and to condemn me. But ultimately – and this is perhaps what gave me the most strength – I was determined never to give my hated enemy, this mayor Stork, the satisfaction of seeing me laid low, brought down by his own hand! I went through many bitter times in this long battle, I lay awake brooding at night, I spent hours pacing up and down in my room working out my next moves. And throughout that time, with this sword hanging over my head, I blithely carried on supplying the needs of my smallholding by illegal means, under the spying eyes of half the village, I ran rings around these idiots, and refused to back off an inch. And what was the final outcome? On all eight counts the charges against me were dropped, either because I had done absolutely nothing illegal, or because nothing could be proved against me. All I got was a fine of fifty Reichsmarks for some technical violation. Stubborn as an ox, I even went and objected to this fine. And I won – the fine was revoked too. Oh how I laughed – and with what feelings of triumph I gazed into the jaundiced countenance of our mayor, too shamefaced to look me in the eye! I may not be the stuff of which soldiers in the field are made, but I can fight my wars and win my battles, in my own way.

  (6.X.44.) We Germans felt the war in our bones long before it came. We kept on hoping that it could still be avoided, but somehow we never quite dared to believe it. It was already obvious before 1939 that Hitler had come to the end of his work-creation program. The Wehrmacht was now fully arm
ed and equipped, and the countless factories with their vast numbers of workers would have to shut down, and unemployment would return, unless something new turned up. But what could that something new be? The something new that occurs to rulers in such situations is actually something very old, namely war, the father of all things, that insatiable destroyer that must be constantly fed – with work, with blood, with tears. What else was Hitler going to think of? Something really new? He never had a new idea in his life, his whole Party and its program was cribbed and cobbled together from the Fascism of Stalin and the Bolshevism of Russia. And the original mind of our brilliant Führer failed again when it came to solving the problem of unemployment: all he could come up with was war. One recalls the various stages along the way: the militarization of the Rhineland, the annexation of Austria, the Sudetenland adventure, Czechoslovakia. Each time he declared himself satisfied, only to come back with fresh demands. He wanted war – at any price. How he must have raged in his heart when people kept on giving in to him!

  From the beginning I was very pessimistic. And so were many others. I recall one evening in Berlin when we’d been invited to the house of a doctor.160 We talked about the future of Germany, and the spectre of the coming war weighed upon us like a dark shadow; even back then we were all certain that Germany would be defeated. (Evil cannot triumph.) What would become of the fatherland that we still loved so dearly? Memories of the occupation of the Ruhr and the excesses of the French161 were still fresh in our minds, and the thought of the Russians with their primitive standard of living still made us feel very uneasy – little suspecting that in a few years’ time Hitler’s Blitzkriege would send our own standard of living plummeting to an all-time low. We talked it all over this way and that, mapping out the future we dreamt of. And we hoped for the future we wanted for Germany and for all true Germans. A journalist known for his caustic wit raised his index finger and whispered: ‘One must always be prepared for the worst: we might lose the war and keep the Führer!’ We laughed heartily. Then we agreed that the most desirable outcome, for us North Germans at least, would be to become a British mandated territory. The British would not interfere with the real substance of our cultural life. We would have to work hard and go without a lot of things, that much was clear. But it would be bearable. We would be more free under the rule of the British than under Hitler’s brownshirts. It’s strange when I think back to that evening, how we really were all of one mind. But when the war broke out in earnest, and the fast-moving campaigns in Poland, France and the Balkans were under way, and the radio carried ‘special bulletins’ almost daily about the latest brilliant successes of our armies, most people just rolled over. They listened as if besotted to these siren strains, forgetting completely that if these conquests ever ended in final victory, their lives would not be freer as a result, and the only beneficiaries would be the Hitler elite. Suddenly they believed every word of the official announcements, and argued passionately against me when I pointed out that the propaganda of Dr Goebbels was unlikely to be more truthful in time of war than it was in peacetime. It took several more years of war before these besotted dupes did another about-turn, and it was actually the increasingly heavy air raids on German cities that undermined their morale. But they now disowned the view that the best outcome for Germany would be to become a mandated territory under British rule. They were ashamed of such thoughts; somehow it was all right to think such things in peacetime, but not now, in time of war, when German boys were shedding their blood in every country across Europe. I have never shared this woolly, sentimental view. I wanted the Nazis to be defeated, and the sooner the better. Under no circumstances did I want Germany to become the dominant power in Europe: with the rise of National Socialism the country had just given another spectacular demonstration of its political immaturity. A nation that fell for every beguiling slogan without thinking for itself was not yet ready to become the leader of other nations.

  But since Hitler’s power could only be broken by losing the war – the Germans would never rid themselves of this tyrant by their own efforts – every additional drop of blood that was shed at the front brought the desired goal a fraction closer. The words of a Viennese film director,162 spoken at the time of our terrible losses at Stalingrad, sounded shocking in their brutality, and yet he got it exactly right: ‘A lot more blood needs to be spilt yet! Whole divisions must perish! Every man who dies out there is one less follower for the Führer! And if they are all killed, I for one shall rejoice.’

  Around the time of the Sudetenland adventure163 I was ordered to report for a medical examination at my local army recruiting office – the first time since 1914. I was determined not to play along with this soldiering lark. The army medical was very thorough as far as the externals were concerned: height and weight were measured, every missing or damaged tooth was carefully noted, and a painstaking check was made for haemorrhoids. The actual medical examination took much less time. The doctor, barely more than a boy, just placed his stethoscope on my chest and listened to my heartbeat. That was it. I took it upon myself to point out that I suffered with my nerves. He waved a dismissive hand: ‘Not a problem!’ I ploughed on regardless, and told him that in the First World War I had been discharged from the service after eleven days as permanently unfit for duty. He asked me: ‘What are you – a writer? You’ll be amazed how much good physical activity will do you. We don’t recognize nervous conditions! Next!’ I had to leave, and the note in my service record book said ‘Fit for restricted duties’. I was determined not to accept this finding. I was working for some film company or other at the time, and I persuaded them to give me a certificate signed with the name ‘Dr Goebbels’, confirming that my work was important for the war effort and requesting that I be exempted for the time being from all military service. I submitted this certificate along with a request for a second examination by a medical specialist, citing my nervous disorder. And sure enough, I was called in for a second examination. The doctor appointed to carry it out was, if anything, even younger than his predecessor, and he was certainly no specialist. He confirmed as much himself, being somewhat more communicative than his predecessor. ‘We don’t carry out any examinations other than the purely physical one’, he explained. ‘But surely’, I said, ‘that means you’ll be conscripting schizophrenics, epileptics, paraplegics and God knows who else!’

  ‘So what?’ he replied, without missing a beat. ‘Some of them turn out to be excellent soldiers. And the rest, who are no good for anything, we just send home again. It makes no difference!’ I took the view that it made quite a lot of difference, but I could see there was no future in arguing the point. I later discovered that people with hereditary diseases and those who had been sterilized by law were also conscripted into the military; although they were not worthy to beget children for the fatherland, they were welcome to die for the fatherland! I took my old service record book164 out of my pocket and showed the doctor the entry confirming that I had been discharged after just eleven days of service, and had never had an army medical since. ‘And I think you’ll find that I haven’t got any healthier in the intervening twenty-five years.’ He just smiled, said vaguely: ‘We’ll see!’ and set about examining me physically. He conducted a painstaking check for haemorrhoids, then placed his stethoscope against my chest and listened to my heart. His face took on an unexpected expression, he listened more closely, and then he murmured: ‘You’ve got a serious heart defect!’ He reeled off a few numbers to his clerk. And with that I was dismissed. I had to fetch my papers from the local army recruiting office. In the orderly room all the young sergeants and NCOs had a go at me. It seemed that my request for a follow-up examination by a specialist had touched a collective raw nerve. Here was one more thing, apparently, that was no longer allowed in Nazi Germany. ‘You’ll never be signed off unfit!’ shouted a young sergeant. ‘You’re as fit as a fiddle, you are!’ I really should have congratulated him on his X-ray vision, which had obviously discovered this throu
gh my clothing, but fortunately the door to the next room opened at this moment, and the major in charge of the recruiting office, disturbed by all the noise, stuck his head round the door and roared ‘Quiet!!’ Then he pointed to me: ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘He’s the one who requested the follow-up examination, sir!’

  ‘I see!’ For some time I was fixed with a rigid stare through the doorway; only the head of the major had joined us in the orderly room, his body stayed behind in the holy of holies. Then he waved to me: ‘Come inside!’ I was even permitted to take a seat in front of his desk. ‘So you write novels and films?’ he asked after scrutinizing me afresh. ‘I’ve never heard of you.’