A Stranger in My Own Country

  ‘No harm done, Major!’ I reassured him.

  He searched among the papers on his desk. As he searched he looked up again and asked: ‘So is it worth it? Can you make a living from it?’

  ‘Oh yes, Major!’ I said. ‘You can – or at least, I can.’

  ‘Curious’, he said. ‘Very curious. I’d never have thought it.’ Finally he found the piece of paper he was looking for, I recognized it straightaway: it was my certificate with the signature of Dr Goebbels. ‘See here’, said the major, tapping the sheet of paper with his hand. ‘What your Dr Goebbels writes here is of no interest to us in the Wehrmacht. As far as we’re concerned, he can write twenty letters, and we’ll put you in the army all the same. We’re not a bit interested in Dr Goebbels.’ The major’s voice was now sounding really annoyed; Dr Goebbels did not seem to be regarded with any great fondness in the Wehrmacht. Thank God, an orderly now brought in my service record book, with the note on the result of my follow-up examination. The major glanced at it. ‘Fit for restricted duties’, he read. ‘Well, that settles it as far as we in the Wehrmacht are concerned. You won’t get called for another medical unless there’s a war.’ I felt happy. The fact that the latest examination had shown that I had a serious heart defect didn’t trouble me at all. Prior to this I had had the healthiest heart in the world, and as I soon established through a private follow-up examination, I still did. So the question is, did the young doctor make a genuine mistake, or did he make an intentional mistake in order to do me a favour? In any event, the Wehrmacht was no longer my concern. ‘I expect you’re pleased that you don’t have to join the army?’ the major suddenly asked me. He sounded quite kindly, more curious than anything. ‘I’d have been nothing but trouble, Major’, I replied. ‘I’ll never make a decent soldier as long as I live.’ ‘Curious! Very curious!’ he said, and signed my service record book, deep in thought. ‘Someone who’d rather write books than be a soldier – I’d never have thought it!’

  He looked at me again, shaking his head. He gave me my service record book, and even shook my hand as we parted. To him I must have seemed a very rare and unusual specimen of mankind, a sort of museum curiosity.

  A few years passed before I was called before another army selection board, and by now there really was a war on – in fact we were well into the war and it was 1944. I was told to report for a medical examination. This had already happened a few times, but so far I had managed to avoid it by reporting myself as ‘sick’. But now I wanted to get this examination behind me once and for all. This constant threat hanging over me – of having to join up and fight – was irritating me more and more the longer it went on. I knew – everyone knew – that these army medicals were just a sham. The army needed more men, and it didn’t care where they came from or what condition they were in. This new round of army medicals had already been dubbed ‘the heroes’ review board’. I was more determined than ever not to be reviewed as a hero. At the time I was in a bad way, mentally as well as physically. I looked terrible and I had lost a lot of weight. Nonetheless I decided to make a special effort for the army doctor this time and to prep myself for a diagnosis of ‘heart defect’. I still had a few caffeine tablets, which I swallowed before reporting for the medical. At the door of the school where we had to assemble I met the army doctor who was conducting the examinations. We shook hands warmly. ‘So you’re one of my victims today!’ he exclaimed with a laugh. I entered the classroom and began mechanically to undress. ‘I’m screwed!!’ I thought to myself. ‘I’m screwed even before the examination begins!’ The army doctor had been our family GP some years earlier, and we had not parted on good terms. As sometimes happens, doctor and patient had disagreed slightly over the treatment for an illness. ‘He’s never forgiven you’, I said to myself. ‘Now he’s going to get his revenge. It’s so easy for him: heroes’ review board!’ And already I saw myself as a raw recruit, doing things I hated, bawled at, hounded from pillar to post . . . We were all ‘old’ men gathered for this medical, all of us over fifty. Damn it, we weren’t exactly a bunch of Greek gods! I simply couldn’t imagine how these emaciated or overweight figures could be turned into soldiers. Yet I learned afterwards that of the hundred or more men who were examined during those days, only four were rejected as completely unfit for duty; all the rest were ‘fit for restricted duties’ or at least serviceable in some capacity. I entered the room where the draft board was sitting. At one end of the room was the board itself, consisting of officers, clerks, a few journalists, the mayors of the villages whose men were up before the board. At the other end of the room was the examining doctor. I had to wait, sitting half-naked on a bench. I noticed that our miller, a jaundiced, liverish man, was wearing a brightly coloured lady’s bathing costume. Ah yes – the wearing of bathing costumes is permitted for ‘awkward’ people, and since our miller has never been swimming in his life, he has probably borrowed his wife’s. For a moment I had to laugh: he just looked too comical, this man with thin, weedy arms and a yellow bird-like head, and below that the blue and red bathing costume, much too big for him of course! But then I grew serious again, and morose. ‘I’ve had it’, I thought to myself, and eyed the doctor with aversion. ‘He’ll check me out good and proper!’ My heart, stimulated by the caffeine, was pounding like a trip hammer, it was really bothersome. ‘What’s up with you?’ asked the doctor, looking at me askance in a most friendly way through his big, rimless glasses. ‘Oh’, I answered without thinking, allowing my bad mood to get the better of me. ‘I’m done for, I’m sick of my life.’ The doctor looked at me for a moment, then nodded. ‘We’re rejecting this man’, he said, looking across to his clerk. ‘Totally unfit for duty.’

  By now my heart was beating so loudly that everyone in the room must have heard it. My precious caffeine – I could have saved it for when I had some difficult work to do, he didn’t even listen to my heart! Discharged as unfit – so we’d managed to get out of that war too! Terrific! And when the next one comes along they won’t even bother with me. A decent fellow after all, the doctor! He didn’t take his revenge – some people are more decent than you think, but it’s rare, very rare. Usually it’s the other way round.

  I stood before the colonel, the chairman of the heroes’ review board. He was writing something in my service record book. ‘So here we have Mr Fallada’, he said, and gave me a friendly look. ‘Little Man – What Now?’? I nodded and was free to go. I no longer had a service record book, I had finally been written off by the German Wehrmacht. Half an hour later I was sitting in the hotel of our local small town, demolishing a plate of roast beef with raisin sauce accompanied by a youngish Bordeaux. And sitting at the large table across from me were the gentlemen from the draft board, also eating and drinking. I caught the doctor’s eye, and raised my glass in greeting. He returned the greeting, smiling through his rimless glasses. It occurred to me that I had deceived the good doctor: I wasn’t sick of my life after all, or at any rate, life felt good again now. Not bad at all, despite the fact that we were now in the fifth year of the war.

  Back before in the last days of August 1939, when the dark storm clouds were gathering ever more menacingly over our heads, our eldest son, a boy of ten, was in Berlin. The easy-going teaching practices of his Nazi teachers had left him insufficiently prepared for the grammar school entrance exam, so we had had to send him to a school in Berlin for a year, where the teachers were rather more interested in their job and less interested in the gossip on the streets. But as what we all feared came to seem ever more inevitable, we decided to fetch the boy home to us for the time being – and never mind his schooling. Who could tell how things would turn out? My wife and I got the car out of the garage and made our last journey in peacetime. It was a lovely late summer day, the roads were almost empty, and we passed very few cars coming the other way. In the villages we saw people standing around by the public loudspeakers; as we passed they stared at us in silence, with an air of disapproval. No doubt the ever-diligent Joseph
Goebbels had put the word out again: ‘the entire German nation is gathered around the loudspeakers’, and here we were again, conspicuously failing to gather. We were always stepping out of line. We were never in the vanguard of ‘national comrades’.

  But as we drove through the open countryside outside the villages, where the fields lay so quiet and deserted, and saw the stooks of corn standing there, waiting to be harvested, the sky stretching away so high and blue above us and the sun shining so warm and bright; as we saw the woods standing there in solemn silence, with only the warning cry of the jay occasionally shattering the stillness; and as we drove over bridges and saw the little rivers and streams below us, the clear waters purling swiftly over the gravel bed – it seemed to us impossible that this beautiful world might at any moment be plunged into a nightmare of blood and destruction! We looked at each other and said: ‘Maybe it will pass us by again!’ We couldn’t believe it, but we wanted so much to hope again . . . This peaceful, beautiful world – why, oh why? The earth has room enough for us all – why, oh why? ‘But what if it doesn’t pass us by?’ we said. ‘Then we won’t let this war speak for us two’, we promised each other. ‘If at all possible, we’ll carry on living as if the war didn’t exist.’ We looked at each other again, and made each other a firm promise. It wasn’t our fault that things worked out differently, that the war dragged us both in and changed us, that it destroyed our beautiful, peaceful world . . . Not our fault. Nobody can live through five years of war, and under a regime like that, without being changed. In the later years of the war especially, when the air raids got so bad, I sometimes played a kind of game, trying to imagine, as I was falling asleep, how we would have survived the war if I had foreseen what was to come . . . In my dream I construct a passageway from the cellar of our house in Mahlendorf, descending deep down into the earth, and I seal it off with nine secret doors, invisible even to the most practised eye, like something out of a classic Edgar Wallace novel.165 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. The walls are lined from top to bottom with books, of course, my beloved books, but there are also cupboards containing games for the children, there’s a sewing corner for my wife, complete with sewing machine, and there’s an open shelf with a huge stack of crossword puzzle magazines specially for my mother. But as a room with no windows would remind us constantly that we are living here deep in the bowels of the earth, which over time would be likely to affect our mood adversely, windows have naturally been provided. One of them looks out onto Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, another overlooks the square in front of Hamburg’s Town Hall, and another has a view of the Outer Alster as seen from the Lombardsbrücke causeway. At the push of a button the people and cars and cyclists in these little panoramas come to life and start to move, the white steamers on the Alster ply busily from landing stage to landing stage, and the white sails of the yachts are unfurled. But perhaps the best thing is a set of three adjacent windows that house large aquariums. Wondrous fish, shimmering and brightly coloured, are slowly gliding between green water plants, a lobster is scurrying across the sand floor towards his hiding place in a pile of rocks, and sea anemones unfold their naked life. When we tire of all these sights, we make our own night; we draw the yellow silk curtains shut, and now the children are allowed to read for half an hour before they go to bed. Naturally arrangements have been made to ensure that the air in our subterranean home is not bad or stale: a ventilation system designed to introduce fresh air has one pipe reaching far out into the beech forest of the river island, where the intake is concealed among boulders in some inaccessible spot. The pipe brings fresh, clean forest air into our quarters. But we can also sniff the breeze that blows higher up: another pipe terminates on the highest hill in our area, hidden in an impenetrable thicket of blackthorn. The hill is only 126 metres high, but it often blows quite hard up there: we are bound to catch a little bit of that breeze down there in our home. And of course we have our cosy bedrooms down there, a fully electric kitchen, and then a whole series of storerooms, containing enough supplies for the next ten years: food, clothing, wine and tobacco, shoes, including things in larger sizes to allow for the children’s growth. Naturally we have our own electricity generating plant and endless fuel bunkers for the diesel oil that drives the generators. The drainage system posed quite a few challenges, but this problem was also solved. We don’t have just the one exit, you see, leading up to the cellar of our house – we have two other exits, for use in emergencies. One of them leads up to a sandpit, ending in a wall of sand just a metre and a half thick which only has to be shovelled away, and then we are outside. But the other emergency exit climbs gradually uphill and brings us to the lake, terminating in a small dock where a fast motorboat is moored ready for our escape; the gate that opens onto the water is possibly even more cunningly concealed than the door in our cellar, and underneath it runs our drainage pipe, which discharges into the water at the bottom of the lake. Our sewage is pumped through this pipe under pressure. It’s all been carefully planned and worked out down to the last detail, and we would want for nothing even if the war were to last for ten years. There was no need to cut corners on the cost, so I was generous and set aside no less than 20 million of my own money for the fitting-out of our subterranean shelter.

  And now imagine that on the first day of the war the Fallada family – father, mother and children – had shut up their house and announced that they were going on their travels. They had disappeared, lost in the upheaval of the great German war, nowhere to be found. Inside their house a layer of dust collects on the furniture, the garden is overgrown with weeds, and in the yard the grass is sprouting in the cracks between the flagstones. ‘Where can the Falladas be?’ people are asking. And the answer will be: ‘They must have fled abroad!’

  In reality, though, we are installed in our underground palace, and it should not be supposed that we are living a life of idleness down there! On the contrary, we have plenty to do. Each day is completely filled. While my wife has more than enough to do keeping the place clean, cooking the meals, washing and mending clothes, I’m in charge of the technical side of things. I look after the electricity generators, get the pump going, fire up the dynamo – and when all that is done I go into the passageway outside the windows and aerate the aquariums, feed the fish and dust off the Outer Alster with all its bits and pieces. Meanwhile the older children are sweeping the passageways, and when they have finished that they sit in the motorboat and tell each other stories about the world outside, where they once lived, and which is gradually becoming a fading memory for them as the months go by. They say words like ‘sun’ and ‘moon’, and tell each other everything they know about them. Then I come and turn them out and fetch them into the living room, where it’s time for school lessons, and as the years pass I find it harder to explain to them all the things that are out there in the world: trees, and countries, and oceans. I look at our youngest, so absorbed in playing with his toys down here, who can no longer remember the world up above, and I wonder how I shall teach him, my very own Kaspar Hauser . . . Such is our life, and the months slip by, and we try to forget that a jinxed war is raging outside. Once a year, though, we put a mild sleeping draught in the children’s soup at supper-time, and when they are sleeping soundly we two parents creep quietly up the stairs to the cellar door; there we wait, listening for any sound, and then we gently open the door and enter the cellar of our old house. The rats and mice scurry away, the floor is littered with dry leaves, blown in through a broken window by the wind, which rustle softly as we walk across the room. Cobwebs hang down before our eyes and get caught up in our hair. We climb the steps, but we do not enter the rooms where we once lived and were happy – we prefer not to see them in their present
sorry state. We step straight out into the yard, breathing in deep lungfuls of fresh air, which I have to say is sweeter than our filtered forest air down below, and for a long time we gaze up at the stars, twinkling and shining, and we feel our hearts beating and we whisper: ‘How lovely! How magnificent!’ Then we head on deeper into the dark, blacked-out village, and we find that nothing has changed, everything looks exactly the same as it did a year ago. We don’t see the war, don’t feel it, don’t taste it – only the blacked-out windows everywhere tell us that the war is still going on. We whisper quietly to each other, and ask ourselves if we are doing the right thing by robbing our children and ourselves of the chance to breathe freely and live a real life, keeping them in an artificial world with all these toys and gadgets. And then I remind my wife what kind of man our village schoolteacher is, and how he didn’t scruple to show photos of butchered Germans, murdered by the Poles, to eight- and ten-year-old children, photos full of shocking, hideous details, designed to teach the children to hate the Poles from an early age. ‘We’re protecting them from all that, and from much worse!’ say I. ‘But afterwards, will they be able to live in the other world again afterwards, when they’ve not stood up to the wind for so long, and not been hardened by any kind of resistance?’ says my wife. And we walk on, until we reach the other lake, and hear the waves lapping over the sand, while the wild ducks quack softly in the reeds. ‘It’s time to go back’, says Suse, and we wander back home through the sleeping village. We also go into the orchard – it’s autumn by now, and the village youngsters have actually left us some apples on our trees. We pick what we can, filling every pocket as well as Suse’s skirts. We make our way through the sleeping, echoing house, through the secret door, and down the steps again to our hidden home, our refuge from the war. At first the descent seems harder and harder with every step I take, it feels as if we are entering a prison. But then, as we stand beside our children’s beds while they are fast asleep, and as we place a few apples on the chair beside them, we just say: ‘This is the right thing to do! We’re saving them from so much!’ And then the next day, this glorious day, almost better than Christmas, when the children find the red-cheeked apples next to their beds, and the youngest one doesn’t even know that you’re supposed to eat it, and wants to play ball with it instead – he hasn’t seen fresh fruit before. We get all our food out of tins and jars and from various types of grains, and our vitamin requirements are supplied in the form of tablets, taken in accordance with a plan carefully drawn up by doctors. And then we have to explain to them that the apples are for eating, and we tell them about the gardens that grow in the light, about the wells, the rain, the sun, the bees that pollinate the flowers, about the clouds that sail across the land, and they listen intently to us as we listened to fairy stories when we were children. Now that is a very special day indeed. But sometimes when I am falling asleep I imagine other things entirely, as if to prove to myself that it is necessary to live like this in the bowels of the earth. I imagine that we cannot open the cellar door, something has wedged itself against it, and so we have to use the emergency exit to the lake. We then discover that not only our house but the whole village is burnt out and in ruins, abandoned by every living soul. And now begins a very different life for us and the children: we carry on living in our refuge, but we also live up above, among the abandoned ruins. We find a few animals that have been gassed: a goat, a few rabbits, some hens. But we have to keep a sharp lookout for enemy aircraft, and also for marauding gangs of people. Once we nearly get caught, at the last moment we manage to snatch our youngest away, almost under the noses of our pursuers, and escape down to our refuge. For weeks on end we dare not venture out again, because the search is on for the people who vanished so mysteriously.