A Stranger in My Own Country

  133. Alfred Rosenberg gave an address at the University of Halle on 4 November 1938 under the title ‘Ideology and doctrine’.

  134. In his principal work, published in 1930, Rosenberg elevates the myth of ‘blood purity’ to the status of National Socialist state religion; cf. note 46.

  135. Working title of the film Der höhere Befehl, made for Ufa in 1935 by Gerhard Lamprecht. Fallada is confusing this film, in which Wieman did not appear, with Operation Michael; cf. note 132.

  136. Identity unknown.

  137. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt; cf. note 95. The list of authors published by DVA included Ina Seidel, Josef Ponten, Jochen Klepper, Börries von Münchhausen and Detlev von Liliencron.

  138. The journalist and author Jochen Klepper (1903–1942); his book Der Vater. Roman des Soldatenkönigs [The Father. The Story of the Soldier King] was published by DVA in 1937 in two volumes. Klepper’s wife Hannelore and his two adoptive daughters were of Jewish origin; faced with the imminent deportation of one of the daughters, the family committed suicide on 11 December 1942.

  139. Gustav Kilpper was replaced in 1943 (?) by Joachim Schmidt; see Hans Fallada, Ewig auf der Rutschbahn. Briefwechsel mit dem Rowohlt Verlag, edited by M. Töteberg and S. Buck, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2008, p. 362.

  140. Probably Gertrud von Le Fort (1876–1971), whose novel Der Papst aus dem Ghetto. Die Legende des Geschlechts Pier Leone, published by Transmare Verlag in 1930, tells the story of the Jew Baruch Leone, who was baptized, and whose son Petrus became Pope Anaklet II in 1130.

  141. Das Märchen vom Stadtschreiber, der aufs Land flog [Sparrow Farm] was published by Rowohlt in 1935.

  142. Here Fallada is mistaken: the farmer Tamm character does not appear in Sparrow Farm, but in Altes Herz geht auf die Reise [Old Heart Goes on a Journey] (1936). It was because of this novel that Fallada was declared an ‘undesirable author’ – which is presumably why the manuscript had ‘ended up on somebody’s desk’ at the Propaganda Ministry.

  143. Cf. note 95.

  144. For his fiftieth birthday Fallada received ‘a drawing of the zodiac done for me by Kubin, with delicate pastel tinting, dominated by Leo the lion, my own birth sign’ (letter to Ernst Rowohlt, 26 July 1943; as quoted in: Hans Fallada, Ewig auf der Rutschbahn. Briefwechsel mit dem Rowohlt Verlag, edited by M. Töteberg and S. Buck, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2008, p. 361).

  145. Cf. note 139.

  146. The books in question were Die Stunde, eh’ du schlafen gehst [Before You Go to Sleep] (Goldmann Verlag, Munich 1954), Der Sohn des Staubes (published under the title Ein Mann will hinauf [A Man Wants to Get On] by Südverlag, Munich 1953) and Der Jungherr von Strammin [The Master of Strammin] (published under the title Junger Herr – ganz gross by Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 1965).

  147. Following the closure of Rowohlt Verlag, DVA refused to negotiate with Fallada, and so for the first time since 1919 he found himself without a publisher. In January 1944 he entered into discussions with the Dresden-based publishing house Wilhelm Heyne, and signed a contract with its publishing director Franz Schneekluth in the second week of March.

  148. Cf. note 146.

  149. In the summer of 1941 Fallada was gathering material in the Reich Ministry of Justice about the Jewish banking house Barmat und Kutisker, and a celebrated fraud case of the 1920s. When the Propaganda Ministry got wind of Fallada’s project, they gave him their official backing in June 1943. He talks about this in a letter to Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt of 11 August 1943: ‘[. . .] I fear that the novel’s point of view will not be what they are expecting.’ On 30 November 1944 he announces in a letter to his wife from the psychiatric prison at Neustrelitz-Strelitz that he finished the novel two days ago (Hans Fallada, Anna Ditzen, Wenn du fort bist, ist alles nur halb. Briefe einer Ehe, Berlin 2007, p. 424). According to Günter Caspar, Franz Schneekluth, the senior editor at Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, received the manuscript before the end of the war; see the ‘Nachwort’ by Günter Caspar in: Hans Fallada, Der Trinker/ Der Alpdruck, Berlin and Weimar 1987, pp. 563–76. The premises of the publishing house were destroyed during the bombing of Dresden on 13 February 1945. The Kutisker novel is thought to be lost.

  150. In the subsequent account of events in Mahlendorf (Carwitz), Fallada uses fictitious names for most of the places and persons mentioned.

  151. Dora Hertha Preisach (no biographical data available) typed up the manuscripts of Once a Jailbird in the autumn of 1933, Once We Had a Child in February 1934, and Old Heart Goes on a Journey in June 1935 in Carwitz. In the summer of 1935 she emigrated to Haifa with her father.

  152. Fallada’s portrayal of the bailiff character was based on Hans-Joachim Geyer (1901–1972), whom he had got to know in Radach in 1923; thereafter they exchanged letters and met up occasionally. Geyer visited Fallada for the last time in the Charité hospital in Berlin in December 1946.

  153. Nickname for Gustav Schwanecke, who was Fallada’s and Geyer’s employer in Radach.

  154. Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt: founded in 1932 as a local self-help association in Berlin, it grew to become the second-largest National Socialist mass organization. By 1943 it had some 17 million members.

  155. The ‘Blood Order’ was the highest decoration conferred by the NSDAP and was first awarded in 1923 to those who took part in the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich.

  156. The battle of Stalingrad began in August 1942 with the assault launched by the 6th Army, and ended early in 1943 with the encirclement and capitulation of the German forces.

  157. The first food rationing cards were distributed on 27 August 1939, just before the outbreak of war. They were used for the rationing of certain foodstuffs and other commodities.

  158. Richard Walther Darré (1895–1953) was the ‘Reich Farmworkers’ Leader’ and Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture from 1933 to 1942, head of the SS Central Office for Race and Resettlement from 1931 to 1938, and the author of numerous manifestos on National Socialist ‘blood and soil’ policy, including Neuadel aus Blut und Boden (1930). In 1932 he founded the monthly journal Deutsche Agrarpolitik (renamed Odal in 1939), in which he propagated his vision of a new ‘farming aristocracy’.

  159. Presumably the 72-year-old Mr Lamprecht, whom Fallada took on as a gardener in July 1942. He made a good impression at first, but was dismissed on 4 December 1942.

  160. Willi Burlage (1893?–1943), a friend from Fallada’s schooldays in Leipzig, had been director of the ‘Heidehaus’ sanatorium in Zepernick, just to the north of Berlin, since 1935. He treated Fallada in his clinic on a number of occasions between 1935 and 1940.

  161. When the Allied Reparations Commission discovered in December 1922 that Germany was in arrears with its reparations payments, the entire Ruhr region was occupied on 11 January 1923 by one Belgian and five French divisions. The occupying troops punished any breach of their regulations. The Reich government called for a campaign of passive resistance, but the economic and political repercussions were so devastating that this had to be suspended on 26 September 1923.

  162. Identity not established. From October 1941 to February 1942 Fallada was writing the screenplay Eroberung von Berlin for Wien-Film GmbH, a large Austrian film production company that came under Nazi control in 1937. Fallada met the head of production, Karl Hartl, at the end of November 1941 in Berlin; the production manager, Fritz Podehl, visited Fallada in Carwitz twice in October 1942. Although the screenplay was reworked several times, the film was never made: the book version appeared in 1953 under the title A Man Wants to Get On, published by Südverlag in Munich.

  163. The Munich Agreement (29 September 1938) provided for the cession of the Sudetenland to the German Reich, as demanded by Hitler. In return Britain and France guaranteed the continued existence of the rump Czechoslovak state. The Agreement lapsed with the entry of the Wehrmacht into Czechoslovakia (15 March 1939) and the establishment of the ‘Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’.

  164. Fallada was given his service record book when he was discharged from the 1
9th Saxon Supply Corps on 22 September 1914 as permanently unfit for military service.

  165. Edgar Wallace (1875–1932) is one of the most successful writers of crime fiction in English. His crime novels had been appearing in German translation since 1927.

  166. Cf. note 160.

  167. Elisabeth (Ibeth) Hörig (1888–1979), Fallada’s older sister, who was politically informed and – like her brother – hostile to the Nazis.

  168. The standard work by Cuno Horkenbach, Das deutsche Reich von 1918 bis heute, was published in 1930.

  169. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles (1919) Danzig with its surrounding territories was separated from the German Reich and on 15 November 1920 it was declared the Free City of Danzig. On 28 April 1939 Hitler announced in the Reichstag: ‘Danzig is a German city, and wants to be reunited with Germany.’

  A despatch from the house of the dead.

  Afterword

  It feels, he says, as if he is writing ‘in retrospect’, as if he is writing ‘in a time of peace’. While the bombs are falling in Berlin and houses are going up in flames, Hans Fallada is sitting in his cell in the Nazi custodial institution in Strelitz and writing a memoir that could cost him his life. With unflinching candour, caught up in his own contradictions, he relates his experiences in Nazi Germany. At the end these notes seem to him too slight, a failure even; the tone of them is too tame for what he has been through. But still: he has ‘written the worst of it out of my system’. So what are we to make of this despatch from the ‘house of the dead’?

  The Prison Diary from the autumn of 1944 is more than just an exercise in self-examination, more than just introspective monologue. It speaks to an imaginary reader, and makes use of all the literary devices that Hans Fallada the story-teller had at his disposal. For an important part of his attempt to process the past, not to say its underlying motivation, is the need to defend his own actions, his ‘inward emigration’.

  It is no coincidence that the opening scene reminds us straightaway of one of Fallada’s lighter novels. With practised skill the writer paints a picture of the high-spirited atmosphere in ‘Schlichters Wine Bar’. Into this cosy scene bursts the waiter who brings the fateful news that the Reichstag is on fire. It is 27 February 1933. The fascist character of the new regime is now laid bare. On the very next day the ‘Edict of the Reich President for the Protection of the Nation and the State’ suspended key articles of the constitution, and the constitutional state was irrevocably transformed into a police state, which took brutal action against its opponents. It was not long before National Socialist cultural policy was also put into effect. The ‘thorough moral cleansing of the body politic’ announced by Hitler meant in practice the suppression of an independent, free press. Once the press had been brought into line with Nazi doctrine, other measures against writers’ organizations soon followed. The ‘Schutzverband deutscher Schriftsteller’ (SDS – Association for the Protection of German Writers) was ‘purged’, and its members were henceforth required to proclaim allegiance to the National Socialist state. In July 1933 the SDS was subsumed into the newly founded ‘Reichsverband deutscher Schriftsteller’ (RDS – Reich Association of German Writers). The Reich Chamber Law of 22 September 1933 established the statutory basis for the regimentation of cultural life in general. Under Goebbels’ supervision the Reich Chamber of Culture, established under the aegis of the Propaganda Ministry in November 1933, would now decide who could work as an artist and who could not. Jews and political dissidents were no longer allowed to write for a living. The campaign of terror against writers unpopular with the regime had already taken on a new dimension with the burning of books on 10 May 1933. Among those whose books were burned were Anna Seghers, Lion Feuchtwanger, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Kurt Tucholsky, Sigmund Freud and many others. Hans Fallada was not on the list. Those who, like him, wished to remain in the country and continue to publish had to reach an accommodation with the powers that be – whether they liked it or not.

  The gaiety and bustle of ‘Schlichters Wine Bar’, the haunt of Berlin’s boheme, belonged to the past. As this opening scene already makes clear, Fallada treats his memories as material for literature, telling stories about ordinary people and the famous, creating characters, dialogue and scenes. The interspersed ‘separate entries’ are a repeated reminder of the conditions of his confinement and the emotional stress he is living under.

  In the autumn of 1944 Hans Fallada had reached the nadir of his existence. The most important wellsprings of his life were drying up: literary success, and his relationship with his wife Anna Ditzen. His drug addiction was getting the better of him again in a life that was gradually turning into a nightmare.

  In 1935, two years after they moved out into the country, the Nazis declared him an ‘undesirable writer’, following the publication of Once a Jailbird and Once We Had a Child. In 1938 Fallada was back on the blacklist again. The literary failures of the next few years did not leave him unscathed. ‘The dream of becoming a great artist is over’ was the bitter conclusion of a writer who had settled for churning out lightweight novels. In 1943 he lost his publisher, after nearly 25 years as one of his established authors. The many compromises, and the battles with the Nazi authorities, had left their mark.

  By the autumn of 1944 Carwitz, once an enchanted island in a ‘storm-tossed world’, had long since ceased to be an idyllic haven where he could work in peace. The war had come to this village too. The house afforded a refuge for Fallada’s mother, Elisabeth Ditzen, and a number of Anna’s relatives. The previous year Fallada had encouraged them to move in, but now he was developing an aversion to the many ‘strange faces’. He found an outlet for his anger by engaging in target practice in the garden. In the village, meanwhile, people were gossiping about an affair of the writer’s. In these notes Hans Fallada relates with brutal honesty and unconcealed hatred how the petty-mindedness and tale-telling of the villagers had poisoned his life over the years. He makes sure that the ‘informers and malicious gossips’ will not readily be forgotten. In contrast to the descriptions in Our Home Today, the book of ‘evasions’, the Prison Diary of 1944 has little to say about the joys of writing in leafy seclusion. The clashes with the Nazi bigwigs of the village and the constant run-ins with the hostile local farmers, all the disputes and legal proceedings going on year after year – these things made his everyday life a hell. And on top of all this Fallada now felt himself consigned to a ‘Strindbergian hell’ in his own home. His resentment against his wife of many years grew stronger. In the end he moved out of the house and into the gardener’s flat in the barn. And he agreed to a divorce. On 2 May 1944 the lawyer Dr Rehwoldt in Neustrelitz was instructed to act for him, and was simultaneously informed that the couple had reached a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’. They carried on living together on the farm in Carwitz, which remained home to their three children. On 5 July 1944 the marriage was dissolved in a hearing before the district court in Neustrelitz. But that did not put an end to their wrangling. Fallada fell head over heels in love with the young refugee widow Ursula Losch, and they began to make plans for the future. But the relationship did not bring him greater peace of mind. On 28 August a quarrel broke out between him and Anna Ditzen that was to have serious consequences. A shot was fired from Fallada’s pistol. He wasn’t aiming at her, they both testified later. The doctor who was called to the scene summoned the police, and Fallada was led away under guard. On 31 August 1944 the district court in Neustrelitz ordered him to be temporarily committed to the Neustrelitz-Strelitz psychiatric prison.

  While the lawyer sought to persuade the court that the whole thing had been an unfortunate accident, pointing out that the accused was a renowned German author, Fallada himself sought refuge in literary work. The prison authorities had supplied him with some paper – not enough for someone who now wrote at manic speed, but Fallada’s handwriting was small and condensed, and there was space between the lines that could also be used. The first work to emerge from a verit
able fever of creativity was the novel The Drinker, in which Fallada comes to terms with the painful end of his own marriage. He then turned to his ‘experiences during twelve years of Nazi terror’, as he called these notes when he was preparing them for publication in 1945. In The Drinker he recounts the decline of the respectable citizen Erwin Sommer, who feels inferior to his ‘remorselessly capable’ wife, eventually taking refuge in alcoholism. He becomes violent towards her and ends up in an institution. Fallada’s hero is finally overtaken by the fate that he most feared for himself – preventive detention under Section 51. For him too this was a very real possibility.

  He had to wait three months for the court’s verdict. On 28 November 1944 the district court in Neustrelitz ordered him to serve three months and two weeks in prison, with full allowance for the time already spent in custody. He was released from custody on 13 December 1944.

  This crisis in Fallada’s life coincided with the collapse of the Hitler regime. He and the rest of the country were physically ravaged and mentally exhausted. While Germany was on the point of losing a catastrophic war, the writer Fallada was sitting at his desk in prison uniform; closely guarded, surrounded by thieves and murderers, he reconnected with his life through the act of writing. The Prison Diary and The Drinker mark the start of the final series of ‘genuine Falladas’ (the author’s own description of his novel Wolf among Wolves, which he wrote in 1937 after a series of more lightweight works), which addressed the conditions of life in Germany in an impressive and convincing way – among them Alone in Berlin, his 1946 book about grass-roots resistance to the Nazis.