A Stranger in My Own Country (37 page)

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 veritable 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.

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.