by Hans Fallada
‘Wake up, Hans, Grete!’ says Stuff. ‘We’re going to Stolpe. We’re leaving.’
The children are awake and keen right away. Clumsily Stuff helps them dress and pack.
The woman sits by the window.
In a sudden bate, Stuff bangs on the table. ‘The goddamned son of a bitch! Do you really think he’s worth it?’
The woman doesn’t budge.
Stuff sighs deeply. ‘Well, come on, kids. Say bye-bye to your mother.’ And suddenly he is all energy. ‘All right, Frau Tredup, get going. Hat, coat. I’m not going to leave you here. The removal men don’t need you. We’re off!’
All this time, Manzow is sitting in the Hotel Cap Arcona.
That bastard, that bastard of a Stuff isn’t coming! Perhaps he went to the bank manager? If he did, then I’m royally fucked.
VIII
The following morning, he knows he’s not. He’s looking forward to the coming elections with cautious optimism. He won’t have to give a speech, but he will have the best propaganda you can have in the world: he will have brokered a peace with the peasants. The 17th is to be the day of conciliation.
On the morning of the 16th Manzow turns the material over to the press: the programme for the day, and what have you. And not even any undue emphasis on yours truly.
At noon on the 16th, Manzow visits Councillor Röstel. Röstel has taken over the Police Department from Mayor Gareis.
Manzow greets him most cordially.
‘Well, you know what I’m here for?’
‘No, not the foggiest.’
‘Well, the farmers’ demonstration tomorrow. The procession through the streets. I want to have it announced officially.’
‘No idea. What is it?’
‘You must have seen our appeal in the papers . . . ?’
Manzow reports.
Councillor Röstel’s brow darkens. ‘Now? Right before the elections? Herr Manzow, what are you thinking of! That’s quite out of the question!’
‘Why “out of the question”?’ Manzow is beaming.
‘With every chance of further clashes! Who could authorize such a thing? The farmers and their flag through the streets! Absolutely not.’
‘The court established that the flag is lawful and is entitled to police protection.’
‘Whatever that means.—Anyway, the prosecution has impounded the flag again.’
‘That doesn’t matter. I’ve had a duplicate made. There isn’t the least justification for banning it.’
Röstel is becoming more and more agitated. ‘I can’t believe you want a career in politics! Your plan is completely batty!’
‘Why “batty”? Tomorrow the Communists will have their march, and the Reichsbanner, and we Democrats. Plus the party of publicans, the Reichswirtschaftspartei, is having a procession. And the Nazis. And you’re saying the farmers should be left out?! Not possible!’
‘You know very well what the difference is. There’s nothing to discuss.’
‘I asked the farmers. They’ll be along at ten in the morning. And they will demonstrate, I assure you, Councillor.’
‘The farmers will not demonstrate, I assure you, Council Leader.’
Manzow arrives in the editorial office just in time to inspire a fiery leader to the effect that even after so many sacrifices on the part of the population, the town administration of Altholm has set its face against peace. The newly installed Chief of Police Röstel etc., etc. The meritorious Council Leader Manzow was unable . . .
IX
On the evening of the 16th, Manzow is informed that the district president has banned the farmers’ demonstration.
Everything’s going swimmingly.
Manzow gets his people together, and at six o’clock the next morning he and the entire Reconciliation Committee set off for Stolpe.
The gentlemen are beside themselves. ‘Unless the demonstration is allowed, the boycott will go on for all eternity, the farmers won’t come another time.’
‘And if it’s not allowed, what do we do with the money?’
‘Then everyone will get back what he paid in,’ declares Manzow: ‘Of course after our costs have been defrayed.’
At seven o’clock the car pulls up outside the president’s villa.
His housekeeper, Klara Gehl, declares that it’s impossible to disturb the president now. But the gentlemen are in a hurry. At ten o’clock the farmers will be in Altholm.
They are kept waiting outside for half an hour. At the end of that time a sweaty and unshaven Chief Adviser Meier appears. Summoned from bed, so that Herr Temborius will have a witness.
The conversation between the gentlemen is short.
Manzow: ‘To our boundless astonishment, President, we heard that you cancelled the planned reconciliation with the farmers.’
Temborius, angrily: ‘Yes, that’s right. I wouldn’t dream of permitting such madness. Bunch of criminals.’
Manzow: ‘But all the other protests scheduled for today have been permitted. Is there one law for the farmers, and another for everybody else?’
Temborius: ‘Public peace and safety are put at risk by the demonstration.’
Manzow: ‘As the representative of the town of Altholm, I take full responsibility for any worker or bourgeois of Altholm who disrupts the demonstration.’
Temborius: ‘And if some outsider should behave irresponsibly? No. No. Absolutely not.’
Manzow: ‘Some outsider? The police have the power to block the approach roads.’
Temborius: ‘I can’t be doing with blocking public roads.’
Manzow: ‘In that case the economic peace will have been shattered, and Altholm once more facing ruin.’
Temborius: ‘National interests take precedence.’
Manzow: ‘But the farmers are already on their way.’
Temborius: ‘Militiamen will intercept them at the railway station, and see that they are promptly sent back from whence they came.’
Manzow: ‘The government position is illegal.’
Temborius, odiously: ‘Just leave that to me.’
Manzow: ‘Good day.’
Temborius does not reply.
Outside, Dr Hüppchen says in surprise: ‘You were really curt with him, Herr Manzow. The president might have been open to some form of compromise.’
‘Him? Never. It’d look too much like weakness. Now it all depends on us getting a brilliant write-up in the papers emphasizing our excellent work. The Reconciliation Committee can’t survive another defeat.’
‘We can do that easily enough.’
‘In that case we’ll all look good tomorrow.’
‘Why tomorrow?’
‘Well, those of us on the list of candidates will anyway. Will you go to the farmers’ reception at the station?’
‘Is there any point? Maybe they’ll just demand their money. Which they’re not going to get now.’
Dr Hüppchen asks: ‘Will the boycott continue now?’
‘I don’t think so. After the farmers have turned out for us once already? I think I’ve attained my objective.’
X
It’s half past nine.
Gareis is taken to the station by Political Adviser Stein.
His wife has gone on ahead, his things have gone on ahead. Now his last and only loyal friend is taking him to the station.
As they walk along the very busy Burstah, a few greet the mayor, many see him and don’t recognize him, and many more recognize him and don’t see him.
‘People are always saying,’ says Gareis, ‘that we politicians are disloyal. I have to say people give us a pretty good model—well, it’ll be better in Breda.’
‘Will it?’
‘Of course it will. I’ve learned so much here. Next time I’ll do it differently.’
‘Differently how?’
‘Just altogether. I think differently. I see everything differently.—You’ll see. As soon as I park my feet under the desk, I’ll bring you in.’
‘That
would be nice,’ says the adviser. And after a while: ‘Something I always meant to ask you, Mayor. Do you remember the evening of the demonstration day?’
‘Unfortunately,’ gruffs Gareis.
‘Actually, I don’t mean the evening so much as the night. We went for a walk. A shooting star fell.’
‘Every chance. There are lots in July and August.’
‘And you made a wish. You were going to tell me what it was for.’
‘I made a wish, Steiny? Nonsense! I’ve never wished for anything in my life except work. Even without shooting stars. At the most, in certain extreme hours, for work to go smoothly. But one might as well wish for a perpetual motion engine.’
‘You made a wish,’ says the adviser stubbornly.
‘Don’t be silly. If I made a wish, then I’ve forgotten it. But of course I never made a wish. You will have made one.’
‘That’s funny,’ says the adviser. ‘You did make a wish. You wished for something very badly. And you’ll never know whether your wish came true or not.’
‘There’s a mass of things I’ll never know in my lifetime, Steiny,’ says the mayor. ‘It doesn’t bother me very much. The things I do know bother me much more.’
They reach the station forecourt. A tidy and orderly forecourt. All the approach roads are occupied by militiamen. The station doors are cordoned off. Messengers dashing self-importantly hither and thither. On one traffic island, Colonel Senkpiel is enthroned among a cabinet of his officers. At his side, in impeccable posture, Commander Frerksen.
‘What’s going on here?’ says the mayor as though electrified. ‘I must catch some of this . . .’
And he marches up to the colonel.
‘You’ll miss your train,’ calls the adviser.
‘Good morning, Colonel. I may not be mayor any more, but I am interested in this kerfuffle that’s going on here. What is going on?’
‘Good morning, Mayor. You should be pleased you’re leaving. The farmers want to hold another demonstration.’
‘The reconciliation, yes,’ says the mayor. ‘Well . . . ?’
‘The government has banned the demonstration. We’re looking after the reception and safe return of the farmers.’
The mayor stands there, looking pensive.
‘Well, well,’ he says finally. ‘Ha. Well, excuse me, gents. Good morning.’
‘Have a good trip!’ the colonel calls after him. Frerksen, ignored, slides a finger up to the peak of his cap.
Silently, the mayor walks into the station, buys a ticket, passes through the platform barrier. He seems to have forgotten about his political adviser.
Who walks silently at his side.
There are militiamen on the stairs and on the platforms.
‘When is the next train from Stolpe?’ Gareis asks distractedly.
‘Nine fifty-six.’
‘And I leave at nine fifty-nine. I get on the same train after they’ve got off.’
On the platform are Manzow with a few other gentlemen. Dr Hüppchen waves discreetly. The others don’t seem to see their one-time mayor.
The train pulls in. It’s madly overcrowded. No sooner are the farmers, a couple of hundred of them, out of their compartments than the militia start in with their chant: ‘Move along, please! Clear the platform! Move along, please!’ Flanked by two rows of militia the completely bamboozled, baffled herd of farmers make their way towards the stairs. In their ranks, the mayor spots Stuff, Manzow, Dr Hüppchen, Meisel, the cursing medical councillor.
‘You’d better hop on, Mayor,’ his adviser reminds him.
They disappear.
‘Yes. All right,’ the mayor sighs.
Then, out of the compartment window: ‘Of course it’s right that the farmers don’t demonstrate today of all days. But they’re doing it for the wrong reasons again. All of them. Every one. Manzow. Temborius. The farmers. Not for the sake of the thing itself. There’s always some nasty little ulterior motive.’
‘I’ve just seen Stuff,’ says the adviser. ‘You know, six months ago, everyone was so mad at him, because he’d trashed a little circus. The performance was rubbish, but that wasn’t why Stuff gave them a bad review, but because the circus director had failed to take out an ad in the paper.
‘I was just reminded of that.’
‘That’s right,’ says the mayor. ‘That’s just it. Spot on. And I too played my part in the Circus Monte, and I was just as bad as the others.’
‘Not just as bad, Mayor, not just as bad.’
The train moves off.
‘Yes. Oh yes. Just as bad.’
‘But in Breda it will all be different, yes?’
‘Let’s hope so!’ shouts Mayor Gareis, already ten yards along the platform. ‘I hope so very much.’
Notes
p. 19 my blue cuckoo stamp: Widely used jocular term for the government mark put on confiscated property, no doubt because the cuckoo usurps the nests of other birds. ‘Zum Kuckuck!’ or ‘Geh zum Kuckuck!’ are mild expletives in German.
p. 32 their black-white-and-red banner: From 1871 to 1918 and again from 1933 to 1945—the periods when there was a German ‘Reich’—black, white and red horizontal stripes were the colours on the flag; they were a heavy presence in Nazi iconography; during the Weimar Republic, they were used by anti-republican Monarchist and Nationalist elements to express anything from nostalgia to murderous hatred.
p. 57 Bauernschaft: Literally, farmers as a group or movement; Fallada’s equivalent for the historic ‘Landvolk’ movement of the late 1920s in northern Germany, on whose leader Claus Heim the character of Reimers is based; italicized, it is the title of their newspaper.
p. 66 the big S: Syphilis?
p. 71 the Kapp Putsch: The Kapp Putsch was a 1920 coup attempt—from the anti-Versailles, Monarchist Right—to overthrow the nascent Weimar Republic. Perduzke’s loyalty to the government—against his own personal politics, perhaps—entitles him, in his view, to a better job.
p. 112 his ‘Solingen assistant’: Solingen is an industrial town in North Rhine Westphalia, known for the manufacture of high-quality steel; the UK counterpart is Sheffield. The handy ‘assistant’ would therefore be a pair of scissors.
p. 141 Stahlhelm: This veterans’ organization, the ‘league of front-line soldiers’, was the largest of the numerous paramilitary groupings that sprang up after the defeat of the First World War and bedevilled the Weimar Republic throughout its brief existence. In 1930, it had as many as half a million members. Politically, it lined up with the National People’s Party (DNVP) in the so-called ‘Harzburger Front’ of Right-wing opposition to the Republic. In 1934, it was assimilated by the Nazis into the SA (Sturm Abteilung (Storm Section), brown-shirted paramilitary force of the Nazi Party, established in 1921).
p. 143 Basedow: Or Graves’ disease: symptoms include hyperthyroidism, ophthalmopathy and mental symptoms. Part of Fallada’s descriptive arsenal (two characters in Alone in Berlin are also sufferers).
p. 173 ‘Fridericus Rex’: ‘Fridericus Rex, unser König und Herr’, 1837 setting by Carl Loewe (1796–1869) of words by Willibald Alexis, glorifying the (anti-French) campaigns of Frederick the Great;
p. 173 the ‘Deutschlandlied’: (‘Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles . . .’), Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s (1798–1874) 1841 words to a melody of Joseph Haydn’s which, ironically, was first composed as a birthday song for the Austrian Emperor Francis II, in 1797, and called the ‘Gott erhalte’. It first became popular among German troops in the First World War. Once Austria ceased to be an empire, following the ousting of the Habsburgs in 1919, the anthem, so to speak, fell vacant. Its use as a German national anthem was conceded by the German President Friedrich Ebert in 1922 to Right-wing pressure (they were denied their flag, but given their song). The Nazis sang its territorially expansionist first stanza; the Federal Republic, after 1952, sang its abstract and idealistic third.
p. 173 the song of the Jewish Republic we don’t want: This is the per
fectly repellent (‘grease the guillotine with the fat of Jews’) SA adaptation of another nineteenth-century original. The refrain is: ‘Blut muss fließen knüppelhageldick / und wir scheißen auf die Freiheit dieser Judenrepublik.’
p. 173 Reichsbanner: The ‘Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold’ (‘Black, Red, Gold Banner of the Reich’) was a Social Democratic paramilitary force formed during the Weimar Republic in 1924.
p. 251 Reichswirtschaftspartei: Recte, the ‘Reichspartei des deutschen Mittelstandes’, the ‘imperial party of the German middle classes’, generally known as the ‘Wirtschaftspartei’ (WP) the ‘economic party’.
p. 310 Reichswehr: The so-called provisional German army—when, under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, it wasn’t supposed to have a real one. Unusually for a Weimar institution, this ‘army in denial’ stayed out of politics. Banz will have been impressed by its small, elite character, but revolted by its loyalty and lack of anti-State ideology.
p. 390 Centre Party: An actual party—see the election result tables in the Appendix.
p. 391 Volkspartei: The so-called people’s party, yet another nationalist, right-of-centre outfit, in this fissile and volatile period. Later incorporated—like all those (the Communists, the Socialists) that weren’t banned—into the Nazi Party.
p. 471 Kaiser Friedrich only lasted ninety-nine days: This is Friedrich III (1831–88), the son of Wilhelm I, under whose long reign Germany was unified in 1871. Friedrich married the daughter of Queen Victoria (also Victoria), and was succeeded by Wilhelm II, who took Germany into the First World War. There are photographs of father and son, both in kilts, at Balmoral. He died of cancer of the larynx; the saying ‘lerne zu leiden ohne zu klagen’—‘suffer in silence’—is attributed to him.
p. 500 a snatch of something: Fallada liked his songs. This is the 1836 song—to a folk melody—by the organ-builder Gottlieb Weigle (1810–82), ‘Drunten im Unterland’, hymning the Neckar valley. ‘Down in the lowlands, things are nice as can be/whins in the highlands, vines in the lowlands/down in the lowlands, that’s the place for me.’ Stein seems to be warning his boss that things can’t continue to go well for ever.
Appendix
