A Stranger in My Own Country

by Hans Fallada

  And it’s a strange thing: I’d just managed to escape almost certain death, and in a manner of speaking I was now safe, yet the outrage I felt about the pigsty they’d put me in outweighed everything else. I had not been anything like so furious with my brown-shirted friends – who did, after all, try to kill me – as I was with the policeman who had put me in this hole. I had only been taken into protective custody, and yet they had the nerve to put me in this squalid hole, fit only for some verminous lowlife! Had these people forgotten the meaning of the words ‘law’ and ‘justice’ in Germany, or what? Then it was high time that I reminded them! And I began to hammer on the iron-plated door, alternately using my fists and my heels. I could hear a muffled echo in the corridor, but it had absolutely no other effect. I hammered on the door again from time to time, and in between I shouted, but nobody came. It didn’t surprise me: I knew what nerves of steel police officers can have, able to sleep through the night on standby on a hard bed while some drunk who’s just been brought in is raving deliriously in the cell next door, or some woman high on alcohol is bawling out obscenities. So I could well imagine that my blue-uniformed friend out there in his front office was taking a quiet afternoon nap while I was making all this racket, especially as this was the first really fine and warm afternoon of the spring. But I carried on hammering and shouting all the same; it was a way of passing the time.

  I was right in the middle of one of these hammering and hollering sessions when suddenly the cell door opened without warning, and a man in a blue uniform was standing there in front of me. But it was not the same man I had seen earlier. ‘What’s all this noise about, then?’ he inquired mildly, and without any real interest. ‘First of all, I demand a decent cell and not a shit-hole like this!’ I shouted in fury. ‘And secondly I demand some lunch! I am here in protective custody, and I have a right to insist on that!’

  ‘Well then, just be happy that you’ve got such a right!’ he replied, slamming the door shut and sliding the bolt home. Through the sound of my renewed angry bellowing I could hear him quietly giggling in the corridor.

  The hours crept past, spent partly in studying the pornographic scribblings on the wall, partly in kicking up more din. I had to do something with my time, after all. I’d have liked to take a look out of the window, and get a little fresh air after this noisome stench. But in order to pull myself up to the window I’d have had to come into contact with the wall, and the thought of that was just too revolting. Then again, I was quite sure that they planned to do something else with me before nightfall, and at the time I just couldn’t believe that they would dare to leave me sitting (or rather standing) in this hole for the entire night. After all, we were living in a country under the rule of law, and a dirty trick like that would cost them dear. Child that I was, I still didn’t get it: since January 1933 Germany had ceased to be a country under the rule of law, and was now a police state pure and simple, where those in charge decided what was lawful and what was not. But on this occasion my instinct was right, and as it was starting to get dark my cell door opened again. ‘Come with me!’ he said, and led me to the front office of the police station, where he handed me over to a man in a grey uniform with the words ‘This is the man.’ Then he turned on his heel and promptly dismissed me from his mind for good. ‘Come with me’, said the man in the grey uniform, and I thought: ‘I wonder where your fate is taking you now’, and followed him. But we didn’t go far, just across the street to a red building that bore the legend ‘Courthouse’. ‘Aha!’ I thought to myself, ‘the courthouse jail – at least it can’t be any worse!’ We entered the building and went into an office, where an elderly, decrepit-looking man with moth-eaten hair was sitting chewing on his pen. ‘This is the man’, said my escort; the lexicon of social intercourse around here seemed somewhat impoverished. The clerk gave me a sidelong look, searched at length through a great stack of files, but in the end decided to plump for a single sheet of paper lying on the desk in front of him. ‘There!’ he said.

  I unfolded the letter. It was from the district council leader for the Lebus district, and informed me in a single sentence that he had ordered my arrest on the grounds that I was involved in a ‘conspiracy against the person of the Führer’.

  ‘I deny the charge!’ I protested. ‘That’s complete and utter nonsense! I have never been involved in any conspiracy, and certainly not against the person of the Führer. I’m not even interested in politics . . .’

  ‘That’s nothing to do with us’, said the clerk evenly, and scratched his ear. ‘We’re only here to process the arrest order. Is there anything else?’

  ‘Then I’d like to contact my lawyer immediately!’ I said. ‘You can write to him’, replied the clerk, and handed me a sheet of notepaper and an envelope. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘I can’t think of anything right now . . .’ I said hesitantly.

  ‘As someone taken into protective custody’, said the man, suddenly looking me full in the face, ‘you can cater for yourself, that is to say, you can have your lunch and evening meal brought in from a local hostelry.’ He looked at me again. Then he added quickly: ‘As long as you’ve got the money to pay for it.’

  ‘That I have!’ I cried, and produced my wallet. ‘Constable, see that this man has his meals fetched regularly from the Poor Knight on the market square.’ And to me: ‘Anything else?’

  At that moment I really couldn’t think of anything else, or at least nothing that the clerk could have done for me. ‘Constable, take this man to his cell!’ Thank God, it was a clean cell, as I could just make out in the fading evening light, and it was also bug-free, as I discovered after the first night I spent there. I woke early, made my bed, and wrote my two letters. My lawyer I simply asked to visit me; the letter to my wife contained the same request but also a few other things, whatever I felt able to say under the circumstances. I could see her there before me; she was having a hard time of it right now, expecting a child, in fact she was expecting twins, as we knew, and she was in a lot of discomfort. And then I pictured myself driving away from the house, in this clapped-out car commandeered by the SA, while a sentry stayed behind outside her door. How would she cope with all this – in her condition? I was somewhat comforted by the thought that at least she need not fear for my life, since the good doctor would have passed on my message. And then my heart sank as I realized that there was no guarantee of this. Would the sentry let visitors through to see her? Wasn’t the whole point of the sentry to keep her isolated? And I could see her there before me, alone in the house with the boy, the telephone now cut off, with only our landlords downstairs, an elderly couple, to call on for help and advice. The Sponars! I suddenly remembered the hate-filled look that Mrs Sponar gave me as I went upstairs escorted by the SA men. A horrible feeling crept over me: did the Sponars have a hand in this dirty business? Then I remembered the Thursday afternoon, the little jokes that Mr von Salomon had made – but how could that possibly be? What interest could the Sponars have in doing me harm? On the contrary, they had every interest in helping me, because I had offered them more than anyone else had: a carefree old age! No, the Sponars would surely help my wife, in so far as strangers like them could really do anything to help. That encounter before morning communion on Good Friday had really been so distasteful – Suse would never be able to trust such people completely. But then again, now that I thought about it there was something reassuring in this encounter too: surely these old people couldn’t be so two-faced and so vicious as to come and ask our pardon with treachery in their hearts? Impossible! And they didn’t need to. No, it had to be that incorrigible schemer and hothead von Saloman who had landed me in this mess! ‘Conspiracy against the person of the Führer’ – that was just his kind of thing! But how did they get the idea that I was some sort of co-conspirator? They couldn’t just arrest every person that Mr von Saloman had visited lately, without further investigation, and take them all into protective custody as suspected co-conspirators! Whichev
er way I looked at it, there was something about it I couldn’t explain; and however much I tried to avoid it, I kept on seeing that look of hatred in Mrs Sponar’s eyes.

  These thoughts kept on going round and round in my head, and so I was really pleased when the police constable finally unlocked the door and handed me my breakfast – a dry crust and a cup of watery chicory coffee. He took the letters I handed him, looked at me, then looked around the cell. His gaze came to rest on the bed, which had been made in regulation fashion and folded up against the wall. ‘This isn’t the first time you’ve been inside’, he observed. ‘Only an old lag makes his bed like that.’

  Unfortunately he was correct in his observation. In the course of my eventful life I had indeed inhabited a prison cell from time to time. But it still annoyed me a little that he had noticed. In the meantime I had become a famous writer, and the days of my youthful follies lay far in the past. I made no reply. He looked me in the face again and said: ‘Well then . . . I’ll look in again before lunch and see what you want.’ ‘Some sort of meat dish with soup and stewed fruit’, I said, ‘and a large glass of beer. And twenty cigarettes.’ (I had ordered the glass of beer – I actually don’t like beer at all – because beer always makes me feel nice and sleepy. I was hoping for a good long afternoon nap. It would make the time pass more quickly.) ‘Okay, done’, he replied, and left. The long day stretched out before me, and I knew from bitter experience what a long and endless torment a day in a prison cell can be if you have no work to do, and are just left alone with your thoughts. I don’t have the ability to ‘doze’, and my talent for sleep is limited at the best of times. So I had decided on a program of work for myself. My cell was clean enough, but by my Hamburg-born wife’s40 standards of spring cleaning it was a pigsty. I had calculated that my lawyer probably wouldn’t come to see me for another two or three days, so I had allocated these three days for window cleaning, washing the walls and polishing. I knew that one could spend a whole day polishing up the zinc lid of a pail until it shone like a mirror, with not a dull patch the size of a pin-head. So let’s get to it! First, the windows – and the hours just flew past so quickly that I was really surprised when the constable unlocked my cell door and brought in my lunch from the hotel in a tiffin box.

  (26.IX.44.) The lunch was tasty enough, and I even got my glass of beer, which was more than I had dared hope for. Ignoring the rules, I let my bed down from the wall and flung myself on it, weary enough and ready for sleep. But then of course my thoughts, as if they had just been waiting for this moment, immediately began to revolve around my wife, left alone without protection, and around this mysterious ‘conspiracy against the person of the Führer’. No stranger to such troublesome intrusions, I countered them by silently reciting poetry to myself from memory, starting with some lines from Hofmannsthal41 (‘Noch spür ich ihren Atem auf den Wangen’) and moving on to Münchhausen’s ballads42 (‘Es ritt nach Krieg und Reisen . . .’). No sooner had I managed to escape the torment of my obsessive thoughts and fallen fast asleep when I heard the key rattling in the lock of my cell door, and I leapt up guiltily from my bed. The police constable didn’t say anything about my using the bed when I wasn’t supposed to, but looked at me instead in silence for a while. Then he asked me a rather surprising question, considering where I was: ‘Do you play cards by any chance?’

  I replied: ‘I do indeed, constable!’

  He looked at me again, and seemed to be turning something over in his mind. Then he came to a decision. ‘The thing is’, he said, and gestured with his thumb down the corridor of the cell block behind him, ‘back there in the cell there are two old Yids and they’re looking for a third man to play cards with them. Have you got anything against Yids?’

  ‘Not really, no’, I confessed.

  ‘Well then’, he said, ‘you come along with me and I’ll put you in with them.’ He led the way down the corridor, then stopped again.

  ‘But you mustn’t say a word about this to anyone’, he whispered. ‘I won’t, constable. There’s nobody here I could tell.’ He went on: ‘And especially not my colleague, who’s on duty tomorrow afternoon. He’s a Nazi, you see, and I’m Stahlhelm,43 do you understand?’

  I understood well enough. The hostility between the Stahlhelm and the Nazis, and more specifically the SA, with which the Stahlhelm had been forced to merge, was well known. The worthy leader of the Stahlhelm, a Mr Düsterberg,44 had been ousted as a result, but the second-in-command, Mr Seldte,45 had landed the job of Reich Minister for Labour in return for selling out his organization. But the struggle between the die-hard Stahlhelm men and the SA continued behind the scenes, and that fire is still burning to this day.

  So I indicated by a nod that I understood completely, and assured him that his colleague would learn absolutely nothing from me. To tell you how this little story ends, I now need to fast-forward one day. At lunchtime the next day the key rattled in the lock again, and again I was caught sleeping when I wasn’t supposed to by a police constable, only this time it was the other one, the bad-cop Nazi. Again I didn’t get shouted at for sleeping during the day, but was taken – again – to the other cell and locked in to ‘play cards with the two old Yids’ – but given strict instructions not to say a word to his ‘colleague’: ‘The thing is, he’s Stahlhelm and I’m Nazi, and if he can drop me in it, he will!’

  It really wasn’t a bad little jail at all, that courthouse jail in Fürstenwalde an der Spree. Nobody made my life a misery, nobody bawled me out, nobody got worked up because I had been arrested for conspiring against the blessed person of the Führer. It was still 1933, and the Nazis had only been in power for a few months; they had not yet managed to stamp out all sense of decency and humanity. I very much doubt if such a thing would be possible in any German jail today, in 1944. People like these two police officers simply don’t exist any more, because whatever sense of justice they still had has been systematically destroyed. Today it is seen as a disgrace to display leniency, or even common decency, towards one’s enemies. It’s become a crime, in fact. The Nazis have been going about their dirty business out in the open for so long now, and shouting about it as if it’s something to be proud of, that they’ve got everyone used to it now. Everyone’s just so apathetic. It’s quite something if someone so much as sighs these days – only to say in the next breath: ‘But what can you do? That’s just the way it is!’

  The truth is I had chosen a good time to be arrested, a time of transition, and the remnants of decency that had not yet been destroyed allowed me to live a pretty tolerable life. The pair I played cards with, ‘the old Yids’, were cultivated and amusing companions. The card games were just a pretext for us to socialize, and we spent most of the time just sitting and talking. They had been teachers at a school not far from Fürstenwalde, which combined classroom teaching with a large farm estate; the idea was for young Jews to learn a trade that was unusual for Jews, namely agriculture. Both these gentlemen, the headmaster and one of his teachers, were idealists and Zionists; their dream was to bring world Jewry back to Palestine, the land promised to the Jews by God Himself, and to persuade all Jews to turn away from money and become a nation of farmers. They were so innocent and naive that they actually welcomed the arrival of the Nazis, believing that Hitler’s reign of terror would help their plans. For now their school had been shut down and expropriated by the Party, and the pupils and teachers had been carted off and scattered to the four winds – but all this just made them smile. They sat there in their cell, pretty shabbily dressed, with the hands of men used to working in the fields, and looking very Jewish. They said: ‘The Jews have suffered so many persecutions and have successfully survived them all. In fact, the persecutions only served to focus their minds on their strengths as a nation, and persecutions made the Jews stronger, not weaker. During the Russian pogroms a huge wave of nationalism swept through world Jewry. Jews in every country, who were normally at daggers drawn, now helped each other.’

  All thr
ee of us were dismissive of the ‘thousand-year Reich’ that the Nazis wanted to establish, which Hitler, and in particular the delusional Mr Rosenberg,46 were always rabbiting on about. I was more sceptical than the others, giving the Nazis four years, five at the most. (I turned out to be a false prophet.) One of the Jews, the headmaster, smiled and said with that inimitably subtle, ironic Jewish smile: ‘A thousand years! I tell you, Mr Fallada, you’ll wake up one day and rub your eyes in astonishment and cry: “What, have the thousand years ended already? It felt more like one day!”’

  I must just tell a little story at this point about my dear old publisher, ‘friend Rowohlt’, who sometimes liked to boast that he was always ahead of his time. By way of example he cited the time he stopped making his payments. What happened? Four weeks later the Dresdner Bank copied his example, and then hundreds and hundreds of firms followed suit. ‘And then take my family life, my friend. As you know, I’ve been married twice before and am now on my third marriage. What is that if it’s not the third Reich? Else was the first Reich, Hilda was the second Reich, and now Elli is my third Reich.47 And now I’ll let you into a little secret, friend Fallada’, dropping his voice to a hollow whisper, ‘whenever I quarrel with Elli I’m convinced that the fourth Reich will be along soon! Mark my words, friend Fallada, we’ll both live to see the fourth Reich yet!’ A few pages further on it will become clear that there are indeed some prospects of a fourth Reich – not least in Rowohlt’s private life.