by Hans Fallada
Anyway, outwardly I had very little to put up with in the courthouse jail at Fürstenwalde. They did take away my big glass of beer a week later, after some official, having got wind of this alcohol abuse, which was completely inadmissible in the prison system, had forbidden it. It was no great sacrifice. What was harder to bear was the brief message from my lawyer that they finally gave me after five or six days of fruitless waiting: he’d been forbidden to contact me or represent my interests.
So I didn’t need any legal counsel. They took care of it. They gave the prisoner in protective custody five-star treatment: he could feed himself at his own expense, wear his own clothes, smoke, and he didn’t need to work. But those basic legal rights that even the most depraved murderer is granted, the right to retain legal counsel and the right to defend himself, were denied me and all others in my situation. Normally anyone placed under arrest in Germany had to appear before an examining magistrate within twenty-four hours, to be told the reason for his arrest and be given an opportunity to explain himself. Depending on the outcome of that explanation, the examining magistrate then issues a definitive arrest order or releases him from custody.
But it’s a different story altogether for someone taken into ‘protective custody’! The gold-braided brownshirt went to the district council leader and accused me of conspiring against the person of the Führer. So they put me behind bars – where I remained: I was not expected to defend myself, nobody wanted me to defend myself, and I was not even given the opportunity. So and so was safely tucked away, so and so could not do any more damage – and that was all they cared about. This striking characteristic of the Nazis, treating people like cattle for the slaughter and never giving a thought to their distress or suffering, was starting to become apparent even back then. Questions of guilt and innocence never interested those gentlemen. The only thing that mattered to them was expediency. Whatever suited their plans was right, whatever didn’t suit their plans simply didn’t exist in their eyes. When later on during the war – and I’ve just remembered this example – some little postmistress was sentenced to several years’ imprisonment because she had taken a single bar of soap that fell out of a damaged parcel, the powers that be did not care a fig about the grotesque mismatch between the ‘crime’ and the punishment. Nor do they care that they ruined a human life, and perhaps more than one, for the sake of a trifle. They didn’t care about people, and despite all their big talk they have never cared about people. All that mattered to them was expediency. And it was expedient to keep the German population down and in a constant state of fear and terror. They terrorized people until the prisons, jails and mental institutions were full to bursting, they terrorized them with the gallows and the guillotine until nobody cared if they lived or died. Life was cheap; a careless jest could send you to your death. So what does any of it matter? ‘You’re done for one way or the other’, as they say in Berlin – and as usual they are right. We’re all of us well and truly done for.
When I received the message from my lawyer that he had been denied permission to talk to me, I knew straightaway that my wife wouldn’t be allowed to visit me either, and my letter to her probably hadn’t even been forwarded. It was only now, as the days and weeks passed, that I realized how hopeless my situation was. They could leave me here to rot until the end of the thousand-year Reich . . . Nobody cared what happened to me, nobody was able to contact me. The judicial authorities were not responsible for me: I was a ‘political’ prisoner, only held in custody here behind bars. The district council leader who had issued the custody order, and who had taken a decision with such grave consequences on the unproven say-so of an SA leader – this zealous district council leader viewed my case as closed the moment I was put away. And what about the SA who had arrested me, whom I had caused so much trouble by refusing to oblige and let them shoot me while trying to escape? Well, the fact was that the SA men had achieved their purpose; I was living the life of a dead man in here, dead to the world, unable to get a message out or receive any message from outside. And whenever my thoughts had taken me this far, the moment always came when I said to myself: something’s not right here. The SA really had gone to an awful lot of trouble over me, as if they took a very personal interest in my case; first of all the argument with the country policeman, then their attempt to make it look as if I was shot while trying to escape. You don’t go to all that trouble over some faceless prisoner whose arrest order has come down from Berlin! Because the investigation will have to be conducted in Berlin. That’s where Mr von Salomon lives, and if he was really preparing a putsch they’ll have to take me there for interrogation and not leave me mouldering here. It was no good: try as I might, the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle just would not fit together. And then my thoughts kept coming back to the dethroned queen, and that hate-filled look of hers. There were many times when I felt certain that the Sponars were behind all this, but then I asked myself the question the ancient Romans used to ask, which should be asked whenever a crime has been committed: cui bono? Who benefits from this? And in the case of the Sponars I could not see any way in which they would benefit. Rather the reverse, if anything.
But as the weeks passed I became more and more concerned about my wife and child, and sometimes I would stand beneath the high window of my cell late into the night, quite convinced that Suse was now standing at her window, looking down at the SA sentry still patrolling outside, and thinking of me. I shook with helpless rage and despair. But in the end I would always go back to bed and sleep a little. What could I possibly do? Poor blighter that I was, they had me where they wanted me, and I could do absolutely nothing about it.
And then suddenly everything changed. One morning the policeman was suddenly standing there in my cell – it was the Stahlhelm man – and saying: ‘Come with me, Fallada, you’ve got a visitor.’
‘What?’ I cried, and couldn’t believe my ears. ‘A visitor – ?! Who on earth would be visiting me here?!’
‘Well, who do you think?’ he said, viewing my agitation with astonishment. ‘Who else but your wife?’
‘My wife – ?’ I exclaimed, and for a moment I was so shaken that I wanted to burst out crying with happiness. ‘Ah, my wife! Well, that’s all right, then!’ And I composed myself, adjusted my clothing, which was looking pretty shabby by now, and followed my leader. And it really was my wife, standing there in a wide corridor, holding my son’s hand and looking towards me. Her pale face lit up with her smile, such a patient, kind and gentle smile!
So I had a visitor, but let me say straightaway that this visit was a ‘clerical error’ on the part of the court office, because this visit should never have been allowed. But as I have already said, in these early days after the Nazi seizure of power it was still possible to find basic human decency and also personal courage (completely eradicated in the meantime) in many parts of the system. By now I had been in the jail for weeks on end, and although I had only had any real contact with ‘my’ two police constables – Mr Nazi and Mr Stahlhelm – the message had filtered through that I was a quiet and well-behaved man with tidy habits. Nobody in prison is more highly regarded than the man who doesn’t make trouble. I had never made any applications or complaints, I hadn’t even written any letters, and smuggling out secret messages was the last thing on my mind. I had been like a man who doesn’t exist, the complete opposite of a conspirator in my innermost being – and as for what the people downstairs really thought about a conspiracy against the beloved person of the Führer, that is anyone’s guess. And so on this particular morning a woman had turned up with her little boy holding on to her hand, clearly in an advanced stage of pregnancy, and had implored them to let her speak to her husband. The husband was only here temporarily, having been taken into protective custody on ‘political’ grounds: all the more reason why visits would not be allowed. But someone must have said to the constable: ‘Oh go on, take the lady up to the corridor – no, not into the visiting room. This isn’t a proper visit, we’ll
just pretend it didn’t happen. It’s just so that husband and wife can see each other again, do you see – just for a minute or so, that’s all . . .’
I wasn’t there in the office, but that’s more or less how the conversation will have gone. And that’s how we saw each other again, the two of us, standing there and looking at each other. The Stahlhelm constable sounded almost threatening: ‘You know you can’t discuss your case, not a single word. And I can give you five minutes, maximum!’ He gave us a very severe look, then did an about-turn and walked to the far end of the corridor, where he turned his broad back on us and found something very interesting to look at in the street.
We hugged and embraced and smothered each other with kisses, weeping a little with emotion and joy, and our little boy was there in between us and asking: ‘Daddy, why aren’t you at home with us any more? Why are you here in this horrible house? Do we have to live here for ever in this horrible house, Daddy?’
But then came the moment in the midst of all this rejoicing and excitement when my wife surreptitiously glanced over her shoulder at the policeman, who had his back turned towards us the whole time, and urgently whispered a single word, and that word was the name of our landlords, traitors and Judases: ‘Sponars!’ And then we talked at length, or rather Suse talked, since my life had been so uneventful that there was little to tell. This visit that never happened definitely lasted longer than five minutes, it may have been fifteen, or then again fifty minutes – the time just flew past, until the policeman finally turned round and said: ‘Right, now it really is time for you to stop!’ And when we looked at him imploringly: ‘Oh, all right then, another two minutes. But I really do mean two minutes this time!’ And so finally we parted; my wife went back to a life of freedom, while I returned to my cell, my heart seething with emotion. In my mind I went back over everything she had just told me, nearly choking with fury and hatred at the despicable vileness of it all. So my dark foreboding had been right, and I had seen aright: that look in the eyes of the dethroned queen had been a look of hatred, the villainous hatred that a murderer feels for his victim. And that woman was not much better than a murderer, one who lacked the courage to do the deed herself, a coward who got others to do it for her.
When I was taken away and Suse had been left alone in the house with our boy, the first thing she had tried to do was telephone my publisher. But when she dialled there was no answer from the exchange, and that’s how it had been the whole time since: they’d blocked the connection. The postman too had only called on the couple downstairs, and had not even delivered the newspaper to her. She had approached the sentry posted on the street and tried to go past him, but he had told her curtly that she was not allowed to leave the house, and that she would be shot if she attempted to escape. And when she asked how she was supposed to buy food for herself and her son, he had just told her that was up to her. Perhaps, he suggested, Mrs Sponar would be kind enough to buy for her when she did her own shopping, although it was a bit much to expect her to help out when traitorous scum like that had been planning an attempt on the Führer’s life. This was the first gentle hint that Mrs Sponar was perhaps on the other side – it was almost imperceptible, but still, it was enough to make my wife suspicious.
It would have been good if the Jewish lady friend had still been in the house, because she could have taken a message to Berlin for us. But she had slipped away during the final phase of the house search, and didn’t even know that I had been arrested. My wife sat at home, deeply worried. ‘Where have they taken my husband?’ she wondered. ‘When will he be home again?’
Thank God, she hadn’t remembered that headline in bold print: ‘Shot while trying to escape!’ She was not afraid for my safety, only worried because we were apart. But she had always been patient and longsuffering, accepting without complaining whatever fate threw at her; she had her work and the child, and so she kept her dark thoughts at bay by working and playing. She was a little surprised that in the wake of such an event and such an upheaval in their house the Sponars hadn’t even looked in to see if she was all right, so as it was getting dark she went downstairs to ask them if they could get some fresh milk and vegetables for the child. She found the old couple sitting in their darkened room in dead silence, the queen working away blindly on a delicate piece of lace, as she liked to do, and the old man with his actor’s face nodding off in his chair, as he liked to do.
They gave her a warm welcome, and showered her with effusive expressions of regret and sympathy – the sort of thing she hated, but now had to listen to patiently – and quizzed her about what had been going on, and what it was I had done.
My wife’s assurance that I hadn’t done anything, and that the whole thing must be some kind of misunderstanding that would soon be cleared up, was met with a coolly sceptical silence, and when she added, in some agitation, that it might all have something to do with the visit from Mr von Salomon, whose name might have led them to think he was Jewish, whereas in fact he came from French (and later Rhenish) aristocracy, this too was met with cool scepticism. That evening Mrs Sponar went so far as to say that she was sufficiently well acquainted with the SA and its leaders to know that mistakes simply never happened. It was probably just the old, familiar story – a husband up to his tricks without the wife knowing, and she having to pick up the pieces afterwards. It was too dark to tell whom Mrs Sponar was looking at when she spoke these words, whether my wife or her own husband, but Mr Sponar did heave a deep sigh at this point. The dethroned queen added that she was well acquainted with, not to say good friends with, the local Party branch leader, a building contractor by the name of Mr Gröschke; she would contact him tomorrow and ask what the charge against Mr Fallada was. She would be happy to report back to my wife, as long as that was allowed.
My wife didn’t care either for the tone or for the substance of our landlady’s remarks, and she quickly asked if they could do the food shopping for her and then made as if to leave. But she wasn’t going to get off so lightly, because now the Sponars launched into a litany of complaint about my irresponsible behaviour, which, they noted, jeopardized their future as well. They pointed out that there’d been talk of a firm agreement about paying them an annuity and giving them the right to live in this house for the rest of their lives – so where did they stand with that now? Had the mortgages at least been bought up? My wife took the greatest possible exception to their complaints, which made it sound as if I was out of the picture for good. She stood up and said curtly that we would stand by our commitments, regardless of whether it was the husband or the wife who fulfilled them, was somewhat taken aback to hear them heave a huge sigh of relief, and left the room.
I won’t dwell on the details of how my wife’s eyes were gradually opened to the guile of the Sponars, how she came to see more clearly with each passing day how the fearful prospect of an impoverished old age had turned our landlords into heartless criminals. Most of her news came via a little old lady who delivered newspapers and bread, who had taken pity on the lonely and heavily pregnant woman. Isolated though our house was, it was the object of close scrutiny in the village. People there knew a lot – and suspected more than they knew.
On the evening when I had put what I thought was a very generous proposal to the Sponars, namely to provide for them in old age in return for their consent to the auction sale, they hadn’t taken time to ‘think things over’, as they had said to me, but had gone straight to their friend, the building contractor and local Party branch leader Gröschke, to seek his advice. I can’t say much about this man from my own observation, I only saw him the one time, much later, a slimly built man with a curiously small head and a hard face. Like many small skilled tradesmen during the worst years of unemployment he had declared himself bankrupt, probably not because of his own incompetence, but either because of the general hardship of the times or because of his Party commitments – or else for a combination of all three reasons. Anyway, he’d been declared bankrupt, and it’s
not hard to imagine what a wretched life such a little man would have led as a bankrupt in a village of hard-nosed farming folk who placed a high value on money and property. But now the Führer had come to power, and with him tens of thousands of these bankrupted little men had seized their own opportunity, determined to get their share of power and property. Overnight they had acquired the power of life and death over their fellow men, or if not that, then at least the power of making them or breaking them: and if they themselves had been harshly treated in the past, they were determined to treat their fellow citizens much more harshly now.
So what kind of advice was such a man going to give his good friend Sponar, when the latter explained his and my situation to him? He knew this friend was living on a pitiful pension from social services, in a house that could be taken away from him at any time. The conversation will doubtless have gone something like this: ‘The man is a writer and he’s not a Party member, and we know from the jokes he was told by his Jewish visitor that he is no friend to the Party. We could have him put away for that alone. But that isn’t going to help us much, in six months or a year he’ll be out again, and we’ll be right back where we started. No: what we need to do is charge him with something serious and conduct a house search – we’ll probably find something. But even if we don’t, it doesn’t really matter; we’ll lock him up anyway on the serious charge, and since he won’t be questioned he won’t be able to talk his way out of it either. Best of all, of course, is if he tries to make a run for it. Then we’ll be rid of him for good, one way or the other.
