A Stranger in My Own Country

by Hans Fallada

  It was of course absolutely typical of the writer Hans Fallada that five minutes after the Nazis had seized power he should have sought out a Jewish international guesthouse – of all things – as his place of residence and gaily started sending out his letters from there. I really was naive to the point of stupidity! For one thing, my application for membership of the Reich Chamber of Literature51 was pending at the time, and our future livelihood depended on the outcome. The fact was that any writer whose application had been rejected was immediately banned from publishing anything at all in Germany, either in book form or in a newspaper or magazine. So I had every reason to be cautious, since I was already quite compromised, as I have said. But caution was the last thing on my mind. To those who warned me that it would be suicide to go and live in a Jewish guesthouse, which couldn’t be kept secret, given the growing number of spies and informers – another fruit of the Nazi regime! – I replied loftily: ‘But I like it there! If they ban Aryans from living in Jewish guesthouses, then I’ll move out. But until then, I’m staying put!’

  Incidentally, the story of my application for membership of the Reich Chamber of Literature has a curious ending: despite several written submissions from me and my lawyer, I never heard back from them. I never did become a member of the RCL, I was just allowed to carry on working ‘provisionally’, since my application had not been rejected as such, i.e. it had not yet been processed. And that is still the case today, eleven years after the Nazi seizure of power. For the gentlemen at the RCL this arrangement has the advantage that they won’t need to expel the author if he makes a serious nuisance of himself, since he was never a member in the first place! Moreover, an author in that situation, living in a constant state of uncertainty, is going to behave himself better than one who is already a member, and against whom formal proceedings have first to be initiated before he can be expelled. (Not that it did make me behave myself any better: I continued to cause those gentlemen a good deal of trouble.) In the early years I used to ask my lawyer from time to time how things were going with my membership application, to which he replied with a wave of the hand: ‘Let sleeping dogs lie! Whatever you do, don’t remind them! As long as they haven’t turned you down, you can carry on working. So there!’

  Although we have hardly got our foot in the door at the Stössinger guesthouse, so to speak, I must just mention the biggest faux pas that I committed round about that time. I received a letter from the Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, signed by Mr Goebbels himself, which read as follows: ‘Dear Mr Fallada, I am obliged to point out that your works in Swedish translation are published by the Bonnier publishing house, which is in the forefront of anti-German agitation. I must ask you to be mindful of this in future. p.p. Dr Goebbels’

  I showed this letter to my trusty Rowohlt. We thought the letter uncommonly well composed – for a minister. We particularly liked the closing sentence, which followed on so lyrically from the one before. But much as we enjoyed it, we still had the problem of having to write a reply, and in particular of having to ‘be mindful in future’, which we were not at all disposed to do. In the end we drafted something along the following lines: ‘Dear Minister, At the time when I signed my longterm contracts with the Bonnier publishing house, I was not aware that it engaged in anti-German agitation. What I was aware of, however, was that the memoirs of Reich President von Hindenburg52 were published under this imprint, and remain in print there to this day. Heil Hitler! Hans Fallada.’ And I actually sent this wonderful missive to the Minister! So neither of us should really be surprised that this seed, so foolishly and rashly sown, would one day bear evil fruit. I myself haven’t been all that badly affected, but poor Rowohlt had to pay dearly for this and other matters that I may get round to talking about later.

  Anyway, we enjoyed our time at the Stössinger guesthouse very much. Not just on account of the food, which really was uncommonly good – my wife learned a great deal there. Not only were there beautifully prepared Austrian pastries, from apple strudel to Kaiserschmarren [sugared pancakes with raisins], but we were also introduced to colonial dishes such as chicken with curried rice, stuffed peppers, and all kinds of good things. But the most interesting part of the experience was the constant succession of other guests. Most of them were just passing through on their extended ‘trip’, spending four or five days in Berlin, while Paris always rated four or five weeks, which offended my sense of local patriotism hugely at the time, before I discovered that magnificent city for myself. Some of them were real oddballs, and Mrs Stössinger would often bring them to my table. We’d then sit for a quarter of an hour over an excellent cup of strong coffee, smoking foreign cigarettes and chatting. There was one lady I recall from the USA,53 a real lady, but divorced from her husband, who earned her living – and a very good living too, judging by the fact that she was staying in an expensive guesthouse – entirely from doing parachute jumps. At the time, in 1933, parachute jumping was not yet the commonplace activity that it has now become as a result of this war. And especially not for a woman! She was an attractive woman, aged around thirty, with a wonderfully toned body. When she walked, she didn’t so much walk as waft. She had fascinating stories to tell about her life of adventure, moving around from one city to the next in the vast expanses of the States, with six or eight old Army aeroplanes and a couple of veteran pilots from the World War, who performed their aerobatic stunts for paying crowds of onlookers. They lived a kind of itinerant circus existence, often short of money, then suddenly, if the crowd for some unknown reason took a special liking to them, very comfortably provided for. The star attraction was always her parachute jump. She described very vividly what it felt like to step out into the void. Back then parachutes were not the perfectly reliable affairs they are today. They often failed to open. So far she had been lucky, but one day. . . . And then she would hug our little boy tightly to her, which he didn’t like at all. She had a boy like him back home in the States, and she was always thinking about him. So for her our lad was a kind of surrogate. We really had to keep an eye on him all the time in the guesthouse, and even then we were always looking for him. There were so many women staying in the guesthouse who had left their own children at home, and who now took every opportunity to spirit our lad away for a few hours in order to play with him or spoil him. There was nothing we could do about all the sweets he was given – he must have had a cast-iron stomach to cope with that lot without serious harm! And then there was the big toy shop directly across the street from the guesthouse. Every two or three days our son would be dragged in there by one of our fellow guests, and allowed to choose whatever he wanted – price no object! Personally, though, I think his admirers of both sexes liked buying him the toys that they enjoyed playing with themselves, and many is the time that I have gone to fetch our boy from one or other of the large, grand bedrooms and found him with his new lady friends, worthy matrons in amazing pyjamas, lying on the floor and ‘squealing with delight’ as he made some clockwork duck waddle back and forth between them, or busily changing the points on the track of a brightly-lit electric train set! It was always a struggle to get him back to our own, much quieter room, and my protests against all this crazy splurging on presents were always quite futile. I have to say that our stay in this elegant guesthouse was definitely not very good for our little boy.

  One of the strangest characters I encountered in the guesthouse was a dark-skinned, slender man from India,54 who had spent time in Soviet Russia as a buyer of precious stones. He bought up choice precious stones there for some prince or other. I assumed that he bought the stones illegally, then smuggled them out of the country without paying any duty. The way he stored them certainly seemed to indicate as much. He used to carry them around on his person, wrapped up in dirty pieces of paper and secreted inside various pockets and pouches. It never ceased to amaze me, the way he would suddenly reach inside his waistcoat pocket while we were talking and pull out a grubby little ball of paper, which
he would then unwrap with his dusky fingers and produce a glittering cut diamond. By then I had already discovered that the precious stone that suited my wife best was an aquamarine, a stone that can appear sea-green or sea-blue, depending on the light, and which is sometimes suffused with a grey sheen, especially in daylight, like early-morning mist over the sea. I once asked the Indian if he had any aquamarines. Without a word he reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a grey cone of paper, like the bags grocers use when you buy half a pound of sugar or semolina, and shook the contents out onto the table. We caught our breath for a moment: aquamarines of every size and shade lay there before us, thirty or forty of them, all polished and unmounted, and not a bad one among them. But there was one that immediately caught our eye, not just because of its size, but also because of its bright, limpid deep-blue glow. Our friend had immediately noted our interest. He picked up the stone and placed it on his open palm. ‘From an icon’, he said, and mentioned the name of a Russian town that I’ve long since forgotten. ‘From an icon there!’ he said. We were completely bowled over. We had never seen such a stone before, and I have never seen one like it since. It was as big as the palm of a baby’s hand, and only ground at the edges. The man held the stone against my wife’s neck, gazed at me with his gentle eyes, and whispered: ‘Only three thousand marks – and I give you!’

  I fought a hard struggle with myself. We had already decided to give up the villa in Berkenbrück for good and to buy something else. Our way of life had swallowed a lot of money, on top of that we had the lawyers’ bills, the financial settlement with Sponars – there was no way I could afford it! And yet it was not the price as such that stopped me buying it. I might have been able to stretch to that with an advance from my publisher. What held me back was the sheer size and beauty of the stone. All my life I have never been able to stand vulgar ostentation, and I just thought that we were not the kind of people to wear a big stone like that. Our whole lifestyle just wasn’t right for it. And we wouldn’t be comfortable living in a grander style, not even for the most magnificent aquamarine. ‘No’, I said slowly, still looking at the stone against Suse’s skin. ‘No, I’m sorry. We really can’t afford it.’

  The Indian smiled a melancholy smile. He shoved the stone back into the paper cone with the flat of his hand. We watched him as he did so, and then the radiant glow was gone. ‘You will be sorry!’ said the gem dealer with a shrug. ‘A stone like that – and there may never be another one like it. Three thousand marks I give away – and only because it is madam!’ He smiled and walked away. I have sometimes regretted not buying it, but not very much. Not much later I did buy my wife a pendant with an aquamarine from a mine in South America. It isn’t half as big, and perhaps doesn’t quite have the fiery glow of that stone, even though it didn’t cost that much less. But the stone suits us better somehow; it is beautiful, but people don’t stare at it all the time. (And I do sometimes wonder if our melancholy Indian gem salesman was a crook, who was out to con people with fake stones. The beautiful big aquamarine really was amazingly cheap. In which case, my dislike of ostentation saved me from making a prize fool of myself.) Of the other guests who stopped off at this caravanserai I will just briefly mention a genuine Indian rajah,55 a fat man who appeared at the guesthouse for a few days with several women and a large number of dark-skinned children. We saw little of them, apart from the children; they spent most of the time sitting in their rooms, and they didn’t eat with us either. The children sometimes romped about in the corridors, as children of every nationality doubtless romp about in long, echoing corridors the whole world over. But the man I often observed with admiration was the cook, who had appeared as part of the rajah’s retinue. For religious reasons the rajah could not eat any of our food, and so this cook had turned up with his own saucepans and skillets and little bowls, all made of copper, and was busy at the stove alongside our fine German cook. He was a huge man, very fat, with not particularly dark skin, wearing a grubby turban, and to go with it an equally grubby-looking capacious white gown, like a kaftan. As the kitchen wasn’t very large, and all the available space was really needed to prepare the food for the other guests, the giant cook had been given the window sill next to the stove – which was fairly wide, it’s true – as his kitchen work surface. So there he stood, mixing and stirring and sprinkling coloured powders from little silver shakers over sauces and rice, while we, father and son, watched with bated breath. He had a true Oriental serenity about him, seemingly quite unaware of our shameless gawping, and he never once looked at us. One day, though, he held a dish under our noses with a little splodge of something reddish, and another little splodge of something yellow. The giant gestured invitingly, and for a moment I looked around for my spoon, but then I thought: ‘Let’s pretend we’re dining with a rajah!’

  I exchanged glances with my son, who preferred the red stuff, and we both knew what to do: we reached into the dish with our fingers, took some of the mush and put it in our mouths.

  Dear God in heaven, it was as if I had swallowed fire itself, my throat felt cauterized and burnt, and suddenly I was gasping for air! But I had no time at all to worry about my own sensations, thanks to the ear-splitting howl which my son now let out. Without the least regard for good manners he spat the food out and screamed like a banshee. The cook, meanwhile, was back at his window sill, sprinkling powders from his little shakers with serene Oriental composure. He was not a bit interested in the victims of his culinary arts. We never watched the nasty man at work again – not that we know for certain that he really was nasty. Perhaps he was just unfamiliar with the European palate.

  We were actually the only Germans staying in the guesthouse now, apart from a certain Professor Nathansohn,56 although according to the thinking that was gaining currency at the time he was not a German at all, but at best a ‘German Jew’. And he did look the part, a fine figure of a man, portly and well-fed, with a splendid hooked nose57 and very full, very red lips, well-mannered, affable and well-endowed with that selfirony in which the Jews so excel. I gathered that Professor Nathansohn was a very famous man, though I had never heard of him myself. He was the inventor of ‘Wistra’, a fibre that could be used to make the most wonderful silk fabrics. But that had not stopped the Nazis kicking him out as soon as they had seized power. Prof. Nathansohn wasn’t too bothered: he had probably moved his money out of the country by then, as a successful inventor he could find work anywhere, and so he had happily moved to London without a moment’s regret. Meanwhile the Nazis had discovered that ‘Wistra’ was not quite working out as planned, and nobody else could sort out the problems, so they had lured Prof. Nathansohn back from England with lots of money and fine promises. So now he was working on official government orders in a large laboratory made available for his personal use, getting ‘Wistra’ back on track, and was meanwhile busily inventing ‘Wollstra’ too. I must admit that I often looked upon the Professor with lively pleasure, as living proof of the fact that the Nazis never hesitated to dump the sainted Party program the moment that something else seemed more important to them. And I must also admit that I would not look upon the good Professor with the same pleasure today. I did not succumb, like most of my fellow countrymen, to the endlessly repeated propaganda claiming that all the ills of the world stem from the Jews, and that the Jew is the Devil incarnate. Up until 1933 I suppose I was what people today call a ‘philosemite’; that is to say, my circle of friends and acquaintances was an entirely random mix of Aryans and Jews. I made no distinction, and had never given it any thought. The anti-Semitic propaganda of the day (see ‘Hangman’ Streicher’s Stürmer!) had always sickened me. But now, in 1933, after the Nazis had seized power, I made one or two observations that did give me pause. When I saw this Prof. Nathansohn, for example, sitting there in all his affability and dining off roast goose at the expense of the German Reich, I couldn’t help thinking that if I had been thrown out in such ignominious fashion I would not have come back to Germany and racked
my brains to invent things for the benefit of the Nazis, no matter how much money they paid me. We also had a Jewish lady friend,58 the one who so cleverly managed to evade detection by dodging from one room to the next when the SA came to the house to arrest me. One of her daughters was living in London, another in Copenhagen – both daughters were married and both were comfortably off. Having asked their mother many times to leave Berlin and come and live with one of them, they finally begged her to leave, so that she wouldn’t have to put up with the humiliations and persecutions of the Nazis any longer; but the mother stayed on year after year, holding out until it was almost too late to leave. And why did she hold out? She was getting a very modest pension from her husband, who had died many years previously, less than a hundred marks a month, and as she said indignantly: ‘I’m not going to hand over the money to that gang of crooks! They’ll never transfer the money to London, never! No, I’m going to get every last mark out of them!’ So what I discovered was that the Jews have a different attitude to money than I do, and it was an attitude that I didn’t care for personally, in fact one that I found quite repugnant. One of them came back for the sake of money, the other one wouldn’t leave for the sake of money: but both of them allowed themselves to be humiliated for the sake of money, consciously and by their own choice.59