A Stranger in My Own Country

by Hans Fallada

  And then he started drawing me. He suddenly became quite still, his face was tense, and I had to be still too. He screwed up his eyes, studied me closely, now very serious: a stranger who was feeling his way to the bottom of my soul. His first attempts were unsuccessful, failing to get beyond the physical externals. The nose, a little exaggerated in the way it stuck out, perhaps, but that wasn’t what he was after. So he set to work again, the pen making a frightful scratching noise on the paper. I started to say something. ‘Not now, you have to be quiet’, he said sternly, and carried on drawing. And then he suddenly said: ‘Finished!’ And looked at me, the smile had returned to his face. I looked at the cartoon110 – and I was looking at myself. I was thrilled with it. It was amazing, it was magic, what he had done there. It was me, in fact I didn’t even think of it as a cartoon in that sense: not at all, that was the real me, that was how I really looked, with the squashed roll-up hanging from my expressive and yet rather limp mouth. Needless to say, the publishers decided not to use the cartoon for my book. They thought it was very good, really quite wonderful, but perhaps just a touch too daring? For the present times, that is? Instead they put a cosy little cottage with a little tree on the cover, which would have been much more appropriate for Marlitt.111 But before that they commissioned Plauen to do a ‘serious’, ‘academic’ portrait of me. I was delighted, as it gave me an excuse to spend more time with him! But the serious portrait didn’t work out either: ‘It’s no good, I can only draw cartoons!’ he cried in despair, having struggled with it for hours. We met up with him a few more times, and he also came out to see me in Mahlendorf. We had a lot of laughs. He was full of new ideas, as ever. ‘When Berlin has been reduced to rubble, Plauen will still be sitting on the ruins and doing his little drawings.’

  I was in Berlin this spring, and standing on the tram with a friend. We were travelling through the bombed-out streets of the city, heading somewhere where we could still get something decent to eat. The friend said to me: ‘Have you heard – ?’ and broke off again. ‘Heard what – ?’ I asked. ‘No, I’d better not tell you, it’ll just upset you . . .’ ‘Look, Max, just tell me! After the ten years we’ve been through, I doubt if anything much can upset me!’ He looked me in the face. ‘Plauen shot himself. Two weeks ago now . . .’ I was wrong: I could still get upset, even after the ten years we’d been through. Plauen? Shot himself? It was not possible, this man who was full of life and laughter, this irrepressible jester – shot himself? Impossible! ‘It’s not possible!’ I said out loud. ‘A man like Plauen would never shoot himself!’ And yet he had done it. His studio had been bombed out, as I have already described, so he took his family down to southern Germany and then found temporary accommodation for himself in Fürstenwalde, the same Fürstenwalde where I had once been kept in protective custody. He needed to be fairly close to the editorial offices of Das Reich, where he had to deliver his cartoons every week. He shared his new quarters with a friend, and when the two of them were talking and laughing together in the evening, their landlord was sitting next door112 and taking down every word in shorthand! Plauen’s deafness meant that every word could be clearly heard. This vile creature kept it up for six months, then went and handed all the material over to the Gestapo. I doubt if he was paid for his pains; he probably dished the dirt out of pure, high-minded devotion to his beloved Führer. What a dung heap they have turned Germany into! And just look at the plants that have grown on this dung heap – unspeakable!

  The material was just too incriminating, even Goebbels could not have saved his pet cartoonist. But they did do something for him; they placed a revolver in his cell, and left it to him to anticipate the verdict. Which he did. I wish I knew if he died laughing. It’s entirely possible, I’m tempted to think so – in fact, I firmly believe it. He was a cartoonist and a caricaturist from the day he was born, and I doubt if he saw the world any other way – he just had to smile about it. And so died E.O. Plauen, real name Ohser, born in the Saxon town of Plauen. May he rest in peace!

  I must interrupt myself at this point. This is a separate entry,113 inserted into these notes I am making. You’ll recall that I am writing these lines in the autumn of the year of the war 1944, in the asylum at Strelitz, where I have been sent for observation by the public prosecutor, doubtless as a ‘dangerous lunatic’. (There are various ways of getting rid of undesirable writers; this is one area where the German Reich is not short of ideas.) I was given permission to occupy myself by doing some writing. I wrote a few short stories to start with, followed by a little novel. And then it suddenly occurred to me: this was the place, inside these four walls, under constant guard and surveillance, where I had to make a start on these notes. I’ve been carrying it all around in my head for so long now. I’ve just got to get it down on paper. And I know that I am crazy. I’m risking not only my own life, I’m also risking, as I increasingly realize as I go on, the lives of many of the people I am writing about. I don’t have a drawer or cupboard with a lock on it. All my things are freely accessible to anyone. I’m writing in a cell they allocated to me, where other prisoners are constantly passing through, police guards are looking in on me all the time, smoking a cigarette and asking stupid questions about what a writer does. They admire my tiny handwriting, the only protection I have against spies and nosy parkers. I know that every letter, every line I write here has to be censored by the public prosecutor’s office before it leaves here. I haven’t the faintest idea how I am going to evade this censorship, how I am going to smuggle the MS out. Am I just being reckless? Or am I acting under an irresistible compulsion? All these thoughts plague me day and night, and make me forget my own fate here in this house of the dead: it’s only when I am sitting writing these notes that these thoughts cease to torment me! And yesterday something else happened that worries me even more. One of the police guards took me to the director’s office, and they showed me a letter, with everything carefully masked apart from the sender’s name. ‘Who’s this?’ ‘Küthers’,114 I replied, ‘a young soldier, an admirer of my books, who sometimes writes to me from the field. We’ve never actually met.’

  ‘Well, I am obliged to inform you that the Prosecutor General has confiscated this letter. Constable, take this man away again!’

  That was all, and it isn’t hard for me to guess what’s in the letter. Küthers, the poor boy – he spent a year and a half in a field hospital, and in his last letter he told me that he would probably have to go back to the front again soon. This will have been his first letter sent from the front, and no doubt it didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic, this letter from a young man whom they’d been patching up for a year and a half in order to make him fit for more slaughter. He will doubtless have expressed the hope that this ‘shitty war’ would soon be over – an old campaigner just knows instinctively that he can speak his mind freely with someone like Fallada. But what this young man couldn’t know was that his letters were no longer reaching Fallada directly, but were being censored first by the public prosecutor’s office – to whom one cannot afford to speak one’s mind at all freely. Poor boy: they will probably court-martial you now because of your ever so slightly disgruntled remarks. In Germany, you see, one has to remain enthusiastic about a lost war even when the world is collapsing about your ears! Poor boy – my hands are tied, I can do nothing to help you. You have made your bed, and now you will have to lie in it!

  But will I not find myself lying in the same bed? Won’t the recipient of such remarks come under the same suspicion as their writer? Won’t they go through all my post at home? Won’t they suddenly haul me off somewhere else to be cross-examined about defeatism, before I’ve had chance to destroy this MS? Won’t they pounce upon these pages, and will not even the tiniest handwriting fail to save me, once they have deciphered a single sentence? Wouldn’t it be better to tear up everything I have written in the last few days and flush it down the toilet? I don’t know. I’m struggling with myself. Now night is falling. Soon they’ll be brin
ging our bowl of gruel with a few cabbage leaves in it, and then at half past seven we have to go to bed, in the cramped cell that I am sharing with a schizophrenic murderer, a mentally deficient and castrated sex offender and another mental defective locked up for attempted rape and murder. My three companions always sleep very soundly, but I don’t sleep so well. I have a long night ahead of me to reflect on my many problems. Shall I carry on writing tomorrow? I’d be mad to do it!

  (1.X.44.) Swenda – A Dream Fragment, or My Troubles.115 I must have known Swenda from earlier, but my memories of her are unclear, they are like the shadows of clouds that sometimes fall upon our lakes even on sunny days. The first thing I know about her for certain is that I am climbing up a broad, antiquated staircase with lovely shallow oak treads, which leads straight up to a set of big, double doors with panels of transparent mirror glass instead of wood. The doors are like the ones that lead to the garden in my own home, except that they are much larger and not so handsome as the doors at home, having ugly decorative trims of brass and coloured glass in the corners of the frame. Through the clear mirror glass panes I can see Swenda standing there, her dark tresses tumbling to her shoulders, looking straight at me. For a moment I stand still on the landing outside the doors, we gaze at each other in silence for a long time. Then I reach for the handle of the door. Swenda shakes her head. And suddenly I remember what I had forgotten, that I may not enter here ever again, that I proposed to Swenda and was rejected, that terrible things happened here which I can only dimly remember, they are like the shadows of clouds that sometimes fall upon the lakes at home on sunny days.

  I turn and slowly go back down the stairs. I walk through the streets of the city, I leave the city behind and find myself in open country. I walk slowly onwards. I come to a railway track, the level crossing barrier is just being lowered, the monotonous sound of the bell announces the approach of a train. On the far side, raised up on a mound of earth, stands the crossing-attendant’s cottage. I lean on the top pole of the barrier and look across at the cottage, nestling in a profusion of yellow and pink hollyhocks. A young girl emerges from the door, the red signal flag in her hand. Her dark tresses fall to her shoulders, it could be Swenda, but I know that it is not Swenda. I know this girl’s name, but I cannot remember it. And as the passing train rattles and lurches between us, I remember that I was rejected here too. I slowly turn round and walk back into the city, whose towers, shimmering in the sun, rise up from the fields as I approach.

  I am standing in a large, unevenly paved market square, where I have just bought three horses. They are incredibly big. ‘How on earth am I going to feed them?’ is the thought that goes through my head. Then I recognize them: these are the ancient nags belonging to our drunken innkeeper. And there is the man himself, greeting me with a laugh, the corners of his mouth are stained brown with tobacco juice, he is unshaven and dirty, as always. I leave the market square and head into the city, the horses, which are unharnessed, follow me readily, one of them has my cigarette case hanging from its hindquarters on a strap. One of the horses is especially affectionate to me, pushing its head under my arm and nuzzling me as I walk on; I walk slightly to one side, I’m afraid the horse might tread on my painful right foot with its broad hooves.

  I stop in front of a large house. I go up and inquire if Mrs Stössinger is there. No, she is away at the moment – but a room has been prepared for me. I go upstairs, thinking to spruce myself up a little, but I have to come and eat straight away. I sit down at a long table, opposite me is a general. He is wearing a white linen suit, but I know that he is a general. He is mentally ill, and he hates me. He has a small, very red head and he watches me silently through bloodshot eyes. The food is served very quickly, and the plates are not changed between courses. There’s poached white turbot, pike tails in a watery aspic, shellfish with mustard butter. No meat – they show me the huge menu, and I note that today is a meatless day. Finally a large, white, marbled ice-cream bombe is served. I take a large portion and put it on my plate, which is already full to overflowing. The ice cream immediately collapses and melts, spilling out over the edge of the plate, the whole plate now overflows. I spread my legs to let the cascading food drip down onto the floor between them. I look round quickly: the bloodshot eyes of the mad general are firmly fixed on me, everyone at the table is looking at me in earnest silence. Between my legs the overflow from my plate is still trickling steadily onto the floor.

  I suddenly remember that I have forgotten to retrieve my cigarette case from the horse, I have no cigarettes on me. I go to the window and open it. The horses have disappeared, and I know I shall never see them again. Now I have nothing to smoke. I look out onto the square around the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. The church is burnt out, the houses around it are in ruins, the streets are buried under deep piles of rubble. There is nobody to be seen. ‘There is a war on’, I say to myself. ‘Berlin lies in ruins.’ The house from whose third-floor window I am now looking out has also been burned out by an incendiary bomb and blown apart by an aerial mine: I myself saw it lying in ruins that time when I was in Berlin on business. I am my own ghost, I think to myself.

  Then I discover a cigarette machine on the wall. I fiddle about with it, trying to get a pack of cigarettes out of it. ‘There’s a war on’, somebody says behind me. ‘Those are all empty packs, just there for show.’ But at the top I discover a compartment with a flat door that I can open just like that. This compartment is also completely filled with empty cigarette packs, but right at the back I find four packs of tobacco. The tax stickers have been torn off. ‘That’s good, that I’ve found some tobacco’, I think to myself, remembering that I’ve probably still got plenty of cigarettes with senior nurse Holst,116 but only half a pack of tobacco. I leave two marks in the compartment for a pack of tobacco.

  By now it is dark, the arc lamps are burning in the deserted stations, no trains are running any more, I’m running away from my father. He is dead, I know, but he has come back to call me to account for what I did to my mother. There’s nothing frightening about him as such, my father, he looks fresh, the little goatee beard, which was white when I knew him, is now brown, he is walking quickly and easily along the street next to the railway line, intent on pursuing me. I run along the railway tracks ahead of him, trying to escape. The line has been bombed, but they have laid out large quantities of long, white roofing battens, over which I am running very fast, half flying in fact. My father has long since dropped out of sight, and as the batten-covered stretch of track starts to climb steeply I know that I must turn off, and then my father will never find me.

  I enter a house and ring the bell at a door in a very dark courtyard. The door is opened by a white-haired lady in a black dress with a narrow, white ruff at the neck, who welcomes me as the representative of the owner, who has gone away. I ask for two rooms to be prepared for me to work in downstairs, and another for my secretary, but she firmly refuses my request: I must make do with the rooms upstairs. My secretary is waiting for me in the large room downstairs, with its upholstered chairs covered in a yellow cretonne patterned with little reddish flowers. I hired her in a bar, a very attractive, very tall woman, just a touch taller than me. At the time she was wearing a lot of face powder, but the powder has washed off in the meantime, revealing two little anchors, blue ship’s anchors, tattooed on her pale cheeks. This woman could almost be my wife, so closely does she resemble her; she is even wearing my wife’s baggy blue trousers with the embroidered anchor, and her face is the spitting image of my wife’s – except that she has these two little anchors tattooed on her cheekbones. I am very disappointed. But at least I can dictate my work to her, at long last!

  Once again I am climbing the broad, easy-going oak staircase leading to the glazed double doors behind which Swenda was standing. I feel very sad, I know that there is no hope for me any more. My feet are dragging, my heart is heavy. When I look up, I see Swenda looking at me through the glass in the door. I go through the
door and stand before her. She just looks at me; there is nothing in her eyes, neither rejection nor entreaty, no fear and no questioning.

  I take her in my arms and carry her into the back of the apartment. The doors open soundlessly before me as I advance with the woman lying inert in my arms. A pale, unearthly light, which does not come from outside, fills the rooms. I’m standing in front of a big, wide ceremonial bed, surmounted by a massive baldachin with dark, pleated drapes. The bed itself, however, looks white and cold. As I go to lay Swenda down on it, her clothes peel away and tumble to the floor, like the petals of a yellow rose falling softly and silently to the ground. I lay Swenda down naked on the cold, white bed, there she lies, her body is whiter than the sheets, and her tresses lie black upon the pillow. She gazes fixedly at me, without love and without anger. I knew her in another time, I was turned away, terrible things happened, my memories of all this are unclear, like the shadows of many a cloud that fall upon the lakes at home. I bend over Swend . . .

  In 1937 I was commissioned by Tobis117 to write the screenplay of a film for Emil Jannings. At the time Jannings was struggling somewhat. He was used to appearing in a couple of films a year, but recently things had not been working out too well for him, simply because he was not being offered the right material. Now all they had lined up for him was the Virchow role, and he said to me at our first meeting that the part filled him with dread: ‘They’ll just have me looking down a microscope the whole time, and that’s not acting, that’s just looking! I want a proper part to play!’ (People might recall that Emil Jannings did subsequently play the Virchow role,118 because ‘our’ film project fell through, for reasons that will appear later. And nobody who has seen this film about the research scientist will ever forget the moment when Jannings-Virchow caught his first glimpse of the tuberculosis pathogen through the microscope. Your heart stood still, you held your breath. This peerless actor had managed to make something as simple as ‘looking’ into a tremendous feat of acting, or rather of human empathy!) Jannings, who tended to lapse into Berlin dialect when telling his stories, went on: ‘And the best thing in old Virchow’s life, these fellows won’t even show it!’ Jannings shot an accusing glance at his production manager, the film director Froelich119 from Tobis. He was Jannings’ full-time minder – you never really saw Emil without him. Jannings was something of a problem child for the film company: his every mood was anxiously observed, and everything was done, every whim satisfied, just in order to keep him sweet-tempered. ‘The thing is’, Jannings went on, ‘old Virchow played around a good bit well into his old age. The old boy was a pillar of society, an Excellency and all the rest of it, but at night he would go out chasing skirt. He picked up some woman in some dive on Elsässerstrasse, or somewhere around there, a chanteuse or whatever they call it, and they really hit it off – big time. And then he married her, just like old Professor Unrat and his Marlene – no, hang on, she called herself Molene. But you know what I mean, Fallada! So that’s the story, and the best thing about Virchow, and these fellows won’t show it, they won’t let me do that!’ And Jannings, fat and not very tall, with his sallow complexion and soft, fleshy face, pointed an accusing finger at Froelich. ‘My dear Jannings’, said the latter reproachfully, ‘why do you keep on going over the same old ground?! We’ve told you a dozen times that this former chanteuse, who now really is the widow of an Excellency, is still alive, and she would object immediately if we tried to portray her on screen.’