by Hans Fallada
But even a Minister cannot nurse a grudge for ever, and one day Mathias Wieman received another telephone call, the flowers and chocolates started coming again, and a fresh invitation was issued. They were friends again, just like the old days – until the Minister asked: ‘About our recent little disagreement, Wieman. I’m sure you’ve thought about the matter again in the meantime, and can see now that I was right?’
Yes indeed, he had thought the matter over, replied the actor, more brave than he was smart, and he was now more convinced than ever that the Minister was wrong. Powerful men are all the same, whether living in the German Reich or under the Sun King: opposition, and obdurate opposition at that, is a thing they cannot abide, and it leads to a spectacular fall from grace. Wieman was sent packing under a cloud – this time for good. He bore it with composure, and indeed was privately glad, perhaps; this friendship between the actor and the Minister had never been a wholly edifying affair. The weeks passed, and Wieman noticed a change in the atmosphere around him. To begin with it was just a slight froideur, but then it felt more like the cold shoulder. People became very short with him, nobody seemed to want to know him any more, bookings that had been firmly promised to him now fell through, and offers of parts that he thought were already his were now withdrawn. ‘Please don’t take this the wrong way, Wieman, but we really do think this role is better suited to P. than to you. But there’s always a next time!’ Except that the next time never seemed to come now.
Eventually Wieman learned that there had been a meeting of the film board at the Propaganda Ministry, and that at this meeting Minister Goebbels himself had recommended that the actor Wieman only be employed with extreme caution. The Führer, he said, had just watched the film On Higher Orders,135 in which Wieman played the part of a Prussian officer, and had commented: ‘No Prussian officer conducts himself like this actor! I don’t want to see this man in uniform again!’
When Wieman heard about this he felt utterly crushed; if the Führer had judged him in these terms, then his artistic career was over. But had the Führer really said that? It was certainly possible. But a tiny doubt remained in his mind. Wieman had been a friend of the Minister, but had fallen from grace – could it be that the Minister had now become his enemy, a malevolent enemy intent on destroying his former friend? Perhaps, perhaps: but even a man like Goebbels would surely not dare to mispresent something the Führer had said, or even make it up completely?
Wieman had a lady friend136 who was an occasional guest in the house of Reich Field Marshal Göring. He told her the gist of the story, and asked her to make inquiries when she saw Göring. She did so at the first available opportunity: after a dinner she asked the Reich Minister: ‘So what’s the problem with Wieman, the actor?’
Göring returned the question: ‘What problem would there be? Wieman is a sound man and a fine actor, I’ve heard nothing bad about him.’ The lady then told him what the Führer had allegedly said. Göring said: ‘That’s possible, the Führer is very particular in such matters. I’ve heard nothing about it, but I’ll make enquiries and get back to you.’ In such matters Göring can be relied on absolutely, and the anxiously awaited report duly came back: the whole thing was pure invention, the Führer had not even seen the film On Higher Orders. According to Göring, Wieman had nothing to worry about.
But Wieman worried all the same. His former friend Goebbels had now been unmasked in all his pitiful nastiness. In vain did he tell the film producers that there was not a word of truth in the whole thing; they simply shrugged their shoulders and said: ‘It makes no difference, Wieman. If Goebbels says we should employ you with caution, that means we shouldn’t employ you at all – and we have to comply. The reasons Goebbels gives are neither here nor there, and it wouldn’t matter if he claimed that an angel of the Lord had instructed him in person.’
Mathias Wieman saw himself facing a long dry spell, in which he would get no engagements and earn no money. He was in the same situation as most of us: he had been earning good money, but it had melted away like butter in the sun, and although he had enough to live on for a while, it was only for a while. Thank heavens he had no children, but he had a wife, who stood by him through thick and thin. He moved with her to a little village by the sea, and disappeared from view, the unknown victim of a ministerial friendship.
He lived there in banishment for two years, and then he was gradually allowed back into circulation, starting with a theatre engagement in Hamburg. Today he is free to perform in films again. But Minister Goebbels recently declared triumphantly that in future he would treat more actors the way he had treated Mathias Wieman. Film took a heavy toll on acting talent, he claimed. So it was good for them if a ‘creative break’ was imposed on them from above. Whereupon the Minister went and sidelined three young actors whom he couldn’t stand.
There are many stories about Joseph Goebbels, but none perhaps that better illustrates the dangerous, two-faced character of the man than the following. In Berlin a reunion was held for holders of the order Pour le mérite from the World War. ‘The Doctor’ had been invited to give the address, and he had spoken about the person of the Führer in his usual rousing and trenchant style. Afterwards Goebbels was standing talking to a group of older officers when a general came up to him and thanked him in emotional terms for the speech he had just given. The Minister, who had possibly had a little too much wine, screwed up his eyes and said that perhaps he and they could spend a little private time together afterwards? Because he had a very special surprise for them. And so it transpired, and the Minister, the Führer’s most loyal henchman, stood up and gave another, much more rousing and impassioned speech about the person of the Kaiser, a speech that just sent these old generals into raptures and moved them to tears.
But that is Goebbels as he really is: two-faced, not a genuine fibre in his whole body! He can talk about anything in vivid, down-to-earth language, and if need be he would speak about Bolshevism tomorrow in exactly the same way he speaks about Nazism today. Within the group of hysterics, psychopaths, monomaniacs and sadists who make up our ‘people’s government’ today, he is the embodiment of pure evil, Beelzebub in person – and all the Jews in the world will never be able to hold a candle to him.
I have never felt at home with my new publisher the way I did with old Rowohlt, as I have probably already said. The assets of Rowohlt Verlag, which continued to trade under the old name, had been transferred to a large publishing company based in southern Germany,137 an enterprise of many parts that had been built up by a capable man with extremely diverse tastes, with some authors whom I could not abide, and others who excited me very much. The thing that united me with the head of this large publishing house was our shared hatred of Nazism. His voice would shake when he spoke of these ‘criminals’, and his face turned white. His whole life and work were now focused increasingly on fighting for authors who had made themselves unpopular with the regime for one reason or another, and for whom he sought to make it possible to carry on working. Amongst his authors was one very good man,138 who was also highly esteemed by the Party, who had written a fine novel about the father of Frederick the Great. But this man had committed the crime of marrying a Jewish woman, and now persisted in the much worse offence of standing by her, despite all the threats he received. The head of the publishing house fought long and hard to ensure that this man was able to carry on working. He succeeded in holding on to this author, but when he himself was ousted,139 the author soon followed him – and then shot himself.
There was also a female author, widely renowned in the Germanspeaking world, and a sensitive, cultivated woman,140 but this woman had committed the crime of writing an entire novel about a priest, and a favourable portrait at that, when any mention of priests in novels was prohibited. Admittedly this novel had been written prior to the prohibition, just as that other author had married his Jewish wife prior to January 1933, but it didn’t make any difference, or mitigate the crime in any way. Such were the battles
that took up the entire time of a publisher in those days . . . That reminds me of a nice story that happened to me when my dear old Rowohlt was still in charge, which beautifully illustrates these senseless battles that had to be fought by publishers when they rubbed up against the regime in those days. I had written Sparrow Farm,141 a fairy-tale after the style of E.T.A. Hoffmann, with some added Fallada-esque touches. For reasons that I can no longer remember, the manuscript had ended up on somebody’s desk in the Propaganda Ministry, where it was vetted, despite the fact that we had no pre-publication censorship as such. Right at the beginning of this book there is a scene where the wealthy farmer Tamm142 distributes alms to the village poor in his own peculiar way: across his farmyard he hides whatever he’s got left in the way of smoked meats from the previous year – bacon, sausages, hams – and invites the village poor to search for it, like children looking for hidden Easter eggs. It so happens that an ancient little woman discovers a ham concealed on top of a tall stack of logs. She quickly fetches a wheelbarrow to stand on and, reaching and stretching, tries to winkle out the pork hindquarter. A young lad from the village, who is watching this jolly game of hide-and-seek, calls out to the old woman: ‘Hey, Trina, I’ve seen your box!’ And the old woman comes back to him as quick as a flash: ‘My boy, it would have given you more pleasure fifty years ago than it does today!’ And that was all. My publisher now had to talk on the telephone to some undersecretary at the Propaganda Ministry, who had serious reservations about the publication of this innocuous fairy-tale. In particular, he could not get past the scene I have just described. For a start, the way this farmer chose to distribute his hand-outs to the poor was quite contrary to all National Socialist thinking. It was quite repellent, the way these old people in the story were made an object of ridicule for the entire village. Rowohlt had a hard job convincing this high-ranking official that there is a huge difference between merry laughter and serious mockery, and Rowohlt ventured to remind him, with all due respect, of certain Dutch paintings of village life, in which such scenes were depicted to the general merriment of all . . . In the end the undersecretary relented, though not entirely convinced. ‘However’, he said in a sharper and more emphatic tone of voice, ‘that vile obscenity must be removed from Fallada’s book!’ Rowohlt could not believe his ears. A vile obscenity – in this innocuous fairy-tale?! ‘But Mr Undersecretary’, he asked, utterly bewildered, ‘I really can’t recall . . . what obscenity do you mean – ?’
‘You know very well what I mean!’ cried the undersecretary on the other end of the line, now quite furious. ‘Don’t play the innocent with me! You know exactly what I mean!’
‘I really don’t know, on my word of honour, Mr Undersecretary – !’
‘In that case you have lost all sense of what constitutes obscenity . . . I am referring to the passage where the wretched village boy looks up the skirts of an old woman, and I am referring to the shameless exchange that ensues – !’ Whereupon dear old Rowohlt ran out of patience once again and said with brutal directness: ‘If that is a vile obscenity, then please explain to me, Mr Undersecretary, how exactly babies are made in the Third Reich!’
He hung up, and nothing happened. The book appeared, complete with vile obscenity, and again nothing happened. But this was an exception: generally speaking something always happened, and it was never anything pleasant.
So publishers, whom a German reading public imagines as spending their time reading manuscripts, publishing books, bagging hopeful young authors in happy hunting expeditions, actually had to perform very different tasks in the Third Reich: making accusations and defending both themselves and others, preparing written submissions, compiling statistics and attending conferences, where self-important guardians of the nation’s culture issued new guidelines for the realignment of the cultural front – decreeing, for example, that the historical novel must henceforth take second place to the romantic novel. That a greater emphasis on sex would not go amiss in future. That more works of fiction dealing with the lives and work of primary school teachers need to be published as soon as possible – presenting teachers in a very favourable light, of course, since there is a shortage of good people entering the teaching profession. And more such ‘cultural’ drivel in the same vein.
It may be that I judged my publisher unfairly during these years. Rowohlt Verlag continued to trade as R.V.,143 despite the fact that it had been bought up by this large publishing house in southern Germany, and it even had its own publishing director, a man whom Rowohlt himself had trained up for the job and appointed as heir to his tradition. Unfortunately Rowohlt hadn’t been a great teacher, and he had hammered away at this young man – who had probably never been that tough in the first place – for so long that all traces of self-will and courage had been beaten out of him. I have often complained bitterly about this spineless management regime, that never took any risks and was always looking anxiously over its shoulder. I have always firmly believed that self-abasement gets you nowhere with the Nazis, and the best tactic is just to carry on with what you are doing – but avoiding direct confrontations, of course. It is never sensible to enter a field carrying a big red flag when you know perfectly well that there’s a raging bull in there. But nor is it any good just to crawl into a mouse hole and never come out again. So there were a good many differences of opinion, but they were always settled by the exercise of good will on both sides. I’d been with Rowohlt Verlag for so many years that I didn’t want to change to a different publisher; I hate change, anything new – I like it best when everything carries on in the same old way. Now the year 1943 was drawing closer, the year in which I became 50, and also the year in which I looked back on 25 years as an author with Rowohlt Verlag; I had submitted the MS of my first novel to Rowohlt in 1918. It’s a strange kind of anniversary, for sure, 25 years as an author with the same publishing house. I think that is not a bad testimony either to the publisher or to the author! I was determined to celebrate my 50th birthday quietly at home in Mahlendorf, and contrary to possible expectation I was not bitterly disappointed when the press were instructed by the Propaganda Ministry to ignore Fallada’s 50th birthday. That suited me just fine. (By the way, I should point out that there were decent men here too. Despite the explicit instruction from the Propaganda Ministry, a number of newspapers did mark my birthday, most notably the Münchner Illustrierte Presse, which even published my picture.) It was all the more gratifying to receive birthday greetings from well-wishers and readers all over the world, especially from young soldiers at the front, who touchingly even sent me little presents: the cigarettes I so loved, envelopes (now in short supply), and even cheese! I lacked for nothing, it was a lovely day, and my Rowohlt Verlag had even sent me a splendid Kubin drawing144 as a birthday present. But just a few weeks later I received a letter from my publisher telling me R.V. had been closed. Such closures were a feature of the wartime economy; in order to free up manpower for the armed forces and the munitions factories, businesses that were deemed non-essential were shut down for the duration of the war, and contracts entered into with these businesses were ‘put on hold’. Just a few days later another letter arrived, correcting the information given in the first one: now it seemed that the publishing house had not been closed down to help the war effort, but had been wound up following its transfer into new ownership – more details would follow in due course. I found it all rather mystifying, but since there was nothing I could do but wait and see, that’s what I did. Soon afterwards I received a telegram, announcing a visit from the management at Rowohlt Verlag – the very man whom the old master himself, Rowohlt, had trained up and appointed as his successor. What I learned from him now was anything but reassuring. Inside the big south German publishing house that now owned Rowohlt Verlag, a fierce power struggle had been going on, and the founder of the business, the Nazi-hater I talked about earlier,145 had been gradually forced out from one position after another; in the eyes of the Reich Chamber of Literature and the Propaganda
Ministry, the man couldn’t do anything right. In the end they had undermined his authority within the company, made it impossible for him to exert any influence or continue his work, so that eventually he had no choice but to sell the business to the buyer who had been waiting in the wings for a long time, namely Eher Verlag in Munich, the Party’s own publishing house. In effect he was selling out to Mr Rosenberg, Mr Hitler, or the German Reich – the choice of name really doesn’t matter, since they all amount to the same thing anyway: the imposition of Nazi influence within this hitherto private business. When the big publishing house was bought up, ownership of the little Rowohlt Verlag was of course transferred to Eher Verlag along with it, and it was a foregone conclusion that the hated name of Rowohlt must be dropped immediately. The big publishing house was required to take on the desirable authors from the Rowohlt stable, while the undesirables were left to fend for themselves. That was the situation in brief, as I gradually managed to winkle it out of Mr Ledig, the managing director, and I need hardly add that I was the most undesirable of all the undesirable authors, given that the new publishing organization was operating under the aegis of Mr Alfred Rosenberg! I told Mr Ledig that in this respect our wishes coincided, as I had no desire myself to be an author in the pay of a Party publishing house. However, I pointed out that there were a number of contracts still in force between us: a general publishing agreement relating to all my works published to date, and three individual contracts for novels that had already been completed.146 Eher Verlag was of course responsible for these contracts now, as the legal successor to Rowohlt Verlag – so how was the company thinking to fulfil its various obligations under these contracts?
