by Hans Fallada
That’s easy, I was told, we’ll just cancel them! I was such a famous author, I would have no difficulty in finding a new publisher!
I gave a thin smile and said I thought that was probably so. But looking for a new publisher would take time, and once I’d found him he would then have to submit new applications for paper supplies to be allocated for my books, so that for nine months, or maybe a year, nothing of mine could be published, and Eher Verlag would have to compensate me for that period of lost time. To cut a long story short: after some discussion the managing director and I came to an agreement which included a very cheap compensation payment for me, and with that he travelled back to southern Germany. I then promptly received a telegram telling me the managing director was not authorized to conduct negotiations with me, and that therefore the agreement was null and void. So why did you send the man to see me in the first place, I wondered, fuming, and hired a lawyer to carry on the negotiations on my behalf. For my part I wanted nothing more to do with these gentlemen, and I resolutely resisted all the siren calls that sought to entice me to Berlin to negotiate in person. It was my lawyer’s job to conduct the negotiations, and as I knew him to be a very canny operator, and I had the law on my side (the contracts were there in black and white, had a long time to run, and could not be terminated unilaterally without notice), I did not doubt the outcome of the matter. I was certain of victory. At the same time I went around in a constant state of distress and anger, of course, as anyone can well imagine. Twenty-five years as an author with the same publishing house, to which I had stayed loyal through thick and thin – and now to be turned out on the street in this manner: I was having none of it!
But then it got even better, and I found myself on the receiving end of the same methods that had been used against me when I bought the villa in the little village of Berkenbrück. Except that then I was dealing with a simple little failed businessman and an equally deadbeat building contractor, whereas now I was facing an encounter with the Party high-ups! What my lawyer now told me was as outrageous as it was devastating. I was expected to agree to the immediate, unconditional termination of the contracts without compensation, in return for which they would pay me very generously for the remaining stocks of my books as a consideration! I said ‘No!’, a furious ‘No!’, and I repeated it many times, instructing my lawyer to sue Eher Verlag for performance of the contracts. He advised me against it, telling me that no lawyer in Germany, himself included, would file such a lawsuit for me; Eher Verlag was effectively the Party, and you don’t bring a lawsuit against the Party! So there I was, up against a brick wall, just as I had been before. And now the wall was even higher, even more insurmountable, and even more brazenly barring the road to any form of justice. The lawyer kept on trying to persuade me; I really should drop the idea of causing any trouble for these people; they had made it abundantly clear that if I did, they would cause trouble for me: then I could expect to be banned from writing altogether. The same old blackmail tactics: these people just keep on playing the same old tune! It doesn’t matter what it is, whether they want to grab the Sudetenland or get rid of the Danzig Corridor, whether they want to steal a nice house or break a few contracts: in large things as in small, they are as uninventive as they are brutal.
I travelled back to Mahlendorf without giving my answer. I fought long and hard with myself. I made myself ill with anger and worry. But in the end I said ‘Yes’ after all. There was not the slightest possibility of a ‘No’ anyway – a ‘No’ would have achieved absolutely nothing. The practical consequence of a ‘No’ would have been to ensure that the RCL banned me from working as a writer, so that all my contracts would have lapsed anyway, and all I would have accomplished would have been to put an end to my writing career.
So I said ‘Yes’ – and as I started to feel better I went in search of a new publisher.147 I found him – and now began a season of surprises. We wanted to draw up a general agreement like the one I had before, and Eher Verlag had previously told my lawyer that they would do what they could to help (you were not allowed to enter into general agreements during the war). But now Eher Verlag was saying that it couldn’t see the need for a general agreement; I could simply sign an agreement for each individual book once the necessary paper supply had been allocated. So my publisher applied to the Propaganda Ministry for a paper allowance, and was told that there was no more paper for Fallada for the time being – maybe in a year or two years’ time . . . So I sat down and wrote to Eher Verlag, asking them to send over their remaining stocks of my books to my new publisher on the ‘generous terms’ they had promised. I got a reply stating that unfortunately not a single book of mine remained in stock. Those bastards had sold all the copies of my books in the meantime and then pocketed the proceeds themselves. I had fallen into the hands of crooks and thieves, but these crooks and thieves traded under the name Eher Verlag – and they had the backing of the German Reich. So that, in brief, is the story of what happened to a minor German author, and I’m sure I don’t need to spell out what he thought and felt about all this, or how it fuelled his animosity towards the ruling regime. But now I’m sitting here with a good publisher and several unprinted manuscripts,148 but no paper and no prospect of paper and no books – only the few remaining foreign rights are still yielding a trickle. But Eher Verlag continues to milk that too, if someone has not remembered to stop the payments, and it takes its nice little cut, even though it is not entitled to, now that it is no longer my publisher. And there’s a sequel to it all as well, another piece of blackmail by an even higher authority. I’m tired of relating all this dirty business, and I expect the reader feels much the same. So I’ll keep it very short, omitting all the details. The Propaganda Ministry itself commissioned me to write an anti-Semitic novel,149 specifically for distribution abroad; the prospect of paper supplies was the carrot, and the threat of disbarment as a writer was the stick. So now the author Fallada is writing an anti-Semitic novel. But it’s a huge topic, and the novel will run to some 1800 printed pages – so it’s a race between me and the war: which will be finished first, the novel or the war – ?
(3.X.44.) When we moved to Mahlendorf150 in the autumn of 1933 we were determined, after the bad experiences we had had, to get off on the right foot this time with the local government officials and Party leaders – come what may. We had had enough of fighting these losing battles, which, as people without rights, we could never win.
We found that things were very different in Mahlendorf, and the local mayor was an elderly salt-of-the-earth small farmer, a wonderfully forthright and dependable character. He was not a member of the Party himself, and it was soon apparent that he was not particularly well-disposed towards it. So we had nothing at all to fear from him. As he had lived in the village all his life, he knew from personal experience who the informers and malicious gossips were, and was completely impervious to their tittle-tattle and tale-telling. Life in the village was peaceful, in so far as it can be peaceful in a village that sits on a peninsula, with no through road to bring in new life from outside. Everyone was related by blood or marriage, everyone knew everyone else, and everyone else’s weaknesses, so it was a fertile breeding-ground for those family feuds we’ve all heard about, which were often perpetuated from one generation to the next. But these feuds, vicious as they were, were not political in any way, they had nothing to do with changing party allegiances, and outlasted all of them: they were not our business. The second important person in the village was the schoolmaster, an older man, who was also not a Party member, and who at the time of our arrival in the village had more than enough troubles of his own: some sort of charge had been brought against him following accusations that he had seduced female pupils. The girls had testified against him, and he was fighting desperately to clear his name. So we had nothing at all to fear from this man either.
There were very few actual Party members in the village, which somehow had never taken much interest in politics. And these few
Party members were barely active. There were a few elderly farmers, a fishmonger, an innkeeper, a painter and decorator . . . but they all had their own worries. Times were hard, a lot of people in the village were unemployed, the parish was poor. The stony, sandy soil and the uneven terrain had never yielded big harvests, and in recent years the harvests had been particularly bad, as nobody had the money to buy good-quality seed stock and fertilizers.
Our arrival was greeted not just with curiosity, but soon afterwards with outright joy, when it turned out that I was in a position to relieve the village of many of its cares and burdens. I needed building work done, I needed a lot of work doing in the garden, digging out boulders, creating new features, planting fruit trees, putting up fences – in short, there was always work to be had at my place, and money to be earned. I threw myself with such energy into the work of tidying up the property that it was as if I had to make up for decades of neglect in just one year. Six to eight men were working for me almost the whole time, as well as three or four women in the garden. The local farmers carted loads of timber, stones and other materials for me. In Mahlendorf I had solved the unemployment problem before Mr Hitler got round to it, and the village was grateful to me, especially its thoroughly decent old mayor, who was thereby relieved of many worries. In those early days I made good friends among the ordinary people of the village, the masons, the carpenters, the forestry workers, friends who have remained true to me to this day, and who never mind giving up a free Sunday if they can help me in some way. But the local bigwigs, the farmers, have long since forgotten that time, and for them I am once again the unwelcome outsider, who doesn’t belong in the village.
At the time, though, I lived in peace with everyone, and felt completely safe and secure. The first tumultuous months after the seizure of power seemed a long way off. We only learned about what was going on from the newspapers delivered to our house. We savoured the peace and quiet with profound thankfulness, we felt restored, and I was working again. This peace and quiet had an unfortunate consequence, however, which at first we failed to notice, but which in time would have serious repercussions: I grew reckless again – particularly in what I said. It wasn’t very long before my workmen were telling a new arrival to their ranks, who greeted me with ‘Heil Hitler!’: ‘You don’t need to say Heil Hitler here, mate, the boss isn’t one of those!’
Fool that I was, I was still flattered by my rapidly acquired reputation as no friend of the Nazis, and I never stopped to think that this reputation of mine would now spread from farm to farm, beyond the village to our local small town, from here to the county town and all the way up to the district council office, where it would be set in stone for all time – regardless of what I did. Indeed, in this initial period, when I thought I was safe, I did everything possible to justify and cement my reputation as a black sheep; and by the time Mahlendorf was being run by men of a very different stripe, it was much too late to be careful. I’d been careless for far too long. This mixture of unthinking recklessness and sudden bouts of caution was a typical feature of those very early days. I suddenly hit upon the idea that I should give some sort of house-warming party in the village, to publicly celebrate my moving in to the community – that would do wonders for my good reputation. Excited by this notion, I contacted the village innkeeper, who was pleased at my suggestion, since it was obviously going to be a nice little earner for him. He also told me about someone who would act as my ‘master of ceremonies’, the manager of a local estate, and I happily accepted the suggestion – the man was a staunch Stahlhelm supporter, and a sworn enemy of the Nazis. (Note the unfailing Fallada knack for making perfectly sure that everything goes spectacularly wrong!) After a few discussions the two of us agreed to stage a ‘German Evening’, so that’s what we did. What was specifically ‘German’ about the evening, I can’t remember any more. Perhaps a few poems were recited, but anyway, the dancing, drinking and smoking went on into the early hours – and all at my expense. The whole village was able to treat itself, and the dance hall was packed, with a local brass band up at one end playing dance music at deafening volume. But the local dignitaries and farmers had stayed away, or else they just looked in briefly. The evening was a resounding success – for the innkeeper, certainly. I stayed until the very end, and my wife fetched me home in person in the not-so-early morning – my wife and my secretary at the time,151 a very striking Jewish girl of Hungarian origin, who opened a restaurant in Tel Aviv two years later. Such was my debut in Mahlendorf, and as usual when I have just made a big mistake, I was pretty pleased with myself.
The first decisive change in our quiet village circumstances occurred when the elderly schoolmaster was transferred – doubtless they wanted to put some distance between him and his young accusers. Incidentally, he was able to clear himself of all charges in due course: as often happens, the fourteen-year-old girls had made up all kinds of stories about their teacher, whom they liked well enough.
His replacement was a Mr Ritzner, a very tall, powerful man of about thirty, who always went around in a brown shirt and full-length boots, was a Party member, and even held some position in the SA. It was only a minor post, but generally speaking – and invariably with this party – the little tyrants are more dangerous than the big ones. We feared that this would be the end of our quiet life in the village, especially as Mr Ritzner was immediately appointed to various official positions: chairman of the local agricultural cooperative and village electricity cooperative. He was also put in charge of the fire brigade – and the post of mayor seemed certain to go to him, especially as it was already against the rules, in fact, for a non-Party member like our old small farmer to hold the office of mayor. But for the moment it didn’t come to that . . . I said to my wife: ‘From now on we must be very careful and mind our p’s and q’s’, not realizing that the verdict on me had already been delivered.
It soon became apparent that the new schoolmaster was seeking out our company. It began with occasional little chats in the village street, and this was followed by a formal invitation to afternoon coffee and cakes, which is something I absolutely cannot abide, but on this occasion I accepted, thinking it was all in a good cause. We spent several hours in the Ritzners’ home, which was furnished in a somewhat surprising style: alongside ancient furniture that was falling apart were some contemporary chairs covered in the most hideous fabric and with that garishly grained wood that spread like a rash across German domestic interiors during those years. There was also a huge, brand-new wireless set of the latest design, and a truly enormous standard lamp with an orange conical shade, which stood all on its own amongst the ancient detritus. We sat and chatted, first of all about the weather and the prospects for the harvest, as country-dwellers do. Then the women got into a conversation about gardening, and about the difficulties of finding a decent washerwoman in the village, while Mr Ritzner talked about his wife’s many illnesses and operations, and the substantial costs involved. It was a very pleasant afternoon, and on the way home I said to my wife: ‘This time it’ll be all right! We’ll get along very well with the man. He won’t make trouble for us.’
So then it was our turn to issue the next invitation to coffee – that’s the thing about invitations to coffee, they always come around in pairs, at the very least. The second afternoon started off in the same perfectly predictable way as the first one: the weather again, the harvest, and a revisiting of Mrs Ritzner’s ailments. Then I found myself listening wide-eyed as husband and wife suddenly launched an emotional appeal, going at us for all they were worth, with tears in their eyes: his wife’s operations had eaten up so much money, he’d had to pay one bill after another, and on his modest teacher’s salary . . . Now he’d exhausted all his resources, the bailiff was paying him daily visits, bringing shame upon him in the eyes of the whole village. I had to help him, I was a wealthy man, etc., etc. This wasn’t the first time in my life I had heard this kind of thing, and I have to admit that I didn’t like what I heard. Followin
g the success of Little Man, when money seemed to flow into our house in a never-ending stream, we had listened to many such requests, and we had lent a lot of money to strangers, acquaintances and friends. And then it had happened that someone who was actually a very good friend of ours had crossed the street to avoid us. In short, we learned the truth of the saying that the quickest way to lose friends is to lend them money. At the time we had vowed never to lend money again. Giving it away was one thing, but lending – never again!
As the entreaties became a little less insistent, I gazed thoughtfully at my host’s brown shirt. We had vowed never to do it, but then again – in this special instance . . . In earlier times the Jews had paid protection money, now it was the turn of non-Party members . . . I glanced across at my wife, and it seemed to me she gave me a slight nod. So I said I was by no means a rich man, I lived completely from hand to mouth: but in this case of dire human need I would think about it, and if the sum involved was not too large, it might perhaps be possible. What sort of figure did he have in mind?
Oh well, he said, he didn’t have an exact figure to hand, maybe four hundred marks, five hundred at the most! He’d need to go and do the sums first . . . I suggested that he do that, and that he should make a complete list of all his debts, not leaving anything out. If I was going to pay off his debts, then I wanted to be his sole creditor. All this back and forth with the bailiff and these unnecessary costs had to stop. And he needn’t worry, I would offer him repayment on favourable terms!
