by Hans Fallada
‘Then you’ll soon be out of light bulbs!’ observed my wife drily. ‘Us? Never! It’s very simple. One of us just goes out and picks up light bulbs for the SA from electrical shops. We go and pick up whatever we need – these days nobody dares to say no to the SA any more!’
I didn’t find these stories quite so amusing as these gentlemen, nor would I have wanted to be one of the party on today’s jaunt to Rügen. It was all a little too coarse, too crude and too primitive for my liking. Eventually, when it was already dark, I showed them out, explaining that unfortunately I didn’t have enough beds to put up such a large company. Someone remarked that the hayloft would have done for them, but I pretended not to hear. Enough is enough, and by now I had had more than enough of the brownshirts and the SA. I said that I had already contacted the best hotel in the local town, and that they were expected there. As they were leaving, little Black Meier took me to one side. There was a look of entreaty in his intelligent, friendly, owlish eyes. The truth was, he said, that they had no money left at all, not for the journey, not for their overnight accommodation, nor for breakfast. I laughed and said I wasn’t in the least bit surprised. I rather assumed, I added, that they were not much better provided for when they embarked on their travels. Another case of just picking up light bulbs as and when, perhaps?
Little Black Meier grinned. I pressed a banknote into his hand, and he grinned even more broadly. They piled into their ancient car. They shouted all kinds of goodbyes – though ‘Heil Hitler!’ did not figure among them. The car leapt forward and disappeared into the night. As it left our driveway it took the sharp left-hand bend on two wheels. ‘What are the chances’, I said to my wife, ‘that they’ll get to the hotel in one piece, driving like that? But I expect their luck will hold. Come on, let’s go and clean up the worst of the mess in my rooms before we get to bed.’ And the night passed and morning came, and I had already been working at my writing for some time when I was summoned to the telephone. It was our fat hotelier calling me. What was the position with the fellows from the SA? Apparently they’d spent all their money on drink yesterday evening, and now had nothing left to pay for their accommodation, their breakfast or the rest of the journey. And none of them had the heart to come to the phone and tell me. What did I think? At first I was inclined to be difficult; I had given Black Meier a big banknote, and they had had plenty to drink at our house, but then I thought that if I refused I would never see the back of them. So I laughed and told the hotelier that I would stump up for the three items he had mentioned, but not for anything else, not a single schnaps, not a single cigarette! Was that clear? Yes indeed, came the reply, and I hung up with a feeling of relief.
Two hours later I was called to the telephone again. No, it’s not what you are thinking, dear reader – they were not that predictable. They had not started to drink again, they had left punctually, they were now not far from Brandenburg. This time it was little Black Meier on the phone, and his voice sounded very pathetic and full of entreaty.
What on earth was the problem now? I asked.
Well, they’d had a bit of bad luck, they had driven the car into a closed level crossing gate, and the car had been a bit damaged, nothing too serious, but still, some minor damage . . . So what did that have to do with me? I wasn’t a bit interested in their car and their crazy driving! Well, it seems that the car belonged to their doctor, the SA’s own doctor, and they absolutely had to get it repaired, otherwise they’d really be in hot water. Could I perhaps . . . the repair costs – ?
I let out a howl of derision and hung up. I was then phoned repeatedly by all the SA men one after the other, then by the owner of a garage, who had already towed the car in. I was foolish enough to ask about the repair costs. When the figure of 250 marks was mentioned, I laughed derisively once more and hung up again. My readers know me by now, and they know that if I am pestered for long enough, I give in. I agreed to cover the repair costs. When I eventually received the bill, it amounted to 378 Reichsmarks – so the damage to the car had not been all that minor after all. To round off the story, I got a letter of thanks from little Black Meier, which was both touching and cheery: he told me he was so happy that I had helped him out of a jam. He had driven the repaired car two kilometres back to the barracks himself, and had been greeted by his friends with a celebratory volley of gunfire; unfortunately he had been wounded, nothing serious, just a bullet in the leg . . . So much for the finer points of social etiquette in the SA following the Nazi seizure of power.
(4.X.44.) I have always held the firm belief that there is some truth to the Latin saying ‘nomen est omen’. Names determine what a person is – very often at least – or what they become. People grow into their names, they change in obedience to their laws . . . Somewhere above I said that our new teacher, the successor to the wretched Ritzner, was called Stork. And I have never seen a clearer example of how a name can shape a person’s destiny than in the case of this man. He wanted so badly to be a strong man – ein starker Mann – but he never quite had what it took, there was always a little something missing; he could never be stark, but only ever Stork. The last little bit eluded him. And that’s how it was with him in everything. I’m sure he came to us in the village full of the best intentions. No doubt he had learned a thing or two in previous jobs, not all of it good, and he was determined to be both careful and patient. And then of course he had heard that Mahlendorf was a ‘difficult’ village: the disputes between its residents, the feuds that were passed down from one generation to the next, were renowned throughout the land. You had to take great care not to be drawn into this maelstrom of hatred and malice. A single ill-chosen word, a visit to the wrong house at the wrong time – these could ruin the standing of a newcomer for all time.
Schoolmaster Stork was on the short side, but broadly built, and he had nimble, slightly twisted legs like a dachshund, a legacy of rickets. His face was pale and wan, with a yellowish tinge, his eyes were dark and deep-set; you quickly became aware that the man could not look anyone straight in the face. He generally looked down when he was talking to you.
The wife of our new schoolmaster was round like a ball, and had a mercurial vivacity about her; but it was not the kind of comforting and contented obesity that comes from enjoying good food, and plenty of it, but rather the kind that stems from a glandular disorder, affecting the pituitary gland, I understand, in the cerebellum. She certainly had the volatile, over-excited manner of someone with glandular problems, alternating unpredictably with sullen moods or downright aggressive behaviour. But generally speaking she was lively, vivacious, full of laughter, and it was not long before she was known to every household in the village, as if she had lived there all her life. She was herself the daughter of a country schoolmaster, so she knew all about village life from an early age, and she knew the teaching profession inside out – better than her husband, so people were soon saying. Rumour had it that she corrected the children’s exercise books for him.
He was the son of an agricultural labourer, who had subsequently been promoted to the stewardship of a country manor. The son too had worked his way up from humble beginnings, doubtless enduring all manner of hardships and deprivations along the way – hence the crooked legs, the physique that always looked somehow underdeveloped, the pale, liverish complexion that indicated bad blood.
Schoolmaster Stork’s debut in Mahlendorf was not auspicious: in the first week after he moved in, his front door and door handle were smeared with human excrement in the night. The perpetrator or perpetrators were never found, and it remained unclear whether they came from our village, where actually nobody yet had cause to hate him so viciously, or from his previous place of employment. At all events, this outrage, which was universally condemned, became the subject of the first heated quarrel between our old village mayor and the new schoolteacher: Stork demanded that the mayor send someone to clean up his soiled front door, since it was an insult to him as the village schoolmaster. The mayor said it was
n’t his responsibility, and he refused. So the village looked on while the unsightly door decoration stayed in place for a couple of days – I don’t recall now who removed it in the end. But the incident taught us that the new schoolmaster was a fiery, quarrelsome and self-righteous man, and we resolved to watch our step in future. Furthermore, unlike his predecessor, he was not content to be a member of the Party and the SA in name and uniform only, but was clearly determined to be very active in these capacities. The thing is, he was a ‘March Martyr’, as we quickly learned, and he was intent on demonstrating his fervour at every turn. He not only took over all the posts held by his predecessor, but was also promptly appointed the ‘Political Leader’ of the village and the local representative both of the Labour Front and of the NSV.154 In short, he soon held every official position going, and had also set his sights, so it was claimed, on the job of village mayor, which we felt was in the best possible hands already, the wise old hands of our small farmer. From the very first day schoolmaster Stork let it be known that he was not minded to be content with the quiet life of a village schoolmaster; he was ambitious, he was positively eaten up with ambition and envy. His sole concern was how to get on in the world and ingratiate himself with his superiors, and he didn’t care what methods he used to further his career. We only discovered that later. But it was not long before we had seen and heard quite enough of this man to give very little away in our dealings with him. We only had occasional conversations in passing, and when it was strongly hinted that we should get to know each other better over coffee and cakes, we pretended not to hear – for which we were never forgiven.
Meanwhile the time had come when we had to send our six-year-old son to school, and who was going to teach him but schoolmaster Stork? What we saw and heard there, however, went a long way towards reconciling us with Stork. He was not only a good teacher, but he also loved children, knew how to put things across to them, and to win their affection. We were very pleased with the results, our boy really liked going to school – and that was no small thing! Sometimes we stayed behind chatting with the Storks, discussing this and that, and I discovered a certain urbane quality in the man, a great facility for engaging with other people’s way of thinking and seeing things from their point of view. In short, schoolmaster Stork was a good conversationalist, who knew how to listen as well as talk. I’ve always found this very appealing, and one day to my astonishment I found myself having a conversation about politics with Stork in which I no longer made any secret of my anti-Nazi sentiments. We spoke about the Jewish question, and I reminded him of what the Führer had said: that to be a true man you had to keep faith with your friends in their hour of need. The fact was the Jews had been my friends in good times, and I was not about to break faith with them now that times for them were bad. His eyes wandered, but he smiled suavely and said that the Führer had assuredly not intended his remark to be applied to criminals, gypsies, Jews and similar riff-raff. But he wanted to hear what I thought about it . . . I was stupid enough to think he really was interested in my opinion. But I had an uncomfortable feeling about it all the same, I had undoubtedly let down my guard, and my wife, who had listened to our conversation with mounting alarm, said the same thing. But as the weeks went by and nothing happened, I almost forgot about this conversation. I only discovered later that Mr Stork made a habit of initiating compromising conversations of this kind, subsequently reporting what was said either to the Party or to the district council leader, as appropriate. He was constantly gathering material – to incriminate others, and to assist his own advancement. Soon there were growing indications that Mr Stork was not the affable and agreeable man that he liked to appear. I heard from my six-year-old son that his teacher had had the gall to ask him where his father had hung the portrait of Hitler at home, and whether he saluted it morning and evening with a ‘Heil Hitler!’ Very soon afterwards a big change then took place in our village; our old mayor was ignominiously removed from his post, having faithfully discharged his office for decades, and replaced by the new schoolmaster Stork. The teacher used the handover of administrative and financial responsibilities to humiliate the honourable old man further. He shamelessly raised doubts about the honest conduct of mayoral business, and had the brass neck to say, when his accusations were shown to be groundless, that it was his bounden duty to carry out a scrupulous audit, and anyone who felt insulted by that simply showed that his conscience was not clear. It was quite apparent that he now felt himself to be the lord and master of the entire village, and so in a way he was, since he had the district council leader and the Party behind him, backing up his every move. Stork was determined now to play the strong man, and to use the power that he had. He publicly announced that a wind of change was blowing through Mahlendorf, and that certain lukewarm, not to say subversive elements should tread very warily from now on. Supported by his mercurial wife, he promptly gathered about him all the village gossips of both sexes, nosed into every piece of idle tittle-tattle like a duck foraging in a pool of murky water, diligently wrote up reports, conducted interrogations, agitated and plotted, and managed within a short space of time to re-ignite all the ancient feuds in Mahlendorf that had virtually died out, while simultaneously inciting new ones. From now on the whole village was constantly permeated by a foul miasma of calumny, as every informer now found a willing ear. This was the time when the German population was starting to feel the effects of cutbacks and economies in their daily lives as a result of the government’s accelerated program of rearmament, and even the quantity of grain that could be fed to pigs was now rationed. One morning, not long after schoolmaster Stork assumed his duties as mayor, a couple of pitiful dead piglets were found dangling from the war memorial in the churchyard, erected to commemorate the dead of the First World War. Strung between them was a cardboard notice: ‘Because you’ve taken the corn we eat, we lay down our lives at the Fatherland’s feet!’ This sent our new mayor into a frenzy of rage. The mere fact that his community harboured such a degenerate reflected badly on him and the discharge of his office. He moved heaven and earth to discover the identity of the perpetrator, but he was never found. He had better luck in another case. A farmer who had had too much to drink told people in the pub that he had a cow in his shed that looked just like Adolf Hitler. The farmer was taken to court and given a lengthy prison sentence. Later on he was transferred to a concentration camp, and if he is not already dead he is probably still living there today. This was an early victory for Stork’s conduct of village affairs, but it was nowhere near enough to satisfy his vaulting ambition. Many more lukewarm brethren must yet be sent to their doom. I had long known that he had his eye on me too, and his confidantes, old women for the most part, had been leaking information for a long time. He started by going through the records of his predecessor and claiming that I’d been let off paying some tax bill or other by mistake. He now demanded payment of the outstanding amount. I refused; the tax rebate had been correct because my income had fallen. In the course of our discussions I saw the true character of the man for the first time: the thin veneer of urbanity vanished in an instant and a threatening bully now stood before me, consumed with envy and lust for power, cunning and yet stupid, utterly stupid, incapable of following a simple argument or understanding a tax document. A dangerous fool, completely incapable of thinking through the consequences of what he was doing. When I had explained my reasoning for the tenth time and saw that my arguments were not making the slightest impression on him, I gave up and told him to do what he liked. He threatened me with immediate foreclosure, accusing me and the old mayor of collusion and corrupt dealings. I slammed the door and left.
Next morning he asked me to come and see him again, and told me – all affability now – that he intended to ask the tax office for an expert opinion on the point at issue. Whether he really did, or whether his much cleverer, but also much more dangerous wife came to the aid of his feeble understanding overnight, I don’t know. In any event, I never heard
another word about this whole tax business. But he never forgave me this defeat and quite a few others besides, as I would learn to my cost in due course. Even so, he was determined to make an example of a few people in this lukewarm neck of the woods, so that everyone would feel a little bit afraid and more ready to submit to his rule. I was first on his list. We already knew that he and his wife were in the habit of trying to glean from our young housemaids, the women who worked in the garden and other workers, what went on in our house and what we talked about. In general I was very lucky in this regard: apart from two exceptions, nobody from our house blabbed in all those years. And there would have been plenty to report; within my own four walls I frequently gave free rein to my loose and impious tongue. . . . But as luck would have it we had just had to fire an older lady who worked for us as a housekeeper, who not only had a son in the SS, but had also – and this was the high point of her life – embroidered a large tablecloth for the Führer himself! She had delivered it in person, and refused to budge until she had placed this work of art, decorated with blue cornflowers and golden ears of wheat, into the hands of the great man himself, and had shaken him by the hand! Following her stormy dismissal without notice, this creature, who certainly wasn’t a perfect fit with the kind of home life we led, had spent long hours sitting with our mayor Stork and relating the table talk of the Falladas. The usual reports had then been drawn up and forwarded. Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – neither the Gestapo nor the district council leader’s office used them to start proceedings against me, because they contained claims so ludicrous that not even an anti-Nazi writer could be supposed capable of such absurdities. Our effusive embroiderer of tablecloths, it seems, had shown herself to be even more stupid than the mayor, and she had got all my little stories mixed up. When she claimed, for example, that I had said that 65 men decorated with the Blood Order155 had been shot at the time of the Röhm Putsch in our little town (1300 residents), this was such arrant nonsense that not even a moron could possibly have believed it. There was not a single holder of the Blood Order living in the entire place, and there certainly hadn’t been any shootings during the Röhm Putsch. So nothing came of it this time round; they were saving me up for later. But schoolmaster Stork called in his brother, also a Nazi, also a member of the SA, and also a ‘March Martyr’, and the two of them now went around in plain clothes, the provocateur and his witness, looking for someone to make an example of. They began by visiting the pharmacist in our little town, a man of nearly seventy, who had once belonged to the Stahlhelm, who had strong nationalist sentiments and up until the Nazi seizure of power had been the king of the little town. They greeted him with a ‘Heil Hitler!’, and the old pharmacist responded with ‘Good day to you’. Our schoolmaster Stork asked him whether he ever said ‘Heil Hitler’, and the pharmacist, who had never once allowed the hated greeting to pass his lips, replied genially that of course he would greet people with H.H. the moment this form of greeting was prescribed by law. And was there anything else he could do for the gentlemen? Having been suitably dismissed with a flea in their ear by this old bruiser, they now trotted off two doors down to the town’s chemist. This chemist, who was likewise an elderly man in his sixties, was something of a sad case, despite the fact that he had succeeded in building up a flourishing business; at one time he had probably thought he was destined for something better than running a country store that typically sold everything from aniseed oil to Harz Mountain cheese, and from rolls of film to spades. The man was a quiet, respectable, educated man, courteous and well-mannered, but every six months or so the madness would come upon him, tormented thoughts of a wasted life, almost put behind him, now overwhelmed him again, and he took to the bottle. He drank for three or four days solid, then staggered home, slept it off, and was once again a respectable, dependable man of business for the next six months. During these bouts of heavy drinking he had the curious habit of quoting from Faust, which he knew by heart, reciting Part II with especial relish. The fact that the townspeople ridiculed this proclivity and showed not the slightest appreciation for Faust Part II merely confirmed him in his contempt and in his belief that his life had been wasted.
