A Stranger in My Own Country

by Hans Fallada

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t mind having fifty cubic metres.’

  ‘You shall have them!’ he said. ‘I’ll make sure they are allocated to you right away!’

  I couldn’t help asking the question: ‘But how is it possible, Mr Stork? Three days ago there was not a single cubic metre to be had, and here you are today, knee-deep in wood!’

  ‘That’s my little secret’, he said, and that’s how we left it. I never did find out what his little secret was, of course. To this day I don’t know if he really did have more wood all along, or if he managed to secure a fresh supply, or if my threat to withhold my taxes had any effect. All I know is that I was given more wood that winter than I’d ever had before, namely fifty cubic metres. But that was him all over, he never changed. He was always a bad lot, even if he did help me out once in a while. He never behaved well because it was the decent thing to do. In most cases I think it was fear that made him change his tune – fear of the consequences of his actions.

  (5.X.44.) He had been living in our village for so many years now, and even a dimwit like him must have noticed that his situation was worse than when he arrived. He had had friends, was invited to people’s houses, and now the friends had backed off and the invitations had ceased. In many cases relations had broken down as the result of a quarrel, but more often than not it was because of the very obvious way the Storks cultivated friends only so long as they could be useful to them. This was another delightful characteristic of our mayor that I have not mentioned before: he had perfected the art of getting people to do him favours, favours that were actually not favours at all but proper jobs of work, such as hauling firewood, ploughing fields and suchlike. He just took it for granted that all these things should be done for him free of charge. If someone asked for payment, that was the end of good relations. The man would get his money eventually, if he was sufficiently persistent, but then the mayor was no longer his friend. So he actually lived a very isolated life in the village; he wielded absolute power, dispensed his favours or disfavours as he saw fit, but he had hardly any friends. And even tyrants have their hours of weakness, when they are in need of friends.

  Another separate entry. I’m feeling fairly agitated; there is a possibility that I might be allowed to go home for a couple of hours to fetch some papers, escorted by a police officer, of course. But that would hardly stop me smuggling this MS out of this house of the dead, and hiding it at home. They may tell me their decision this evening. I can hardly believe they’ll give me permission, but it would be such a relief! I’m living in a constant state of fear as I push ahead with my writing day after day, watched by so many prying eyes, and it is preventing me from enjoying my work – and disturbing my already fitful sleep. I’m not so much afraid for myself, I’m already living the life of a prisoner behind bars, so outwardly my life would not be very different up until the final hour, when I hope to acquit myself well. But all the others who would be caught up in this business – it’s them I fear for! It was incredibly reckless of me to start writing this account here. And yet I could not do otherwise. And yet I carry on writing!

  But if they would let me go to Mahlendorf for a few hours I would take this MS with me, and I would stop writing at the point I had got to by then, even though I have not yet written what may be the most important chapter, about the war. I wouldn’t even be sorry to end it this way. I embarked on this project with great expectations, but now I’m rather disappointed. All the things I’ve been through come across as just a bunch of petty squabbles, it seems to me, which everyone else must find boring. At the time I felt anger, bitterness, and sometimes fear. But now, writing about these things much later, I haven’t even felt that any more. So how am I to communicate anger, bitterness and fear to the reader? He’ll be bored stiff reading it! And yet I say to myself: what else could I have written? I wasn’t living at the heart of events, I wasn’t the friend and confidant of ministers and generals, I have no great revelations to make. I lived the same life as everyone else, the life of ordinary people, the masses. And for those of us who were not Party members, life in the Third Reich really was just one long series of wrangles, small battles that we had to fight in order to make a living and survive. Nothing big happened. Just as a publisher couldn’t publish books any more, but had to spend his time conducting a pointless correspondence with the authorities about every damn thing, so the writer of books could not just get on with his work in peace; there was constant friction, agitation and interference. When I think how much I myself had to change in writing my books! I had to abandon all thoughts of writing the books I really cared about. Any portrayal of darker characters was strictly forbidden. I had to be optimistic and life-affirming, in an era that was negating the very meaning of life through persecution, torture and executions. Since Wolf I’ve not actually written anything that I really cared about. I’ve fallen back on ‘light fiction’. I’ve written books of memoirs, yes, and they’ve given people a lot of pleasure; but they were just evasions too. I really don’t feel so old yet that I want to live off my memories – or my memoirs. It would have been much nicer if I’d been able to write them ten or twenty years later. But that’s just it: they systematically took us away from our real work, they wouldn’t allow us to follow the call of our own heart. For them there was only one call, and that was the sound of them calling the shots. They are frightened of the individual and individuality, they want the shapeless masses into which they can drum their slogans. And they’ve done very well with that, especially now during the war. They have introduced forced labour, they prohibit everyone from doing the work they want to, the work they were born to, under threat of dire punishment. They are destroying every human being – and the puppets that are left give them no trouble at all.

  What will Germany be like after this war? What kind of Germans will one have to live with? A terrible thought! How few of them will have retained vestiges of their true selves! And they won’t even feel the change that has happened to them! They’ll just say: ‘We were always like this!’

  So I am not satisfied with what I have written. Although I don’t know how I could have written it any differently. I’ll just carry on, more doggedly than a mule. But if they do let me go back to Mahlendorf for a few hours, then I’ll break off without any regrets or remorse. Perhaps my heart has been embittered by what I have written so far? I don’t know. But I would be happy to hear a ‘yes’ this evening. I’d manage it somehow, smuggling the thing out – under the watchful eyes of the policeman! And then what a relief to think to myself: most of what you planned to write is safely tucked away in Mahlendorf! Then I could sleep more soundly again. Another task accomplished.

  When the war came, mayor Stork told everyone who cared to listen that he had immediately volunteered for front-line service. Schoolmaster Stork promptly related this to his pupils, telling them how happy he would be if he could take up arms and show the Führer that he was one of his loyal warriors. Stork was in his early thirties at the time, robust and without visible ailments (except when his feelings of envy sometimes became too much and adversely affected his gall). But the months went by without Mr Stork marching off to war. Every now and then mention was made of the fact that he was indispensable as mayor, and that his local authority superiors would not release him for military service: but his own burning desire was still to be posted to the front. He often belittled the work he was doing here on the home front: ‘But of course we must faithfully do our duty wherever the Führer has thought fit to place us!’ The months turned into years, four years of the war had passed, and our mayor was still with us. (During these war years he was more insufferable than ever, but I will come to that later.) Then the news finally came through that our mayor was leaving us: he really was going to join the army as the war entered its fifth year. But again he was out of luck: denied the opportunity to take up arms and fight for his Führer, he was posted to the medical corps. He bore the disappointment heroically, but never failed to point out what a disapp
ointment it was. Doubtless his wife did much to help him bear his fate with fortitude, going to visit him in the barracks nearly every week with suitcases filled to bursting. It was actually inconceivable that a man could eat so much in addition to the robust army fare. But doubtless Mr Stork put the principles of National Socialism into practice by giving much of it away. Though not so much to his comrades, so we heard, as to his superiors, in particular the all-powerful orderly room sergeant, who could make or break a man.

  The training period passed quickly, and all of Stork’s comrades were sent out to Stalingrad,156 where a fierce battle was being fought. But destiny (and the all-powerful orderly room sergeant) once again had it in for Stork: of all his comrades he was the only one who had to stay at home and work in the orderly room. His frequently voiced disappointment knew no bounds: ‘But I mustn’t complain. I must do my duty wherever my Führer sends me.’ While his comrades, engaged in heavy fighting on the Eastern and Western fronts, often went a year or more without getting leave, Mr Stork was allowed to go home on leave at least once a fortnight, and often weekly – and he was promoted more rapidly than the rest of them at the front. A true Nazi, and a March Martyr to boot, a dyed-in-the-wool loyalist – a man such as that wears his superiority like an unseen badge wherever he goes: he performs a more important service for his Führer back here in the homeland than any non-Party members fighting at the front. Many people in our village were too ignorant to understand this; they resented the fact that he was always home on leave, while they didn’t get to see their own sons or husbands from one year to the next. But the Storks rose above such benighted sentiments, and continued to show themselves most Sundays, walking arm in arm on the village street. For sheer shamelessness and effrontery, they had always been in a class of their own. They had always followed the principle that Nazi rules and regulations imposing restrictions and privations on the population, especially now in wartime, only applied to others, never to themselves. And they followed that principle here: if you’ve got it, flaunt it! Meanwhile, by all accounts, petitions were being furiously penned by husband, wife and friendly, lower-ranking bureaucrats, arguing the urgent need to reinstate Mr Stork in his old post as mayor. The new mayor, it was claimed, was just not up to the job, and some recent political appointees in the village were already displaying alarming red tendencies. Unfortunately the Wehrmacht, which is of course not an arm of the Party, showed not the slightest inclination to release Private, or indeed Corporal, Stork from the medical corps on the strength of these petitions. On the contrary, rumour has it that the army pulled him out of the orderly room and sent him out to some large troop training ground in the East. Whether he is fighting for his Führer there with pen in hand again, or whether they are getting him ready to be shipped out to a fighting unit – perhaps one day schoolmaster Stork’s fondest wish will be fulfilled after all, and now in this fifth year of the war he will get to hear a shot fired again, or even – God forbid! – loose one off himself!

  But in relating all this I am anticipating events that occurred much later in the life of our mayor. Before he joined the military, he spent another four years of the war in Mahlendorf, and you may depend upon it that he made full use of the time to inflate his own sense of power and humiliate the local residents he didn’t like. Even before this he could hardly have complained about a shortage of powers, and he had already become the absolute master in Mahlendorf – apart from the occasional need to refer back to his superiors on this or that matter. But all this was as nothing compared with the power that the war placed in the hands of this bitter, resentful little coward. How it must have tickled Stork, suddenly to have the power of life and death placed in his hands! He sat on the draft board that conscripted people into the armed forces, and if the mayor cast his vote to the effect that such and such a man could or could not be spared from his farm, that frequently decided the matter. He had never learned the meaning of shame, Mr Stork, and it wasn’t long before we saw his enemies leaving the village to go and fight – and in some cases die – at the front, while his friends stayed at home on their farms year after year because they were indispensable to the war effort! His opportunities for tormenting and harassing his fellow men, already far too numerous, now grew exponentially. The system of ration cards157 that regulated everyone’s provisions, and which now made the most basic needs of life dependent on a decision by the mayor, made him all-powerful. The way he approved or denied requests for new shoes for poor girls, the way he used a worn-out bicycle tyre as a pretext to wreak revenge, and the way he was so open and transparent about it all, so that the mean motives behind his refusal were always plain to see under the thin cloak of his expressions of regret – it was just disgusting! How much worry he caused my wife when the children had their school holidays and Stork refused to issue the ration cards for them on one pretext after another, making it harder and harder to get bread for them! Stupid as the mayor was, he was ingenious enough when it came to devising such torments and thinking up endless new pretexts, if not for denying the fulfilment of legitimate requests, then at least for delaying it, and not for a moment was his conscience troubled by thoughts of a worried mother or hungry children. There is one story that casts a glaring light on the utter viciousness of this swine, who was protected by his official position and those who had appointed him. Here it is. Living in the village was a small woman, very young and not unattractive, married to a farm mechanic who had been sent off to the front on the first day of mobilization. Mrs Schote was a shy, kindly thing with a two-year-old daughter, and nobody in the village had a bad word to say about her. She had always been hard-working and frugal, and her child could not have had a better mother. She had the misfortune to live in the same house as the wife of a farm labourer, a thoroughly disreputable woman, debauched from an early age, one of those creatures who seem to regard immorality and shameless brazenness as their natural element from the day they are born. This woman, a certain Mrs Kock, had only married her husband, a three-parts idiot, in order to have a father for the child she was expecting – as she told him straight after the wedding, laughing in his face. She was as ugly as sin, as vulgar as a street whore, and as work-shy as an old drunk. While the two husbands had been living in the house as well, these two very different parties had been at daggers drawn; they never spoke to each other, never even gave each other the time of day. Mrs Kock had developed a special knack for pushing and pinching her neighbour’s little girl when nobody was looking.

  But with the outbreak of war the relationship between these two very different women started to change. They grew closer, they spoke to each other, they even formed a kind of friendship. Heaven knows how that came about! Mrs Schote would have been welcome company anywhere in the village – in the houses of ordinary folk, at least – but nobody wanted anything to do with Mrs Kock. It was probably Mrs Kock who initiated the rapprochement. With what she had in mind, she didn’t want a spy in the house; and an accomplice would not spill the beans. And the shy little woman, lonely and abandoned, probably didn’t dare to resist her coarse, vulgar neighbour; feeling defenceless and vulnerable, she knew her life would be hell if she didn’t do what her neighbour wanted. That’s how it must have started; later on, having once tasted of the forbidden fruit, she no doubt went along with it willingly enough. A rumour gradually spread through the village of indecent goings-on in the house of the two soldiers’ wives. It was said that they received male visitors, and there was talk of night-time revelries too. In actual fact this was something that didn’t concern anyone apart from those immediately involved, i.e. the two husbands, who were far away. But a village, and especially one that stands isolated on a peninsula, cut off from every breath of fresh life, has no such qualms, and is grateful for every bit of new gossip. When people started talking about these two women it wasn’t long, of course, before the story reached the ears of our worthy mayor. It was no business of his either, whether in his capacity as mayor or as a private individual, and he promptly declare
d that he was not interested in Mrs Kock, allegedly because her immorality, renowned throughout the village, was ingrained and incurable, but in truth because he was afraid of her sharp, vulgar tongue. But he took a very different view of Mrs Schote’s involvement. He lamented her youth and inexperience, set himself up to act on behalf of her husband in the field, and voiced dark fears that the nocturnal male visitors might be prisoners of war, with whom Germans were forbidden to consort on pain of imprisonment. In short, he once again had no difficulty in finding reasons why he should poke his nose into somebody else’s business, which, foul-smelling as it was, didn’t concern him in the slightest. And having satisfied himself in this way that intervention was required, the coward picked a man from the village to assist him, an obnoxious old bachelor with a notoriously dissolute past of his own, and the two of them took up sentry duty outside the house of the two women at 9.30 in the evening. They had waited barely half an hour when two men did indeed slip into the house – not prisoners of war, not even men from Mahlendorf, but two soldiers whose job it was to guard POWs working on a nearby estate. The two spies now moved into position at the window of the one room where light was showing; because the blackout curtains did not close properly, and the old window frames no longer formed a tight seal, they were able to observe everything going on in the room and hear practically every word that was spoken. They were gratified to note how affectionately the two guardsmen were received by the two amorous women, how they took a bottle of wine and packs of cigarettes out of their pockets while the two women served up coffee and home-made cakes. They exchanged a running commentary in eager whispers, carefully noting every kiss, every cooing laugh, every fiery glance. But they soon discovered that they were not alone in enjoying the spectacle of these amorous dalliances. As is the way in village life, the news that the mayor was bent on putting a stop to the immorality of the POWs had spread from house to house in the immediate neighbourhood, and soon the two male observers were joined by half a dozen female ones, mostly old women, but there were also two young girls of sixteen and seventeen. As the hours passed, and the initial caresses and endearments turned into something altogether more serious and intense, and the amorous discourse of the lovelorn couples grew ever more explicit, the party assembled outside the window became steadily more boisterous and unrestrained. Each in turn excitedly pushed the other away from his (or her) listening post at the window, and spluttering with barely suppressed laughter they told each other in whispers what they had just seen; and mayor Stork, who had come here to keep watch in the name of morality and as the guardian of innocence, voiced no misgivings whatsoever about the fact that young girls were participating in this spectacle, shoving him aside and breathlessly following the cavortings with shining eyes. It was a classic Breughelesque scene from rural life, the natural product of wholesome living in a village, on the land, where, according to our Führer and his henchmen, all is purity, innocence and glowing health! No Darré158 could have painted a more persuasive picture!