A Stranger in My Own Country

by Hans Fallada

  Notes

  1. Incorrectly dated: the Reichstag burned down on 27 February 1933. Fallada had to rely entirely on memory when writing these reminiscences, so there are occasional errors and misdatings.

  2. The publisher Ernst Rowohlt (1887–1960). Fallada met him through Egmont Seyerlen (1889–1972). Seyerlen’s wife, Anne Marie (Annia) Seyerlen (1885–1971), had encouraged Fallada to write. His first novel The Young Goedeschal was published by Rowohlt Verlag in 1920, and all Fallada’s subsequent works up until 1943 appeared under this imprint. Over the years Fallada and Rowohlt, who always addressed each other with the more formal second person form ‘Sie’, became not just business associates but close friends. The scene in ‘Schlichters Wine Bar’ described here paints a fairly accurate picture of their relationship in February 1933. In November 1944, when Rowohlt was making plans to set up a new publishing house after the war, he went to see Fallada in the Neustrelitz-Strelitz facility with a view to securing his collaboration and support. On the relationship between Fallada and Rowohlt, see Hans Fallada, Ewig auf der Rutschbahn. Briefwechsel mit dem Rowohlt Verlag, edited by Michael Töteberg and Sabine Buck, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2008.

  3. ‘Schlichters Wine Bar’ in Lutherstrasse, which had been established in the 1920s by Max Schlichter, a brother of the painter and printmaker Rudolf Schlichter; popular with Berlin’s bohemian set and a regular haunt of Bertolt Brecht, Theo Lingen, Heinrich George and others.

  4. Anna Ditzen (1901–1990), Fallada’s wife since 1929, and Elli Engelhardt (no biographical data available), Ernst Rowohlt’s third wife, to whom he was married from 1933 to 1941.

  5. The novel Little Man – What Now? (1932) marked Fallada’s national and international breakthrough. By the end of June 1932 more than 2,000 copies had been sold; four months later sales had reached 21,000. A film contract was soon signed; translation and reproduction rights were sold. Fallada was bombarded with inquiries from newspapers and devoted readers. He wrote to his parents on 16 July 1932: ‘We are really happy, now we can easily move to a larger apartment, furnish it nicely, pay off our debts, and above all have a longer summer holiday.’ (Letter to Wilhelm and Elisabeth Ditzen, Hans Fallada Archive, Neubrandenburg)

  6. The novel The Good Earth by the American writer Pearl S. Buck (1892– 1973) was published in German for the first time in 1933.

  7. The famous epic of the deep South by the American writer Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949) appeared in June 1936, and immediately became one of the biggest best-sellers in the history of American literature. The film of the same name had its US cinema release in 1939, and became one of the most successful films of all time.

  8. A chronological slip. Fallada was working on the novel Once a Jailbird in January 1933, but did not begin writing Once We Had a Child until November of that year.

  9. Hermann Göring (1893–1946) was the Prussian Minister of the Interior at the time of the Reichstag fire (and as such in charge of the entire Prussian police force); in April 1933 he became Prime Minister of Prussia and Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe. Göring played a key role in the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship; it was at his instigation that the first concentration camps were set up, initially as prison-like facilities where opponents of the regime were incarcerated by the police and the SA. He was also responsible for the establishment of the secret state police, the Gestapo.

  10. From 15 November 1932 to 23 April 1933 Fallada occupied the upper floor of the villa at Rother Krug 9 in Berkenbrück/Spree, to the east of Berlin.

  11. The Jewish paper wholesaler Leopold Ullstein (1826–1899) had founded a newspaper publishing company in Berlin in 1878, which revolutionized the newspaper market of the day with the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, the first German mass-market weekly. When he died the company was taken over by his five sons – Hans (1859–1935), Louis (1863–1933), Franz (1868–1945), Rudolf (1874–1969) and Hermann (1875–1943) – who built it up into an influential publishing enterprise producing newspapers, magazines and books. It is not clear which of the sons is referred to here.

  12. Emil Ludwig (1881–1948), son of the Jewish ophthalmologist H. Cohn, was the author of successful biographies of Goethe, Napoleon, Rembrandt, Bismarck, Wilhelm II, Michelangelo and Lincoln. His books were burned on 10 May 1933. Six days later the board of directors of the Association of German Booksellers pronounced his work to be ‘detrimental to Germany’s international standing’, and recommended that it should not be disseminated. That same month Ludwig resigned from the German branch of the PEN Club. From 1940 onwards he lived in exile in America, moving back to Switzerland after the end of the war.

  13. In Die Weltbühne, which had been founded in 1905 by Siegfried Jacobsohn as a theatre journal (Die Schaubühne) and later turned into a political weekly, Kurt Tucholsky denounced militarism and the lack of democratic principles in many of the institutions of the Weimar Republic. In the article ‘Militärbilanz’ [‘The state of the military’] (22 April 1920) he called for ‘the dissolution of the Reichswehr, the creation of a standing army of 100,000 men, as permitted under Article 160 of the Peace Treaty, a civilian police force, under the command of democrats. Summary dismissal of all officers who display even the faintest hint of monarchist sympathies.’ Tucholsky was particularly exercised by the issue of the Reichswehr, as he explains in a later article: ‘The barrack rooms are awash with imperial insignia, pictures of the Kaiser, nationalist pamphlets and newspapers. The officers, whether elderly staff officers or young pups, all have exactly the same outlook on life and on the state, and it is the backwardness of their outlook that led us into that catastrophe. Their political reliability does not bear close inspection.’ (‘Die Reichswehr’, in: Die Weltbühne, 23 February 1922)

  14. Das Tage-Buch, the weekly intellectual journal first published by Rowohlt Verlag in 1920, carried articles on literature, theatre, cinema and the press. In the first issue, which appeared on 10 January 1920, the founder Stefan Grossmann set out the aims of his new journal: ‘Das Tage-Buch can and will serve no political party, but I am hoping for a conspiracy of creative minds alongside, above and in despite of political parties.’

  15. The American journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner H.R. Knickerbocker (1898–1949) had been living and working as a foreign correspondent in Berlin since 1928. In the early 1930s he published a series of books on current political issues, which were published by Rowohlt Verlag – including The Red Trade Menace (1931).

  16. The much-discussed book by Weigand von Miltenberg (pen name of Herbert Blank, 1900–1959) had appeared under the Rowohlt imprint in 1931; it contained a savage critique of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

  17. The book by Walter Oehme and Kurt Caro, which was published by Rowohlt Verlag in 1931, was a critical assessment of the NSDAP and its leading functionaries. The authors dismissed Hitler’s ‘propagandistic doctrines’ in Mein Kampf as ‘a demagogue’s Bible’.

  18. In 1932 the journalist and author Konrad Heiden (1901–1966) published his Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus. Die Karriere einer Idee under the Rowohlt imprint; 5,000 copies were printed. Heiden, who was one of the earliest critical observers of National Socialism, published the first serious biography of Adolf Hitler in 1936, when he was living in exile in Switzerland.

  19. In March 1933, as part of an ‘initiative to combat the un-German spirit’, the German Student Union organized a campaign against Jewish, Marxist and pacifist writers. This culminated on 10 May 1933 in public book burnings on the Opernplatz in Berlin and in twenty-one other German cities, when tens of thousands of works by proscribed authors were consigned to the flames by students, university professors and National Socialist agencies.

  20. Fallada takes the view that the terms imposed by the Allies under the Treaty of Versailles (1919) – and in particular the vast sums demanded in war reparations – had weakened parliamentary democracy in Germany from the very outset and encouraged the rise of National Socialism. In the later version of the text that Fallada revised for publication (19
45 typescript), the paragraph ‘And I’ll say it here and not mince my words . . . in which we are now living!’ has been cut out. In its place Fallada has inserted a new paragraph: ‘I myself, the author of these lines, am a perfect example of the political folly of the Germans: despite all the bad omens, despite my own bitter experiences, I kept on believing that the Nazis would settle down, that they really weren’t that bad after all, until they finally dropped the mask altogether in the war and the atrocities of their SS and SA, of their Gestapo and concentration camps, taught me that they were a lot worse than anyone in their wildest fantasy could possibly have imagined. The fact that I never became a Nazi, that I felt nothing but utter hatred for them right from the start, has to do with reasons that are much more “bourgeois”: because I despised their crudeness, their constant resort to violence, their stupidity and their philistinism. But the last few years have seen to it that there was nothing bourgeois about that hatred any more; it wasn’t just political, it was something elemental.’ (Hans Fallada, Der unerwünschte Autor. Meine Erlebnisse während zwölf Jahre Naziterror. Typescript 1945, Hans Fallada Archive, Neubrandenburg, pp.10f.)

  21. Winter Relief Organization [WHW in the German – Winterhilfswerk des Deutschen Volkes]; it was established in September 1933 under the control of the Propaganda Ministry as an emergency aid initiative. Through door-to-door collections and street collections, plus the sale of badges, the WRO raised 358.1 million Reichsmarks in its first winter, which were used to help the unemployed and homeless.

  22. During a hospital stay (21 January–22 February 1944) Fallada witnessed the heavy bombing raids on the German capital. In a letter to his sister Elisabeth Hörig of 2 March 1944 he mentions ‘the series of terror attacks, which were probably the worst thing I have ever experienced’.

  23. As well as the Prison Diary the ‘Drinker manuscript’ contains the novel The Drinker and five short stories, two of which are stories for children: Der kleine Jü-Jü und der grosse Jü-Jü [Little Jü-Jü and Big Jü-Jü] and Die Geschichte von der grossen und der kleinen Mücke [The Story of Little and Big Mücke] (published in: Hans Fallada, Drei Jahre kein Mensch, Berlin 1997, pp.79–95).

  24. Anna Elisabeth Rowohlt (1930–?).

  25. Ulrich (Uli) Ditzen, the eldest son of Hans Fallada, was born on 14 March 1930 in Berlin.

  26. In his account of the events of Easter 1933 Fallada gets some of the dates wrong. The correct sequence of events is as follows: Friday 7 April 1933: visit from Ernst von Salomon; Sunday 9 April (Palm Sunday): arrival of Lore Soldin, a family friend, who appears in Fallada’s account as ‘a Jewish lady’; Wednesday 12 April: Fallada is arrested by the SA; Monday 17 April (Easter Monday): Lore Soldin leaves; Tuesday 18 April: Anna Ditzen visits her husband in Fürstenwalde; Wednesday 19 April: a second prison visit does not work out; Saturday 22 April: Fallada is released.

  27. The writer and Freikorps combatant Ernst von Salomon (1902–1972); in 1922 he was sentenced to five years in prison as an accessory to the murder of Germany’s Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau. In 1930 Rowohlt Verlag published his autobiographical novel Die Geächteten [The Outcasts]. In 1933 Rowohlt hired him as a publishing editor. Ernst von Salomon took over the position of Franz Hessel, who – just like Paul Mayer – had to be dismissed because of the Nuremberg Laws. From 1936 Salomon became increasingly interested in cinema, and in 1939 he moved to Upper Bavaria to devote himself exclusively to film projects.

  28. Probably Horst von Salomon; no detailed information available.

  29. Bruno von Salomon (1900–1954).

  30. Between 1918 and 1920 the Baltic Armed Forces or Landeswehr fought against Bolshevist troops and subsequently the Red Army; the Iron Division under Major Josef Bischoff took Riga on 22 May 1919. Ernst von Salomon joined the Freikorps in the Baltic in the same year.

  31. Underground nationalist terror organization during the Weimar Republic; founded by Hermann Ehrhardt after the failed Kapp Putsch, the organization sought to undermine the political system of the young Republic by carrying out political assassinations (including that of Walther Rathenau). Ernst von Salomon was one of its most prominent members.

  32. Walther Rathenau (1867–1922), Reich Foreign Minister, was murdered in Berlin on 24 June 1922 by members of the Consul Organization. Ernst von Salomon had been involved in the preparations for the assassination, and received a five-year prison sentence.

  33. In the novel Die Geächteten (1930) Ernst von Salomon reappraises his part in the assassination of Rathenau from a critical perspective. Fallada’s account of the book here is therefore quite misleading.

  34. In the novel Die Stadt (1932) Ernst von Salomon describes his part in the Landvolkbewegung [agrarian protest movement] in Schleswig-Holstein in 1928/29. Fallada’s novel A Small Circus (1931) is set against the background of the same events.

  35. The autobiography of the Communist Max Hölz (1889–1933) was published by Malik Verlag in 1929; Kurt Tucholsky called it ‘an outstanding document of our times’ (Auf dem Nachttisch, 1929). Max Hölz, who in 1921 had organized an armed uprising of workers in the industrial heartland of central Germany, was charged with the murder of an estate owner in Saxony and sentenced to lifelong imprisonment. A public appeal by leading scientists and artists, including Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein and Ernst Rowohlt, led to his amnesty and release in 1928.

  36. The literary journal which appeared between 1930 and (May) 1933, edited by the anarchist publisher and writer Kurt Zube (1905–1991).

  37. The decree issued by Göring on 3 March 1933 removed all existing restrictions on the use of force by the police.

  38. Julius Streicher (1885–1946) started the anti-Semitic paper Der Stürmer in 1923; from 1925 until 1940 he was Gauleiter of Middle Franconia, later Franconia. From March 1933 he headed the ‘Central Committee for Defence against Jewish Atrocity and Boycott Propaganda’. In the SA he held the rank of Obergruppenführer.

  39. Protective custody was introduced on 28 February 1933 under the provisions of the Reichstag Fire Decree; it was used for the political repression of regime opponents and any others who were persona non grata. The first wave of arrests following the Reichstag fire was directed principally against Communists; in March and April 1933 at least 16,000 people were arrested by state agencies in Prussia alone. Persons held in protective custody could be detained indefinitely; they were not entitled to legal aid. They were initially housed, like Fallada, in police jails and prisons, later in concentration camps.

  40. Anna Ditzen was born in 1901 in Geestemünde and grew up in Hamburg.

  41. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s poem Terzinen I. Über Vergänglichkeit [On Transience] (first published in: Blätter für die Kunst, March 1896).

  42. Börries Freiherr von Münchhausen’s ballad Graf Egisheim (1919).

  43. Established shortly after the end of the war in 1918 by the reservist army officer Franz Seldte, the ‘Stahlhelm, League of Front-line Soldiers’ was a paramilitary defence organization that was seen as the armed wing of the German National People’s Party (DNVP). When the Nazis seized power, the organization underwent ‘voluntary assimilation’ in 1934. To avoid forcible dissolution, the majority of members voluntarily joined the NSDAP as a self-contained paramilitary unit; renamed the ‘National Socialist German League of Front-line Combatants’, the ‘Stahlhelm’ was incorporated into the SA as ‘Reserve I’. In 1935 it ceased to exist as an association with a historical identity of its own.

  44. Theodor Düsterberg (1875–1950) joined the ‘Stahlhelm’ in 1923, and in 1924 became joint chairman with Franz Seldte. In 1932 he campaigned on behalf of the ‘Stahlhelm’ and the DNVP against Adolf Hitler for the position of Reich President; in 1933, following the Nazi seizure of power, he declined the offer of a place in Hitler’s cabinet. In 1934 he was briefly incarcerated in Dachau concentration camp during the wave of arrests that followed the Röhm Putsch.

  45. Franz Seldte (1882–1947), the founder of the ‘Stahlhelm’, became Reich Minister for Labour in Hitler
’s first cabinet; he remained in post until 1945. In April 1933 he joined the NSDAP, in August he was made an Obergruppenführer in the SA, and was later appointed Reich Commissioner for the Volunteer Labour Service.

  46. Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), a leading NS ideologue, stoked up anti-Semitism by distributing numerous pamphlets on racial ideology. In 1922 he became editor-in-chief of the Völkischer Beobachter. In 1929 he founded the ‘Militant League for German Culture’, with the aim of combating ‘the culturally corrosive aspirations of liberalism’, and in 1930 the Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte [National Socialist Monthly]. 1930 also saw the publication of his book Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts [The Myth of the Twentieth Century]. In January 1934 he was appointed ‘Commissioner of the Führer for supervising all aspects of the intellectual and philosophical training and education of the NSDAP’. Part of the remit of the ‘Rosenberg Office’ was the ‘cultivation of literature’. Rosenberg was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg Trials and executed on 16 October 1946.

  47. Ernst Rowohlt had married the actress Emmy Reye in 1912. This marriage soon ended in divorce. In 1921 he married Hilda Pangust, a native Latvian. From 1933 to 1941 Rowohlt was married to the German-Brazilian Elli Engelhardt.

  48. The lawyer Dr Alfons Sack (1900–1944); he had successfully defended the Communist Ernst Torgler in the Reichstag fire trial.

  49. The Stössinger guesthouse was situated in Berlin-Charlottenburg, at Lietzenburger Strasse 48, close to the Kurfürstendamm. Fallada lived here with his family from 23 April to 8 May 1933. Following a nervous breakdown he went to Waldsieversdorf in the Märkische Schweiz area east of Berlin, first to a hotel and then to a sanatorium. On 20 June Fallada and his family moved back to Berlin and the Stössinger guesthouse; on 8 July Anna Ditzen gave birth to twins, one of whom died soon after birth. On 15 August Fallada and his son Uli and the family nanny moved to Feldberg, where he supervised work on the house in Carwitz. On 14 September he collected his wife and daughter from the clinic. On 7 October 1933 the family moved into their new home in Carwitz.