Nightmare in Berlin

by Hans Fallada

  How often he had said to his wife: ‘Just be patient! Our turn will come again! But when that day comes, I won’t have forgotten anything, and I won’t be forgiving anyone. There is no way I’m going to be “magnanimous” — who is ever “magnanimous” to a poisonous snake?’

  And he had described how he would haul the schoolmaster and his wife out of their house, how he would interrogate them, harass them, and finally punish them, this pair who had not scrupled to make children of seven or eight spy on their own parents! ‘Where has your father hung his picture of the Führer? What does your mother say to your father when the man comes round collecting for the Winter Relief Organisation? What does your father say in the morning — does he say “Good morning” or does he say “Heil Hitler!”? Do you sometimes hear people speaking on the radio in a language that you don’t understand?’

  Oh yes, the hatred he felt for this educator of our youth, who had shown photos of horribly mutilated corpses to seven-year-old children, that hatred seemed to have taken permanent root.

  And now this same Doll had become mayor, and a portion of that retribution of which he had so often spoken, feeding his hatred by imagining how it would be, had now become a duty laid upon him. It was his job — among his many other responsibilities — to classify these Nazis as harmless fellow travellers or guilty activists, to root them out from the bolt holes where they had been quick to hide themselves, to kick them out of the cushy jobs they had cleverly and shamelessly landed for themselves once again, to strip them of the possessions they had acquired by fraud, theft, or blackmail, to confiscate the stocks of food they had been hoarding, to quarter the homeless in their big houses — all of this had now become his bounden duty. The local Party bigwigs and principal culprits had, of course, fled west a long time ago, but the National Socialist small fry were just as disgusting in their way. All of them claimed — either with righteous indignation or with tears in their eyes — that they had only joined the Party under duress, or at most for economic reasons. All of them were willing to sign a statement under oath to that effect, and if they’d had their way they would have sworn it right there and then, before God and the whole world, with the most sacred of oaths. Among these two or three hundred National Socialists there was not a single one who claimed to have joined the Party out of ‘personal conviction’. ‘Just sign the statement’, Doll would frequently snap impatiently. ‘It doesn’t alter anything, but if it makes you happy …! Here in the office we’ve known for a long time that there were only ever three National Socialists in the world: Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels! Off you go — next, please!’

  Mayor Doll would subsequently visit the houses and apartments of these National Socialists with a few policemen (some of whom, in those early days, were pretty dubious characters themselves) and a clerk to take notes. He found cupboards piled high with linen, some of it hardly used, while up in the attic a mother evacuated from her bombed-out home in Berlin didn’t know how she was going to put clothes on her children’s backs. Their sheds were stacked to the ceiling with dry logs and coal, but the door was securely padlocked, and none of it was shared with those who lacked the wherewithal to warm a pot of soup. In the cellars of these brown hoarders they found sacks of grain (‘It’s just feed for the chickens!’), meal (‘For my pig! Got it on a ration coupon from the Food Office!’), and flour (‘It’s not proper flour, just the sweepings from the mill floor!’). In their pantries the shelves were packed with supplies, but for every item they had a lie ready to hand. They feared for their precious lives — it was clearly written in their faces — but even now that fear could not stop them fighting to the bitter end for these supplies, claiming that everything had been acquired by legal means. They would still be standing there, next to the cart, when their hoarded treasures were taken away. They didn’t dare cut up rough, but their faces wore an expression of righteous indignation at the injustice visited upon them.

  Doll’s own expression when carrying out these confiscations was invariably one of anger and contempt, but inside all he felt was disgust and weariness. As someone who had always preferred to live quietly on his own, and who even within his marriage had defended his right to solitude as something sacrosanct, he now had to spend nearly the whole day with other people, talking to them, trying to wring something out of them, seeing tears, listening to sobs, protests, objections, pleas; his head often felt like an echoing abyss filled with noise.

  Sometimes he thought fleetingly: What happened to my hatred? These are the Nazis I swore to be revenged on, after all, whose vile deeds I said I would never forget and never forgive. And now I’m standing here, and the only thing I feel is disgust, and all I want is my bed, and the chance just to sleep and sleep and forget about all this — just so that I don’t have to look at all this filth any more!

  But in these days and weeks when he was constantly overworked, he never had time for himself. He could never think his own thoughts through to the end, because his mind was constantly taken up with other things. Sometimes he had the unsettling feeling that his insides were leaking away, and that one day he would just be a hollow skeleton with a covering of skin and nothing else. But he had no time to dwell on this thought, and he couldn’t decide whether he really had stopped hating the Nazis, or whether he was just too tired to feel any kind of strong emotion. He wasn’t a human being any more; he was just a mayor, a machine for doing work.

  There was only one case where the feelings of hatred seemed to come alive again in Doll. A certain Mr. Zaches had lived in the little town for as long as anyone could remember, like his parents and grandparents before him — a genuine local, therefore, and the only kind recognised as such by the natives. Now up until the time when the Nazis seized power, this Mr. Zaches had run a small, struggling beer wholesaling business, and also used to make fizzy drinks for children from spring water, carbon dioxide, and coloured flavourings; latterly he had also supplied wholesale tobacco goods to the hospitality trade. But all of this combined had not been enough to support Zaches and his family. So the two nags he kept to transport beer were also pressed into service for all kinds of other haulage jobs — fetching suitcases and crates from the station, hauling timber out of the forests, ploughing and working the fields of local smallholders. Yet even with all this, the family could barely make ends meet; Zaches was constantly on the brink of ruin, the loss of a customer was enough to put the whole business at risk, and the days when payments to the brewery became due were days of fear and trepidation for the Zaches household.

  But when the Nazis came to power, all that changed completely. Like many businessmen threatened with ruin prior to 1933, Zaches had joined the Party, bedazzled by all the talk of ‘smashing the tyranny of usury’ and of the universal prosperity that would surely follow. He wasn’t a bit interested in politics, of course, but only in doing well for himself — and in that he succeeded after 1933. Quietly at first, but then more and more brazenly, he set about stealing business from his competitors, who had not been smart enough to join the Party in good time. He put pressure on landlords to order goods only from him, and those who complied were rewarded with little favours. He made minor political difficulties disappear, secured advantages for them by having a word with the local mayor, and generally used his position on all manner of committees, boards, and councils to ruthlessly advance his own interests. If anyone opposed him, he secretly gathered evidence against that person, set his spies to work to listen and watch, and then either issued threats or drew the net closed, whichever best suited his own needs.

  As a result, his business flourished. As well as the cart horses, he now kept a separate team that only hauled crates of beer and barrels. And Zaches, the obsequious, ever-courteous pauper had now turned into Mr. Zaches, the National Socialist Party member, a man with a finger in every pie and a sharp tongue in his head, who knew that he had a lot of money behind him, as well as a Party that could make or break its fellow citizens, and held the power
of life and death over them. On the back of all this, Zaches had become big and fat, and only his unhealthy, sallow complexion and his dark, piercing eyes, which avoided the direct gaze of others, recalled the lean years of the past. When the war broke out and merchandise in his line of business became particularly scarce and sought-after, his substantial earnings were unaffected; on the contrary, he made more money from a limited supply of inferior merchandise than he had been making from the good stuff. On top of that, the departure of so many men to go and fight in the war brought him a number of new posts, and like all National Socialists he did not feel bound by the rules governing the rationing of food. He took whatever he needed from the land — bacon, eggs, poultry, butter, and flour — and what he couldn’t eat himself he sold on at extortionate prices, secure in the knowledge that an old Party member was effectively untouchable.

  And so he remained — until the Red Army arrived on the scene. Zaches was one of the first to be arrested. His sworn statement that he had only joined the Party for economic reasons was surely no less than the truth in his case, but for many years now he had been such a selfish parasite and enemy of the people that economic reasons were no mitigation whatsoever. Yet once again he had more luck than he deserved. The authorities soon had to grant him a measure of freedom again, because he was needed for work in the town’s dairy. In his youth, Zaches had learned the dairy trade, and when times were tough he had helped out there from time to time — so now he was just the man to step in and lend a hand. For better or worse, it was necessary to employ him there, though nobody liked the idea — least of all Doll. But the pressing need to feed the mothers and children of the town meant that political interests had to take a back seat for now.

  Things went on in this way for a while, until certain rumours began to reach the ears of the mayor, and he summoned the onetime beer wholesaler and now dairy manager Zaches to his office. ‘Look here, Zaches!’ he said to the sallow-faced and still portly man, who couldn’t bring himself to look Doll in the eye, ‘I’m hearing all kinds of stories about a big stockpile of goods you’re supposed to have hidden somewhere. What’s that all about?’

  Not surprisingly, Zaches assured him that he had no such hidden stock of supplies. He freely admitted that he had had cases of wine and schnaps buried in his garden in seven different places. But these hiding places had all been discovered, he said, and now he had nothing more hidden away.

  While Zaches was speaking thus, in all apparent honesty, Doll had been observing him closely, and now he said: ‘Everyone in the town knows about the seven hiding places. But there’s a persistent rumour going around that what they found was just a trifle compared with the big hoard that hasn’t been found yet …’

  ‘There is no big hoard any more, Mr. Mayor’, insisted Zaches. ‘It’s all been found. I don’t have anything more.’

  ‘Repeat what you just said, Zaches, and look me in the eye while you’re talking!’

  ‘Eh?’ Zaches was thrown into confusion by such an unusual request. ‘How do you mean— ?’

  ‘Forget that I’m the mayor. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me again, man to man, that there is no big hoard anywhere!’

  But Zaches couldn’t do it. Before he’d said more than three or four words, his gaze slid away, and though he tried again, his eyes promptly wandered off once more. Zaches became confused, started stammering, then tailed off into silence …

  ‘So’, said the mayor slowly after a lengthy pause, ‘now I know you’re lying. There’s some truth in the rumour.’

  ‘Not at all, Mr. Mayor! On my mother’s life …’

  ‘Don’t give me that, Zaches!’ said Doll in disgust. ‘Just think for a moment, use your brain … You’ve always been a Nazi—’

  ‘I was never a real Nazi, Mr. Mayor! I only joined the stinking Party because I had a knife at my throat. I’d have had to file for bankruptcy otherwise, and that’s the honest truth, Mr. Mayor!’

  ‘You have absolutely no chance of getting your property back again, and as for enjoying the stuff you have hidden, you can forget it! But the fact of the matter is’, Doll went on, appealing to his better nature, ‘that any hidden goods I find as mayor are for distribution to us Germans, Zaches. You know as well as I do that there are hundreds of people in this town, Zaches, who lack the basic necessities of life. And then there’s the newly established hospital — they’ve got eighty patients there already — just think how much good a glass of wine would do them, and how quickly their spirits would be lifted if we could hand out a few cigarettes! Be a man, Zaches, and don’t think about yourself for once: think about all the people who are having a hard time, and do something to help them! Just think of it like this: you are making a generous donation. So tell me where you have hidden the stuff!’

  ‘I’d love to help all those people’, replied the fat man, and there were tears of emotion in his eyes. ‘But I haven’t got anything else, I really haven’t, Mr. Mayor! May I be struck down dead if I have hidden anything else away …’

  ‘You’ve lived a life of plenty for twelve years now, Zaches’, continued Doll, appearing not to have heard the other man’s impassioned assurances, ‘and you’ve never thought about anyone else. Now you’ve found out for yourself — but only in the last six weeks, mind, only in the last six weeks! — what it’s like to do heavy work you’re not used to, and to feel the pangs of hunger. Just think about other people for once, who are having to go without everything. Prove to the town that you’ve been unjustly maligned, that you can do the decent thing! Tell me where you’ve hidden the stuff!’

  For a moment, Zaches appeared to hesitate, but then he came out with all his protestations and beastly oaths again. The mayor kept on at the former beer wholesaler for another hour. The longer it went on, the more convinced he became that the man had hidden something else away, and possibly a great deal; but he couldn’t get it out of him. He was rotten and corrupt to the core. And it made no difference when Doll told him how much trouble he’d be in if they did find something. Then the dairy would just have to manage without him; he would be thrown into a black hole and kept on bread and water, and they’d make him work all day long, lugging heavy sacks of grain. ‘You wouldn’t survive that for long, Zaches, all bloated with alcohol as you are! And I gather you have diabetes, too! You’ll probably end up paying for this futile lie with your life!’

  But it was no use: no amount of persuasion could get the man to reveal his hiding place. He sat on his hoard like a malevolent little hamster, and would rather be beaten to death than give it up. A wasted hour behind him, Doll shrugged his shoulders and had the man escorted back to the dairy. He didn’t doubt for a moment that this hiding place existed, quite possibly stuffed with very valuable goods. And then, with a hundred other matters to attend to, the mayor gave no more thought to the beer wholesaler.

  Just how large and well stocked the hoard in question was, Doll learned only a few days later from his police constable. ‘You should get along to Seestrasse, Mr. Mayor, and see for yourself what the Russians are loading up from the cellar of Zaches’ place!’

  ‘Is that right?’ replied Doll, acting all indifferent, although his heart was already aching with grief and anger. ‘So they’ve found his hiding place, have they? I always knew there was one, as soon as I started questioning the man. I thought I might go and poke around over there myself, but I never got round to it …’

  ‘You wouldn’t have found it anyway’, said the police constable by way of consolation. ‘Zaches bricked up an entire coal cellar over a year ago — those Nazis, it just goes to show you again how deeply they believed in their precious Führer’s victory! But nobody would have found this hiding place — someone spilled the beans, of course.’

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Doll.

  ‘A servant girl who used to work for Zaches. She thought the Russians would let her have some of it, of course. But they told her to get lost —
they’ve got their own views about informers like her!’

  But when Doll learned in the course of the day how large had been the stockpile of goods stashed away by this lowly, rank-and-file member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, he was overcome with anger again, and he gave orders for Zaches to be fetched from the dairy there and then.

  ‘Well, Zaches!’ he said to the fellow, who knew everything by now, of course, since news like that travels fast in a small town. ‘Your storehouse has been busted, and how many days ago is it since you were standing right there and swearing on your mother’s life that you hadn’t hidden anything away?! You’ve been lying through your teeth!’

  Zaches said nothing; he stood there with bowed head, his gaze wandering back and forth, but never looking the mayor in the face. ‘Do you realise how much damage you’ve done to the town and to all Germans everywhere?!’ And the mayor began to list the haul: ‘One van packed with tobacco, cigars, and cigarettes. Two vans filled with wine and schnaps — and those are all goods that have been stolen from the German people, because they were supplied to you for distribution to the trade. But you just lied about it, of course, and claimed you hadn’t received any deliveries, and kept it all for yourself instead, true to the good old Party principle: private greed before public need!’

  Looking even more sallow and ashen than usual, the man just stood there and let the tide of anger wash over him, saying nothing in reply. ‘But that’s not even all of it’, said Doll, and went on with his list. ‘One van full of linen — and I don’t have a single sheet, a single towel, left for the hospital. Five large wireless sets, three typewriters, two sewing machines, one sun lamp — and a whole van full of clothing and other stuff. Shame on you, you degenerate, for betraying your own people like that. I can’t believe all the stuff you’ve stolen and hoarded!’