A Stranger in My Own Country (10 page)

It was the first time in my life that I had been confronted by attempted Nazi blackmail of this kind, and I must confess that the brazenness with which it was presented to me really knocked me back. ‘But surely I am at least allowed to terminate my rental agreement', I cried angrily. ‘I have no desire to carry on living here!'

‘You are not allowed to terminate your rental agreement', he replied, ‘because by doing so you will aggravate the plight of a fellow German
national. Of course, you are free to live wherever you like, but you must carry on paying the rent here! And of course, if you so wish, Mr Sponar will try to find an alternative tenant, at your own expense. If that works out, then of course you are off the hook. As you see, we are bending over backwards to accommodate you here. So: what is your decision? Are you coming with us, or are you going to meet your obligations?'

What choice did I have? I complied, inwardly raging. Perhaps the leader read something of my feelings in my face, because he said: ‘And I would advise you to be extremely polite in your dealings with the Sponars. Any cause for complaint, and we'll come down on you very hard!' And with that they left.

(27.IX.44.)
As for us, we just sat there wondering where it had all gone wrong. I especially didn't dare look at my wife, having now realized just how much damage I had done to us both by my ill-advised outburst of anger. Neither of us wanted to speak. But in the end I got to my feet and said: ‘Yes, I've made a mess of things again, I can see that, you don't need to look at me like that, Suse! But I'm not going to carry on living here on that account. I can't stand the sight of those two sanctimonious creeps, and if I had to clap eyes on them every day I'd end up doing something really silly. I'm going to the village to see if I can't get a car to Berlin, and while I'm gone you can start to pack. Just pack what we'd need for a long trip, and use the big wardrobe trunk too, Suse. I have a feeling that we won't be living here again!' And I cast a long and rather wistful look around my large, bright study, the first room for which we had had furniture made to our own design by a master carpenter who still loved his work. Suse followed my gaze, and she doubtless felt a little wistful herself; but she said stoutly: ‘Of course it's best if we move away from these two-faced people, I can't stand the sight of them either, and especially not her. He's just a weedy little man, and he reminds me of a rabbit with that velvet jacket of his. But I do wonder if Berlin is the right place for us? We're just coming into the hot season, and it would surely be better for the boy to have trees and
grass and water, like we had here. It would be good for me too. And it would definitely be better for you.' (Now she's thinking about the bars in Berlin, I thought to myself.) ‘Not at all!' I cried, suddenly excited at the thought of a change of scene and different company. I was already realizing that it would be quite impossible for me to sit around quietly in the countryside after the last few eventful weeks. ‘Not at all, we'll just move into the Stössinger guesthouse
⁴⁹
for now, I'll phone them right away and see if we can have a nice big room. And what happens after that, we'll just have to wait and see. At times like this it's best not to make any plans at all. As you see, nothing turns out the way you expect it to!'

Having thus entrusted our collective future to pure chance, I got started on the work of moving house – which proved quite entertaining for me and our boy. The one unpleasant moment for me came when I knocked on the Sponars' door downstairs and went in with a receipt and a wad of notes in my hand to pay the rent and the annuity in advance for the next quarter. He could not conceal his agitation, and was almost shaking as he darted about looking for pen and ink. He normally signed his name with a flourish, but now he could barely manage a scrawl. The queen, meanwhile, sat by the window, bolt upright and stiff as a ramrod, and she was back at her lace-making again, the wooden bobbins clacking away balefully. Her dark eyes darted restlessly back and forth between her husband and me, and suddenly she laid aside the bobbins, reached out her hand and said imperiously to her husband: ‘Sponar, let me see that!'

He responded with alacrity, she counted the notes, read and reread what was written on the receipt, handed it to me between the tips of two fingers, and said spitefully: ‘But the furniture and all the other things stay here, as a security for our claims! From now on nothing more is to be removed!' I could have taken issue with her on that, but for one thing we already had all our essential belongings loaded into the car, which was parked outside the garden gate – I had put off this unpleasant parting visit until the last moment, when Suse and the boy were already sitting in the car. And for another thing, I had only just
been hauled over the coals for my precipitate actions, and the effects of such a drubbing lasted for a few hours, even with me. So I moved not a muscle in my face – the mark of supreme self-control in moments of dire peril, as all the adventure stories tell us – and walked to the door without a word. The queen called after me in a deep, malevolent voice: ‘And tell your wife I hope all goes well with the birth!' Coming from her, it sounded so malicious and hateful that for two pins I would have turned round and strangled the evil woman with my bare hands.

But I controlled myself again, and focused on getting out of there as quickly as I could so as not to have to listen to any more. Breathing a sigh of relief, I climbed into the car with my loved ones and called to the driver: ‘Go! Go!' I was afraid they might come running out after me. My wife asked anxiously: ‘Was there a problem? You look so pale!'

‘No', I replied, ‘it all went fine. But let's not think about any of this any more.' And as we took our leave I gazed out at the village as we drove through, and when we passed the house with the sign ‘Karl Gröschke – Building Contractor' I pointed it out to Suse and showed her what an ugly house it was: the misbegotten brainchild of a country builder with pretentions, and a blot on the sandy landscape. And I began to rhapsodize about the beautiful buildings one sees in southern Germany, where even the humblest dwelling has something of beauty in it, be it only in the way its form is structured and articulated; and where even the simplest woodcutter has something of the artist in him, be it only in the way he carves a wooden spoon with his penknife. Warming to my theme, I soon forgot the little village of Berkenbrück and its inhabitants, and then we were in Berlin and arriving at the Stössinger guesthouse, at which point our lives entered a new and interesting phase, and all our troubles – for now – faded somewhat into the background. We had stayed at the guesthouse once before, in a quiet, tree-lined street in the old west end of the city, but only for a short time on that occasion. But we had enjoyed our stay. It was a very elegant guesthouse, but quite small – it won't have had more than fifteen or twenty rooms at most. The proprietor
⁵⁰
was an elderly and very shrewd Jewish lady, whom my wife and I came to regard highly.
She was very precise in money matters, and her bills were not cheap. But she knew how to keep the business side and the personal side quite separate, and while she was the guesthouse proprietor, she was always the perfect lady. Actually, the term ‘lady' is somewhat misleading: she was a cultivated and very motherly woman, who was always on hand to offer help and advice. With her motley international clientele she encountered every kind of peculiar and bizarre behaviour, but had learned to smile and turn a blind eye. No doubt she had her fair share of shady customers staying under her roof, international con men at large, but she wasn't bothered, just as long as they didn't play the fool in her house and paid their bills on time. But she would not tolerate any kind of smuttiness, such as bringing women of dubious character into the house, or flirting with the very pretty housemaids. If that happened, the eyes of this little old rotund Jewish woman would flash, and even the most well-heeled guest would get his marching orders there and then. If the odd guest came home drunk once in a while and kicked up a racket in the small hours, she would dismiss it with a smile. But when it came to cleanliness she was remorseless, both towards her guests and her maids, who were constantly cleaning the huge rooms from top to bottom.

It was of course absolutely typical of the writer Hans Fallada that five minutes after the Nazis had seized power he should have sought out a Jewish international guesthouse – of all things – as his place of residence and gaily started sending out his letters from there. I really was naive to the point of stupidity! For one thing, my application for membership of the Reich Chamber of Literature
⁵¹
was pending at the time, and our future livelihood depended on the outcome. The fact was that any writer whose application had been rejected was immediately banned from publishing anything at all in Germany, either in book form or in a newspaper or magazine. So I had every reason to be cautious, since I was already quite compromised, as I have said. But caution was the last thing on my mind. To those who warned me that it would be suicide to go and live in a Jewish guesthouse, which couldn't be kept secret, given the growing number of spies and informers – another fruit of the
Nazi regime! – I replied loftily: ‘But I like it there! If they ban Aryans from living in Jewish guesthouses, then I'll move out. But until then, I'm staying put!'

Incidentally, the story of my application for membership of the Reich Chamber of Literature has a curious ending: despite several written submissions from me and my lawyer, I never heard back from them. I never did become a member of the RCL, I was just allowed to carry on working ‘provisionally', since my application had not been rejected as such, i.e. it had not yet been processed. And that is still the case today, eleven years after the Nazi seizure of power. For the gentlemen at the RCL this arrangement has the advantage that they won't need to expel the author if he makes a serious nuisance of himself, since he was never a member in the first place! Moreover, an author in that situation, living in a constant state of uncertainty, is going to behave himself better than one who is already a member, and against whom formal proceedings have first to be initiated before he can be expelled. (Not that it did make me behave myself any better: I continued to cause those gentlemen a good deal of trouble.) In the early years I used to ask my lawyer from time to time how things were going with my membership application, to which he replied with a wave of the hand: ‘Let sleeping dogs lie! Whatever you do, don't remind them! As long as they haven't turned you down, you can carry on working. So there!'

Although we have hardly got our foot in the door at the Stössinger guesthouse, so to speak, I must just mention the biggest
faux pas
that I committed round about that time. I received a letter from the Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, signed by Mr Goebbels himself, which read as follows: ‘Dear Mr Fallada, I am obliged to point out that your works in Swedish translation are published by the Bonnier publishing house, which is in the forefront of anti-German agitation. I must ask you to be mindful of this in future. p.p. Dr Goebbels'

I showed this letter to my trusty Rowohlt. We thought the letter uncommonly well composed – for a minister. We particularly liked the closing sentence, which followed on so lyrically from the one before.
But much as we enjoyed it, we still had the problem of having to write a reply, and in particular of having to ‘be mindful in future', which we were not at all disposed to do. In the end we drafted something along the following lines: ‘Dear Minister, At the time when I signed my longterm contracts with the Bonnier publishing house, I was not aware that it engaged in anti-German agitation. What I was aware of, however, was that the memoirs of Reich President von Hindenburg
⁵²
were published under this imprint, and remain in print there to this day. Heil Hitler! Hans Fallada.' And I actually sent this wonderful missive to the Minister! So neither of us should really be surprised that this seed, so foolishly and rashly sown, would one day bear evil fruit. I myself haven't been all that badly affected, but poor Rowohlt had to pay dearly for this and other matters that I may get round to talking about later.

Anyway, we enjoyed our time at the Stössinger guesthouse very much. Not just on account of the food, which really was uncommonly good – my wife learned a great deal there. Not only were there beautifully prepared Austrian pastries, from apple strudel to
Kaiserschmarren
[sugared pancakes with raisins], but we were also introduced to colonial dishes such as chicken with curried rice, stuffed peppers, and all kinds of good things. But the most interesting part of the experience was the constant succession of other guests. Most of them were just passing through on their extended ‘trip', spending four or five days in Berlin, while Paris always rated four or five weeks, which offended my sense of local patriotism hugely at the time, before I discovered that magnificent city for myself. Some of them were real oddballs, and Mrs Stössinger would often bring them to my table. We'd then sit for a quarter of an hour over an excellent cup of strong coffee, smoking foreign cigarettes and chatting. There was one lady I recall from the USA,
⁵³
a real lady, but divorced from her husband, who earned her living – and a very good living too, judging by the fact that she was staying in an expensive guesthouse – entirely from doing parachute jumps. At the time, in 1933, parachute jumping was not yet the commonplace activity that it has now become as a result of this war. And especially not for a woman! She was an attractive woman, aged around thirty, with a wonderfully
toned body. When she walked, she didn't so much walk as waft. She had fascinating stories to tell about her life of adventure, moving around from one city to the next in the vast expanses of the States, with six or eight old Army aeroplanes and a couple of veteran pilots from the World War, who performed their aerobatic stunts for paying crowds of onlookers. They lived a kind of itinerant circus existence, often short of money, then suddenly, if the crowd for some unknown reason took a special liking to them, very comfortably provided for. The star attraction was always her parachute jump. She described very vividly what it felt like to step out into the void. Back then parachutes were not the perfectly reliable affairs they are today. They often failed to open. So far she had been lucky, but one day. . . . And then she would hug our little boy tightly to her, which he didn't like at all. She had a boy like him back home in the States, and she was always thinking about him. So for her our lad was a kind of surrogate. We really had to keep an eye on him all the time in the guesthouse, and even then we were always looking for him. There were so many women staying in the guesthouse who had left their own children at home, and who now took every opportunity to spirit our lad away for a few hours in order to play with him or spoil him. There was nothing we could do about all the sweets he was given – he must have had a cast-iron stomach to cope with that lot without serious harm! And then there was the big toy shop directly across the street from the guesthouse. Every two or three days our son would be dragged in there by one of our fellow guests, and allowed to choose whatever he wanted – price no object! Personally, though, I think his admirers of both sexes liked buying him the toys that they enjoyed playing with themselves, and many is the time that I have gone to fetch our boy from one or other of the large, grand bedrooms and found him with his new lady friends, worthy matrons in amazing pyjamas, lying on the floor and ‘squealing with delight' as he made some clockwork duck waddle back and forth between them, or busily changing the points on the track of a brightly-lit electric train set! It was always a struggle to get him back to our own, much quieter room, and my protests against all this crazy splurging on presents were always
quite futile. I have to say that our stay in this elegant guesthouse was definitely not very good for our little boy.