A Stranger in My Own Country Read Free

the extreme: hatred and sadness, hope and fear, self-pity and self-recrimination, discerning insight and blindness. The Prison Diary stands before us not as the documentary record of a controlled and sustained process of thought and reflection, but as the testimonyof a highly conflicted personality, damaged by Nazi terror and trapped in the internal contradictions of his own actions.
    This ‘unpolitical writer’ is here making his first profession of political faith. It is revealing and instructive – but it fails to convince. Fallada is one of that group of artists who did not leave Germany during the Nazi years. So his memoir sets out to justify his actions. With his ‘catalogue of sins’ as a writer he finds himself the target of accusations and reproaches. His account reveals the bitterness and contradictions of those artists who felt they had no choice but to ‘stick it out’ in Germany and do what they could to defend the great German ‘civilized nation’ against the primitive violence of ethnic nationalism and racism. Like Ernst Jünger, Fallada believed that he had shared in the ‘tragedy of his people’. Those who emigrated, fleeing into ‘comfortable’ exile, were ‘slinking away to a life of ease’ in the country’s ‘hour of affliction and ignominy’. He claimed to have thought about emigrating on several occasions, and had packed his suitcases more than once: but in 1938, when the family had made all the necessary preparations to travel to England via Hamburg and was ready to go, he simply could not bring himself to leave Germany. And so he stayed – for ‘the trees and the bees’. As a writer, he said, he could not imagine living anywhere except Germany, and ‘probably couldn’t do it anywhere else’. Fallada paid a high price for staying, as these notes from 1944 testify.
    The phrase ‘inward emigration’ was coined by Frank Thiess as early as 1933 – he too rejected the idea of German exile from the outset. After 1945 the rift between the émigrés and ‘those who had stayed behind at home’ grew deeper. The claim made by Thiess – that by ‘sticking it out’ in Germany he had acquired a ‘rich store of insights and experiences’ – culminated in the imputation that it had been harder ‘to preserve one’s identity here than to send messages to the German people from over there’. This egregious defamation of German authors in exile elicited an unusually sharp riposte from Thomas Mann. He argued that the literature of ‘inward emigration’ had forfeited any claim to the status of resistance literature. ‘It may be superstition, but in my eyes any books that could be printed at allin Germany between 1933 and 1945 are less than worthless, and not the kind of thing you want to pick up. The smell of blood and infamy clings to them. They should all be pulped.’
    However, writers like Ricarda Huch and Ernst Barlach can claim with some justification to be practitioners of ‘inward emigration’, since they took a public stand against National Socialism. But what of Hans Fallada? Did he seek to offer any kind of ‘intellectual opposition’ to the prevailing ‘spirit of evil’? Certainly, in a novel such as Wolf among Wolves , he gave readers a work of fiction that did not conform in any way to the tasteless triumphalism of approved Party literature. Nor is there any doubt about his aversion to fulfilling the regime’s expectations. And yet he is compromised by the revised ending to Iron Gustav , rewritten along the lines suggested by Goebbels. Indeed, Fallada found himself having a lot more to do with Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry than he was comfortable with – as the Prison Diary also attests. So we see the author who was celebrating in ‘Schlichters Wine Bar’ in February 1933 turning up five years