A Stranger in My Own Country Read Free Page A

later in the Hotel Kaiserhof, where the Nazi state held court, and where Fallada now took part in discussions about a proposed project with the ‘National Actor’ Emil Jannings. The claim of the authors who had ‘stayed behind at home’ that they had opposed the regime, even if their opposition had to be read between the lines of their texts, was dismissed early on by Thomas Mann as a strategy doomed to failure.
    Fallada too misread the political situation and his own role in it. And he vilified the émigré writers. He claimed he would rather perish with this ‘unfortunate but blessed nation’ than ‘enjoy a false happiness in some other country’. He defended himself against his critics in exile by lashing out at them, deploying the standard arguments used to justify ‘inward emigration’. The idea that artists had a special role and a special responsibility for the sorely afflicted country also surfaces in the diary of Wilhelm Furtwängler. In 1945 he writes: ‘Here I was able to do more for the true Germany, and thus for peace and the arts worldwide, than anywhere else.’ In Fallada we read: ‘[. . .] not everything has lost its savour [. . .] we were the salt of the earth.’ A proud boast, and a foolishone. Like Furtwängler, Fallada invokes Germany’s cultural heritage and celebrates the nation that produced Goethe and Beethoven: ‘I love this nation, which has given [. . .] imperishable sounds to the world.’ The exhortations of the émigrés to engage in active resistance are decisively rejected by Fallada: he refuses to ‘commit suicide cheered on by a bunch of émigrés’. Here too he is following the standard line of argument used by ‘those who stayed behind at home’. Thus in 1945 Frank Thiess asserted that it had been a great deal harder to live through the ‘German tragedy’ in Germany than to pass comment on it from the ‘boxes and orchestra seats of other countries’.
    Above all else, the Prison Diary documents the failure and the growing despair of an unpolitical writer. The fact that his own notes fail to satisfy him in the end, that he finds them ‘without merit or interest’ even (he has ‘no great revelations’ to make), undoubtedly has something to do with his inability to analyse National Socialism critically. Political reflection was not Fallada’s forte – and there is no reason why it should be. He tells us that he has never thought in terms of Jews and Aryans, that Jews had always been part of ‘an entirely random mix’ of friends and acquaintances. When he was arrested by the Nazis in 1933, a female Jewish friend was staying in the house. The way he describes the situation shows how he failed to grasp the very real danger. He says he has not wasted mental energy on such things as ‘learning to tell the difference between all these silly uniforms’. Was it a ‘Standartenführer’ who arrested him on that occasion? ‘A “Rottenführer”? A “Scharführer”? I’ve no idea.’ All that mattered to him was that ‘a good old country policeman’ was there too, ‘wearing the familiar green uniform’, who could at least be expected to see that things were done in a ‘legal’ manner. After his release from protective custody at the end of April 1933 Fallada notes that they are still ‘entirely unpolitical people’, and many things are just a ‘closed book’ to them: he has no idea ‘what the lawyer and the district council leader talked about in private, regarding conspiracies against the person of the Führer, good and bad political jokes, and Mr von Salomon.’
    His political innocence and ‘naivety’ are also evident in anotherarea. Shortly after the Nazis seized power in 1933, Fallada moved into a ‘Jewish’ guesthouse, and, as he puts it,