A Stranger in My Own Country Read Free Page B

‘gaily started sending out’ his letters from there. His friends warned him that his imprudent behaviour – ‘given the growing number of spies and informers’ – was tantamount to suicide, but he blithely dismisses their concerns: ‘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!’
    While anti-Semitism now became de facto government policy, and the Jews were discriminated against, humiliated and persecuted, Fallada, who describes himself as a ‘philosemite’, makes a few observations that ‘give me pause’. The Jews, he writes, really do have ‘a different attitude to money’. Fallada comes out with anti-Semitic remarks despite himself, describing the typical ‘Jewish’ face in terms redolent of a caricature in Der Stürmer , and characterizing someone as ‘a little, degenerate Jew’. He writes about the ‘deep instinct for quality that so many Jews have’, their capacity for self-irony, in which they ‘so excel’, and he is fiercely critical of the anti-Semitic propaganda of the National Socialist regime, which he says ‘had always sickened’ him – and which nevertheless dictates the terms of reference for his own arguments. The ‘unpolitical’ writer was becoming politicized without even noticing it. When he reluctantly accepts a commission from the Propaganda Ministry in 1941, he does so under the dubious premise that if he does it at all, then he will write a ‘non-anti-Semitic, anti-Semitic novel’.
    He makes no secret of the fact that he despises the Nazis. He attacks their viciousness and inhumanity with utter disgust and growing hatred, calling them ‘brutal’, ‘primitive’, ‘thugs’, ‘an entrenched gangster culture’. In his description of an ‘archetypal SA visage’ (with ‘that thick neck with its six or seven rolls of fat’) he voices an emotive rejection that ‘had absolutely nothing to do with politics’. And Fallada writes very movingly of the victims of the Nazi dictatorship, one of whom was the music teacher Sas, who was arrested for illegally keeping a portable printing press in his house, and then had to endure endless torments until he was finally hanged in Plötzensee prison. An ‘everyday story of German life’, as Fallada puts it.
    In May 1945 Fallada was back at work on his notes, which he had written only a few months previously at the risk of his life. He now wanted to adapt his memories and experiences to the changing times. The Red Army had entered Feldberg, and the town was under the control of the Soviet town major. Fallada was revising and editing his account, because now, finally, he saw a real prospect of getting it published. His proposed title was ‘The undesirable author – My experiences during twelve years of Nazi terror’ – even though the work has little to say about the struggles of the ‘undesirable author’. But in May 1945 it seemed desirable, indeed necessary, to give the text sharper political definition. The foreword he wrote for it reads like a mission statement for the task of revision and emendation he is about to undertake: ‘These reminiscences clearly bear the traces of the circumstances in which they were written. Constantly interrupted and laid aside, concealed from the gaze of the prison warders, they were never going to be a work of calm contemplation. They are not serenely detached, but sad, angry and full of hatred; I have suffered too much. They are driven solely by the single-minded resolve that kept me going for twelve years: the resolve to root out every trace of Nazism from this unfortunate German nation, which has brought calamity upon nearly all of Europe through its deluded faith in the crazed “Führer”. Never again must anything like Nazism be