A Stranger in My Own Country Read Online Free

visited upon mankind; these reminiscences, which show that everything Hitler did, big or small, was rotten to the core, may hopefully help to prevent that happening.’
    With these words Fallada began to transcribe his notes on 9 May 1945, the day after the war ended. 136 pages of the typescript he prepared have survived, amounting to approximately half of the original hand-written pages. The text breaks off in mid-sentence partway through the entry for 30 September 1944. It is impossible to say now whether Fallada stopped work at this point and never resumed, or whether he finished the text and the remaining pages have simply gone missing. At all events, the surviving typescript shows significant changes in content and style. There is a very obvious attempt to emphasize just how much Fallada hated the Nazis. So the ‘ruthless men’ of themanuscript now become ‘ruthless thugs’. Similarly Fallada makes more of his own sufferings at the hands of the Nazi dictatorship. In the first version Fallada had to wait ‘five or six days’ for a response from his lawyer when he was arrested in 1933; in the typescript this has been stretched out to two weeks. And there is also a marked shift in his attitude towards the German people: in September 1944 he speaks of this ‘unfortunate but blessed nation’, but in May 1945 he takes a much more distanced and pessimistic view, referring only to ‘this unfortunate nation’. Fallada also radically revised the memorable portrait of his publisher and friend Ernst Rowohlt. As well as adding further details, he paints an even more favourable picture, in order to do his old colleague a good turn – in 1945, as a former member of the NSDAP, Rowohlt was facing a denazification tribunal. So Fallada emphasizes Rowohlt’s international standing and praises his ambitious publishing list, which included many foreign authors and a number of Jewish ones.
    There were other changes besides. The anti-Semitic remarks are toned down in the typescript intended for publication. The assertion that the Jews have a ‘different’ attitude to money is now contextualized as a ‘first impression’, which on mature reflection he rejects as mistaken. The power of National Socialist propaganda, he belatedly realizes, has influenced even the staunchest opponents of Nazism. What was intended as a criticism in the autumn of 1944 – that it was the Jews themselves who had ‘erected this barrier between themselves and other nations’ – now gives way to a recognition that the Jews were right to stick together in their hour of danger. After all, 95 per cent of Germans had elected the Führer and supported his policies, so ‘why should the Jews, whose lives were constantly in danger, believe that we happened to belong to the other five per cent who had rejected him?’ The later toning-down and revision of anti-Semitic remarks undoubtedly stemmed in part also from the new revelations about the horrific scale of the Holocaust. The reports from the concentration camps and extermination camps that were gradually emerging showed for the first time the full extent of the persecution and the enormity of the crimes that had been committed.
    In May 1945 Fallada found himself in a changed situation, both personally and politically. The new revelations and discoveries were incorporated into the typescript. Sometimes whole passages were excised in the course of revision. Fallada was becoming increasingly aware of his own political naivety. In the autumn of 1944 he still took the dubious view that it was not the Germans ‘who did the most to pave the way for National Socialism’, but rather the French and the British. In May 1945 he acknowledged self-critically that he was ‘a perfect example of the political folly of the Germans’, who hoped in their millions that ‘it wouldn’t be so bad’, and in the end learned to their