A Stranger in My Own Country Read Online Free Page A

cost that things had turned out a great deal worse ‘than anyone in their wildest fantasy could possibly have imagined’. So in May 1945 he chooses to emphasize the political ‘naivety’ of the Germans rather than dwell on their ‘attitude’ to National Socialism, seeking thereby to defend his fellow countrymen – and himself.
    A portion of the typescript, the first section of the notes from the Reichstag fire to Fallada’s arrest at the beginning of April 1933, was revised and edited in 1945 under the Soviet military administration and published in the Tägliche Rundschau under the title ‘Celebrating Easter 1933 with the SA’. Fallada edited the text down for print, cutting the portrait of the conservative Ernst von Salomon to a minimum and condensing the story of the Sponars, whose name was changed to ‘Donner’. Published in serial form in November and December 1945, the text served above all to present Fallada as a victim of the Nazis.
    But let us now return to the original, hand-written version. The Prison Diary of 1944 begins as an apologia. Fallada feels compelled to explain why he chose to ‘stick it out’ in Germany. He wheels out a series of friends and contemporaries such as Rowohlt and e.o. plauen in order to show by their example – vicariously, on occasion – the trials, perils and struggles endured by those who stayed behind at home. As the example of Peter Suhrkamp shows (see note 67), the account he gives can sometimes be clouded by errors and personal animosities. Subjective assessment and stylization occasionally win out over the true facts. But Fallada’s reckoning with the past documents a growingdisillusionment and resignation. At the beginning Fallada draws a clear distinction between the good Germans and the Nazi mobsters, between victims on the one hand and perpetrators on the other. But from the experiences he recalls and the stories he tells, a picture gradually emerges of a nation of fellow travellers, cowards and informers. Decent men and women are sold down the river.
    â€˜We had had enough of fighting these losing battles, which, as people without rights, we could never win’, writes Fallada of the events of autumn 1933, when he had to flee to Berlin at a moment’s notice after his arrest in Berkenbrück. For the first time in his life he had suffered ‘a patent injustice’, having lost the roof over his head after being denounced: ‘Child that I was, I still didn’t get it: since January 1933 Germany had ceased to be a country under the rule of law, and was now a police state pure and simple.’ But even in Carwitz, his place of refuge, the suspicions and accusations continued. Quickly identified as a man who hated the Nazis, the author was kept under close watch by the villagers. For the first time Fallada writes openly about everyday life in National Socialist Germany, where someone like the village mayor is described as ‘this pitiful scrap of a human being [. . .] in all his wretchedness’.
    The nation that he began by defending has become alien to him; the country, his homeland, no longer seems like home. And his hopes for a possible new beginning, for a peaceful and civilized Germany, have vanished. The feeling of resignation culminates in a final, escapist dream vision: the sheltering cave beneath his own house. ‘In my dream I construct a passageway from the cellar of our house [. . .] descending deep down into the earth, and I seal it off with nine secret doors, invisible even to the most practised eye [. . .]. But this is no hideous, dark tunnel of bare earth: an elegant flight of stone steps leads downwards, the walls are covered with stars and electric lights are built into the vaulted ceiling. At the bottom you enter a fine antechamber, stepping straight from that into the vast living and working space, twenty metres below the ground.’ Fallada imagines his