A Stranger in My Own Country Read Online Free Page B

‘underground palace’ in increasingly elaborate detail – his metaphor for ‘hibernating’ throughthe winter of National Socialism. A final bastion against the trials and impositions of the age: a desperate idyll. But it all ends in a bitter guilty verdict: ‘Buried alive. How could you do it? How could you do that to your children?’
    The Prison Diary of 1944 is a record of growing resignation and despair, written in the hope of bearing witness.

The genesis of the Prison Diary manuscript
    The original text of the Prison Diary from the autumn of 1944 forms part of the so-called ‘Drinker manuscript’, which is kept at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. The manuscript consists of 92 sheets of lined, A4 paper – i.e. 184 pages – with page numbers inserted by the author. On pages 1–6 Fallada wrote the short story Little Jü-Jü and Big Jü-Jü and the first five pages of the novel The Drinker : this portion of the manuscript was lost in the chaos of the post-war era. The surviving text begins on page 7: the rest of the novel The Drinker (pp. 7–131) is followed by the short stories Looking for Father and The Story of Little and Big Mücke (pp. 131–41, line 7).
    Fallada had begun writing these literary works on 6 September 1944. As he was able to write relatively undisturbed in his confinement, he soon embarked on a highly dangerous undertaking: here of all places – ‘inside these four walls’ – he sets about writing down his memories of the Nazi period. On 23 September 1944 he writes the date at the top of the last page (page 184) – ‘23.IX.44.’ – and adds the title of a short story Der Kindernarr as a cover for the compromising content of his memoir. He then goes back to p. 141, line 7, inserts the same date again – ‘23.IX.44.’ – and begins to write the account that we now know as the Prison Diary: ‘One day in January 1933 . . .’
    In the weeks that followed he produced a highly intricate and virtually indecipherable manuscript. Fallada wrote 24 lines per page in the German form of cursive handwriting known as Sütterlin, until he reached the last line of page 183. At the end of the page he begana new sentence with the word ‘And’. On page 184, where the date – ‘23.IX.44’ – and the title Der Kindernarr were already noted at the top, he now wrote the short story of that name. When he got to the bottom of page 184 – having now used up all the 92 sheets of paper allocated to him – he turned the page upside down, wrote the page number 185 on the bottom edge, and continued writing in normal Latin script between the existing lines of Sütterlin script. He proceeded in the same way with the remaining pages: they were turned upside down, numbered in sequence, and Fallada carried on writing between the existing lines of text. On page 189, line 1, he ends the short story Der Kindernarr . On page 183 Fallada picks up the sentence he began earlier with the word ‘And’ and continues to record his memories, in Latin script, until he reaches page 202, where he interpolates the short story Swenda – A Dream Fragment, or My Troubles . As the ‘Swenda story’ is an integral part of the Prison Diary, it has been included here. It follows on from one of the three ‘separate entries’ in which Fallada provides a commentary and an update on his present situation in the psychiatric prison.
    The Prison Diary account is continued on pages 204 to 228 in Latin script. Fallada now inserts up to three additional lines at the top of the pages and up to two more lines at the bottom. Page 228 brings him back to the first page of his memoir – page 141. He continues to write between the lines of this page in Latin script, then inserts the page number 229 between the first and second lines at the top of the page; from this point he carries on writing