A Stranger in My Own Country by Hans Fallada Page A

‘murderers, thieves and sex offenders’, always under the watchful eye of the prison warders, he wrote quickly and frenetically, freeing himself, line by line, from his hatred of the Nazis and the humiliations of the past years. He proceeded with caution, and in order to conceal his intentions and save paper he used abbreviations – ‘n.’ for ‘nationalsozialistisch’ (National Socialist), for example, and ‘N.’ for ‘Nazis’ or ‘National Socialism’ – while the minuscule handwriting was enough in itself to deter the prison warders. But Fallada went further in his efforts to ‘scramble’ the text, turning completed manuscript pages upside down and writing in the spaces between the lines. The highly compromising notes, part micrography and part calligraphic conundrum, became a kind of secret code or cryptograph, which can only be deciphered with great difficulty and with the aid of a magnifying glass.
    On 8 October 1944, a Sunday, Hans Fallada was allowed out on home leave for the day. He smuggled the secret notes out under his shirt.

A despatch from the house of the dead.
Afterword
    It feels, he says, as if he is writing ‘in retrospect’, as if he is writing ‘in a time of peace’. While the bombs are falling in Berlin and houses are going up in flames, Hans Fallada is sitting in his cell in the Nazi custodial institution in Strelitz and writing a memoir that could cost him his life. With unflinching candour, caught up in his own contradictions, he relates his experiences in Nazi Germany. At the end these notes seem to him too slight, a failure even; the tone of them is too tame for what he has been through. But still: he has ‘written the worst of it out of my system’. So what are we to make of this despatch from the ‘house of the dead’?
    The Prison Diary from the autumn of 1944 is more than just an exercise in self-examination, more than just introspective monologue. It speaks to an imaginary reader, and makes use of all the literary devices that Hans Fallada the story-teller had at his disposal. For an important part of his attempt to process the past, not to say its underlying motivation, is the need to defend his own actions, his ‘inward emigration’.
    It is no coincidence that the opening scene reminds us straightaway of one of Fallada’s lighter novels. With practised skill the writer paints a picture of the high-spirited atmosphere in ‘Schlichters Wine Bar’. Into this cosy scene bursts the waiter who brings the fateful news that the Reichstag is on fire. It is 27 February 1933. The fascist character of the new regime is now laid bare. On the very next day the ‘Edict of the Reich President for the Protection of the Nation and the State’suspended key articles of the constitution, and the constitutional state was irrevocably transformed into a police state, which took brutal action against its opponents. It was not long before National Socialist cultural policy was also put into effect. The ‘thorough moral cleansing of the body politic’ announced by Hitler meant in practice the suppression of an independent, free press. Once the press had been brought into line with Nazi doctrine, other measures against writers’ organizations soon followed. The ‘ Schutzverband deutscher Schriftsteller ’ (SDS – Association for the Protection of German Writers) was ‘purged’, and its members were henceforth required to proclaim allegiance to the National Socialist state. In July 1933 the SDS was subsumed into the newly founded ‘ Reichsverband deutscher Schriftsteller ’ (RDS – Reich Association of German Writers). The Reich Chamber Law of 22 September 1933 established the statutory basis for the regimentation of cultural life in general. Under Goebbels’ supervision the Reich Chamber of Culture, established under the aegis of the Propaganda