A Stranger in My Own Country (15 page)

Meanwhile the twins had been born, and the younger of the two girls died a few hours after the birth. There was a very specific medical reason for it, which had nothing at all to do with the agitation and
stresses suffered during the pregnancy; and yet I was never able to let go completely of the idea that the Sponars were partially responsible for this misfortune, the Sponars and everything that went with them – the hated brownshirts and the protective custody and my wife's long trek through the night to reach the little town of Fürstenwalde. It's unfair to think like this, and I have no evidence to support such a view, but I still say: they are partly responsible. Things would not have worked out this way, and our little girl would still be alive today, if we had been allowed to carry on living in peace and contentment, if this wretched Nazi takeover hadn't occurred!

In the meantime we'd found the house in the country
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where we wanted to live from now on, a secluded house by the water, and now it was a matter of retrieving our furniture and other things that were still being held by the Sponars as ‘security' for their claims. Here too our friend Peter Suhrkamp proved to be our saviour. He boldly drove back to our old village to conduct negotiations, and instead of going to see the poor ‘fellow German national' whom I had so wronged, he went straight to the man who really mattered, the building contractor Gröschke. That was a nerve-wracking day for us! We could not relax at all, I for one was pacing up and down the whole time, I couldn't settle to anything, and pestered my tired and sickly wife with a thousand fears and misgivings. I pictured our negotiator already under arrest, and could well imagine the evil and malicious Gröschke, how furious he must be about the sneaky sale of the mortgages! The waiting was agony . . .

Then our friend returned, and as was his wont, he told us nothing at first, but instead made very free with his criticisms, particularly of me. He had already heard from the nurse how restless I had been, how I had been pestering my wife, and also that I'd been drinking alcohol again, and now I really got it in the neck! It was a case of once a teacher, always a teacher with him, and he could be really acerbic and downright scathing when playing that part. Sometimes I fought back, because it really went against the grain, as a forty-year-old man, to be told off like a naughty schoolboy! But on this occasion I kept my mouth firmly shut, since any argument on my part would have just
delayed his report on what he had accomplished. And so after we had been hauled over the coals and given a thorough drubbing, he finally got round to telling us what had happened.

(29.IX.44.)
It had all gone remarkably well, as it turned out. The sale of the mortgages and the resulting loss of the rent payments had not caused tempers to flare, as I had feared, but had made them pause and reflect. They were prepared to make the best of a bad job and negotiate. And so they had talked money, finally agreeing on a figure that satisfied all outstanding claims from the Sponars and secured the release of my furniture. It was still extortion, it was still an injustice, and it was still a tidy sum; but it was something we could live with, viewing it as the penalty to be paid for an act of great folly.

And then I see before me the bright, sunny summer morning: the stunted pine trees through which my wife once fled through the night are already giving off a subtle scent of resin. The two brightly painted removal vans come to a halt on the brown gravel road in front of the villa. The removal men are carrying the items of furniture out of the house one by one. Inside the packer is going about his business – this is just a removal job like any other for him, with nothing to indicate the story that lies behind it. The Sponars are nowhere to be seen. My presence is completely superfluous, but my friend Peter Suhrkamp insisted that I should be here, that I should show my face here again, for the sake of the removal men, but also for myself. As I said: once a teacher, always a teacher, and one has to do one's homework, however tiresome it might be. My homework was to show my face here again. And now comes the hardest and most hateful part of all! He taps me on the shoulder: ‘Right, then. Let's go!'

‘Fine', I say, throwing away my half-smoked cigarette and lighting up another one immediately. We start walking. ‘Take it easy', says Peter Suhrkamp, ‘He won't arrest you a second time!'

‘No, no', I reply. ‘Of course not.'

We go into the house, the pretentious product of a country builder's
fancy. We enter a room that is half parlour, with upholstered seating, and half office, with a roller blind. I am introduced to the tall man with the curiously small, hard head. He greets me pointedly with a ‘Heil Hitler!' I return the greeting, cursorily. Mr Gröschke is in his shirtsleeves, the sleeves of his brown shirt. ‘Time to count out the cash, Fallada', says Peter Suhrkamp. And to the local Party branch leader: ‘Well, it's all turned out a bit differently from what you expected, Mr Gröschke.'

This is a direct challenge, but Gröschke replies matter-of-factly: ‘We'll be converting the first floor and the attic into small apartments, and that way the house will cover the interest payments.'

‘And you'll get a nice little contract out of it', replies Peter Suhrkamp with a grin. For a moment they both look at each other, and then they both smile. A very knowing smile. ‘Oh well', says Mr Gröschke, ‘when it's for a friend – !' He quickly counts the banknotes, nods and puts them in a small cashbox. Somewhat surprisingly he then goes on: ‘Why shouldn't one do business with a friend occasionally – ?' They smile once more; I am quite certain that the Sponars won't get to see much of my money. But that's the kind of man he was. This was the man at whose bidding I was supposed to be shot ‘while trying to escape', who had caused us so much anguish, who had made our lives a misery for a while. That was him. A kind of vulture – with a small, shrivelled head and a long, thin, wrinkly neck. ‘Well now, was that so bad?' Peter Suhrkamp asks me, when we are standing outside again on the sunlit street. ‘Was it worth staying at home on that account? You'd have felt ashamed of yourself for the rest of your life, Fallada!' I say nothing.

We stay and watch the brightly painted furniture vans start up, the road surface is too soft, they need to be towed off. But then they are on the metalled road to Fürstenwalde, where the contents are to be shipped on to Mahlendorf.
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The little village of Berkenbrück with the Sponars and its brownshirts is finally behind me. And in Mahlendorf we'll go about things very differently. There we'll get in with the local community leaders and Party bigwigs from day one! (How that turned out we would learn to our cost in due course!)

The months passed and we were now living in Mahlendorf. A year went by, and we were well into the second year, still living in Mahlendorf, happy for the most part . . . We had almost forgotten the little village of Berkenbrück and the Sponars. Sometimes, when I was out walking with the dogs, it seemed almost incredible that we once lived in a house overlooking the Spree, and that river steamers used to sound their horns beneath our windows. Our son had long since forgotten it all. And then we got a reminder. A letter with a black border arrived in the post: an actual obituary notice. ‘He has passed away in his 80th year, Emil Sponar', etc., etc. ‘“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall see God.” In profound sorrow, Friederike Sponar.'

However, this news did not reach us from the little village of Berkenbrück, it came from Berlin, from the east end of the city, and one of those long, overcrowded streets that are swarming with people like a beehive swarming with bees in the summer. Yes, of course: the safeguard against foreclosure had been abolished, the Sponars were not able to carry on living in a comfortable villa at the expense of their creditors; in their old age they had to move to a place where people lived cheek by jowl. Should we pity them? Do we have to? The card landed in the wastepaper basket – the Sponars meant nothing to us any more. They had hurt us very deeply once, but that was forgotten now. There is so much one has to forget in this life! Rest in peace, old man!

Four more weeks passed, and then another letter with a black border arrived in the post. Could it be that the queen had followed her husband so quickly to the grave? But no, she was still alive, in fact she was writing to us, writing to us in her large, firm handwriting. We had offended her: ‘I have waited week after week for a word of condolence for the passing of my dear husband . . . He was a good man, he meant well by you. What he did was his duty, as a loyal follower of the Führer . . .'

‘Wastepaper basket, Suse!' I said. ‘Why are you getting so worked up? That woman must be mad – remember her eyes! No, not a word, straight into the wastepaper basket!'

The weeks passed, and again we forgot about the Sponars. What reason did we have for thinking about an old, impoverished woman, who was thinking back on her wasted life with hatred and fury? We had enough worries of our own! And then another envelope arrived from her, this time without the black border, and this time with no note or letter, but enclosing a photograph of our eldest son, which Suse had given to the Sponars perhaps, or left behind by mistake when we moved house. Just the photo – so now she was returning our gifts! I looked more closely at the photograph – and saw that she had pricked out the child's eyes with a needle!

I hope my memory doesn't deceive me: Suse never saw this desecrated picture, I was able to burn it behind her back. It's such a long time ago, we've certainly never talked about it: the name Sponar was never spoken between us again. But the strange thing is, I am almost glad, now, that this woman perpetrated this final and supreme act of infamy. For by doing so she justified all the feelings of hatred that I harboured for her and her husband, and she justified in advance the words that I have written about her here. Perhaps she will still be living, a very old woman, when this book is published; I should like to think that she will still be able to read it with all her mental faculties. This is the obituary that I am dedicating to her and her husband. And with that I dismiss the pair of them from my life, a closed chapter as far as I am concerned, way beyond love, hatred and forgiveness!

In the preceding pages I have told the life story, or what I know of it, of my friend Peter Suhrkamp, whom I have not seen for many years. Now I'd like to write something about my esteemed publisher Rowohlt, who has also been a wonderful friend to us. We had to manage without him for many a long, hard year, but at least we do see him now from time to time. He too has been tossed and tumbled by the waves, and like the rest of us he didn't escape the brown tide entirely unscathed. Sometimes it was hard to believe that this man, who always described himself as a survivor who always bounced back, would ever get back on his feet again. But lo, he lives! If my information is correct, he is currently swanning around in the lovely little village of Kampen on the
island of Sylt, fanned by glorious sea breezes and doing . . . absolutely nothing for the total war effort.

I've already said that he was just as reckless and just as fearful as I am. But as he met up with at least a dozen people every day, doing business with them, chatting away, sharing news (and what kind of news was there in those early years other than about the Nazis!), it was inevitable that he ran far greater risks than someone like me, living a quiet life out in the country and often seeing nobody for ten days at a time. There are many stories about him from this time, and it's impossible to recount them all. But one of them shows very well how this inveterate gambler, who all his life played every book like a hand of cards, how he also liked to play with fire. In the early days after the seizure of power, when so much had to be overturned and then reorganized again, the Reich Chamber of Literature issued a ruling allowing Jewish authors and Jewish translators to carry on working for the time being, on condition that they had a so-called ‘exemption certificate', which was issued by the RCL. This policy was intended as a transitional arrangement, to provide protection against excessive losses for publishers who had many such works in progress at the time. Now we had a Jewish translator in the office called Franz Fein,
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who was a brilliant translator; nearly all the translations of Sinclair Lewis's works, for example, must have been done by him.
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Old Rowohlt was a firm believer in loyalty, and he had no intention of getting rid of Franz Fein. So he just let him carry on translating. A week later a warning letter arrived from the RCL, noting that the Rowohlt publishing house was still employing the translator Franz Fein, who had no exemption certificate, and requesting that he no longer be employed in future. Rowohlt put the letter on his ‘compost heap', where all the letters that he didn't want to answer ended up, and carried on employing Franz Fein as before. The next letter from the RCL was more threatening in tone: on pain of a fine of so many marks, the Rowohlt publishing house was forbidden to continue employing the Jewish translator Franz Fein, who had no exemption certificate. This letter likewise landed on the compost heap, and Franz Fein carried on working. The final letter from the RCL was
a hammer blow: a fine was imposed, and Rowohlt was summoned to appear before the German publishers' court of honour. At this point Rowohlt decided to respond. His reply consisted of a single sentence: ‘The translator Franz Fein is permitted to work in accordance with exemption certificate No. 796. Heil Hitler.' The people at the RCL had failed to check their own records properly before writing their letters. Such ‘triumphs' were royally celebrated in the office, of course, and we told everybody about them, but in the end they were – like my own aforementioned letter to Dr Goebbels – dearly paid for. Nothing was forgotten, everything was noted down, and the pile of small snowballs grew until it became a huge, crushing avalanche!