A Stranger in My Own Country (21 page)

We would, we did, and we paid ourselves. All well and good, and perhaps just as it should be; perhaps a man like Jannings cannot be expected to pay for everyone at these meetings all the time. But then something surprising happened, something completely at odds with the picture I have just painted. In the middle of one of these meetings the door opened and Jannings' manservant Ernst came in. My gaze followed him as he passed through the illustrious gathering and went up to the desk where Jannings was sitting. ‘He'll have a message for his master', I said to myself. But Jannings merely glanced quickly at Ernst and carried on talking. Now Ernst was not, as one might suppose from what came next, an aged, grey-haired manservant with years of honourable service behind him, who now enjoyed special privileges. On the contrary: he was a young man of about thirty. Now he was standing at the desk, and he opened up the cigar box that was sitting there and took out a cigar. Taking a knife from the pen dish, he cut off the tip of the cigar and lit it with the ornate gold lighter that was also on the desk. The manservant Ernst then walked off with a relaxed air, inhaling deeply and pleasurably on his master's cigar, bought solely for Jannings and himself. What a strange and contradictory world we live in, how mysteriously labyrinthine is the human heart, for ever impenetrable to the inquiring mind! It has also happened that I have been with Jannings in the evening, chatting away, when all of a sudden he had to go out, and rang for his manservant Ernst: ‘Ernst, get me my coat and my hat! – Good, Ernst, and now I need money!' The manservant reached into his pocket and placed two banknotes into his master's hand. Jannings
looked at them, and shook his head: ‘That's not enough, Ernst. I'm off to see the women tonight!'

‘Mr Jannings – !' The manservant's tone was reproachful, his eyebrows raised.

‘It's no use, Ernst, I'm off to see the women! I need more money, Ernst!'

‘Then I'll have to open the safe, Mr Jannings', still in a beseeching tone of voice. ‘Then do it, Ernst, my boy. I'll wait.' And he launched into a conversation with me, which I had great difficulty in keeping up, so stunned was I by what I had just witnessed. In the end Ernst came back and placed five hundred-mark notes in his master's hand, not without reproach. ‘That should be enough, Ernst, and if it isn't, I'll have to ring and get you out of bed!' Whereupon Jannings bade me a hasty farewell. I was completely taken aback by this bizarre domestic set-up, and this master-servant relationship, and it occurs to me only now, nearly ten years later, as I am writing all this down, that the veteran actor was perhaps just play-acting and putting on a little improvisation for his screenwriter. The fact is he never stopped being an actor. One of my most delicious memories is the time he acted out for my benefit a visit that ‘his' Minister, Dr Goebbels, paid him when he was staying by the lake at St. Wolfgang. Much of the charm gets lost in the telling, of course. You really had to be there and see how Jannings acted out the various parts, how this fat, sallow man was suddenly transformed into Councillor Schmidt, or Dr Goebbels, or some Bavarian village cartwright. But I'll attempt it nonetheless, not least because this little story so beautifully illustrates Jannings' relationship with ‘his' Minister, the man who was the focus of all our thoughts at that time. I'll let Jannings tell the story in his own words, just as he told it to me at the time, in his characteristic Berlin dialect: ‘Look here, Fallada, you know I have this little house by the lake at St. Wolfgang. So there I am, still in bed, shortly before nine one morning this spring, still feeling nice and woozy, because we'd had a few the night before at the White Horse Inn. Suddenly, there's somebody standing in the room. “What's up?” I ask, pretty annoyed, because I hate being disturbed in the night.
Ernst says to me, in his doleful voice – you know what he's like: “Mr Jannings, there's a man from the Gestapo downstairs who would like to speak to you.”

“Oh Lord, Emil”, I say to myself, “what on earth did you say last night when you were pissed out of your mind! I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Emil: one of these days you'll talk your head right off your shoulders!” But there was nothing for it, I had to bite the bullet; I threw on a dressing gown and knocked on Gussy's door. You know, don't you, Fallada, that I'm married to Gussy Holl?'
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I nodded. ‘“Gussy”, I say to her, “you see me now, but in a little while you won't be seeing me any more. The Gestapo are downstairs. Say goodbye to your Emil, woman.” I go downstairs, and there's this fellow all kitted out in Bavarian gear, the works, with
lederhosen
and a loden hat with a great shaving brush sticking out the top, some type from Berlin. Complete with glasses and legs like matchsticks. “Jannings”, I say, to introduce myself, and he introduces himself as “Councillor Schmidt”. And then we stare steadily into each other's eyes. I think to myself, if you want something from me, then just spit it out. And we carry on staring, neither of us wanting to speak first. In the end the whole thing just feels silly, so I say to him: “So what can I do for you, Councillor?”

“Well”, says he, and my heart is trembling like a blancmange. “Well, Mr Jannings, the Minister wishes to pay you a visit today. That is a great honour, Mr Jannings, because generally speaking the Minister doesn't visit people in their homes. I have already carried out an inspection of your property. On one side is the lake, on the other side there's a stream, on the third side is a wire fence, so now we'll have to post the sentries on the side facing the road in order to secure the property.” And the man did his job thoroughly, I will say that: you couldn't find a bush to pee in without stepping on some Gestapo lad, all togged up for the great outdoors, with
lederhosen
and a hat with a shaving brush, which was thicker or thinner, depending on rank and seniority.

“Gussy”, I then say to my old lady, “we are highly honoured, the Minister is visiting me today. Now listen, Gussy, you're a clever woman, and I need your advice. The morning and the lunch, we'll
manage that somehow. But what are we going to do then? You know what it's like: if I spend two hours with the man, we end up arguing, he's got his ideas and I've got mine. He can't stand being contradicted – and I'm even worse. So what am I going to do with the Minister all afternoon?”

“That's easy, Emil”, says Gussy, showing that she really is a clever woman, “there's the lake and you've got a motorboat. Take the Minister out in the boat and show him the sights from the lake – the engine makes so much noise that you won't be able to have a proper conversation anyway!”

“Perfect, Gussy”, says I, “you've got it sussed again. But there is one little problem. You know that the Minister has a physical deformity – dot and carry one, you know what I mean – and it's pretty awkward climbing into the boat. How are we going to swing that, I wonder?”

“Oh Emil”, says Gussy, “that's simple, that is! You just nip into the village, see the cartwright, and get him to make you a little stepladder. You can make up some excuse, if the Minister's visit is supposed to be secret.” So off I go into the village to the cartwright's place. “Master Cartwright”, says I, “I want to go out in my motorboat today, and I've just twisted my ankle. Would you be so good as to make me up a little wooden stepladder quickly, so that I can get into the boat more easily?”

“We know all about it”, says the cartwright, and laughs. “I'll get it done right away – on account of Mr Dot and Carry One!”

So, the Minister turns up, and everything goes swimmingly. And after lunch I say to him: “Dr Goebbels, would you like me to show you the sights around the lake – ?” He's very happy to go along with that, so we walk down to the boathouse together. And as we're standing there chatting away, while my bosun fires up the engine, I see the Minister glance at the stepladder, and he sees straightaway that the ladder is new, and I know he just can't stand being reminded of his little physical deformity. “How's this going to end?” I think to myself, and before I've finished thinking the thought the Minister suddenly squats down on his haunches and bam! he's jumped into the boat, and didn't even look at the ladder. “That's good”, I think to myself, “that's pretty
smart!” And then we set off. I explain all the sights to him, the engine makes such a racket that we have to bellow into each other's ears, but it all goes well. And the whole time we're on the water I'm thinking: “Okay, he's in the boat now, but how's he going to get out again? He's never going to use the ladder!” And what can I tell you, Fallada: we'd hardly tied up before the Minister squats down again, gives a great heave and shoots almost straight up in the air, and before you know it he's standing on the jetty! He made it! And I said to myself, Fallada: “The guy's got what it takes, the guy's pretty smart, the guy's all right! Anyone who's as switched on as he is, is fine by me. He's a poisonous, jealous little bastard, but he's all right just the same!”' With these words Jannings ended his tale of the Minister's visit – showing just how ambivalent were his feelings towards the man who now held the fate of our film in his hands.

(2.X.44.)
‘How will the Minister react to the plan?' – that was the big question that was exercising us all. ‘How do we tell the children?' – that was the hardest part. In my view it was all very easy: you gave the Minister my novel to read, and since he was clearly not stupid he would see immediately that the book really did chronicle the fortunes of a German man from 1900 to 1928, and more to the point, that it offered a splendid role for Emil Jannings. But the old film hands just shook their heads at such naive suggestions, saying that the Minister should not read this novel, because it contained far too many things that a Nazi government minister should not know. And there were lots of things missing – as I was soon to discover. So the film bosses spent a lot of money, a lot more money than they had already paid me, and got a whole series of writers on the job, writers whom Emil Jannings dismissed as ‘Nazi hacks', in other words established screenwriters favoured by the Party. These gentlemen fell upon my novel, excerpted, condensed and abstracted it for all they were worth, twisted the plot, cut out some figures and invented new ones, skewed characters so that a villain suddenly became a noble-hearted hero, while a virtuous girl
now committed some act of infamy – and justified all these abominations with the ‘requirements of film', which apparently obeys different laws from those that govern the theatre, the novel, life in general – and indeed the entire universe. As all these people beavered away, it soon became clear that I had once again delivered too much ‘product' for the money they paid me: they could have made five or even ten films out of the material I had supplied. Deciding what to use became a real problem. In the end they agreed to make a two-part film on an epic scale, which would be shown over two evenings. To sugar the pill for the Minister they designated this beast a ‘classic German film', and manfully suppressed – in my presence at least – any impulse to address the question of just what the Minister would say to a ‘classic German film' involving the undesirable author Fallada.
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In the end they commissioned a well-known German woman writer
¹²⁸
with a lot of film experience to work up the draft prepared by the Nazi hacks and give the thing a bit of artistic polish. This woman – Jannings called her ‘the old film tart', as he called all women working in the film industry ‘old film tarts' – actually managed to pull it off, restoring some life and lustre to the poor butterfly that had long since had all the bloom rubbed off its wings by repeated handling: the screenplay that was sent to the Minister now had a number of decent scenes and one very fine one.

I've told the story at some length in order to give the reader some idea of how, under the National Socialist regime, every artistic activity was inhibited and rendered almost impossible by the need to defer to the tastes and prejudices of senior government figures. The issue was never: how do I make a good film? The issue was not even: how do I make a film that will please the public? Instead it was all about the one issue: how do I make this film project palatable to my Minister? Every artistic consideration and every question of taste took second place to this one overriding issue.

Thank heavens, I was not directly involved in any of this, and my feeble protests were met with a patient smile, like the objections of a child who knows nothing of the world. But like everyone else I
couldn't wait to find out what Dr Goebbels would say to the draft screenplay. The script was returned, and I can testify under oath to the fact that Goebbels had really read it. On every page we were taken to task for something we had all forgotten, I more than anyone, and on every page one word had been heavily scrawled in pencil, followed by one, two or three exclamation marks and sometimes by a question mark as well: ‘Jews!!!?'

Yes indeed: we had all forgotten, of course, that the Jews were to blame for everything bad that had happened in Germany since there were Germans on the planet, and that no classic German film could possibly be complete unless they were given major leading roles. But strangely enough this ministerial criticism never assumed any practical relevance – yet another of the wonderful mysteries of film: the screenplay had apparently been approved in its present form, despite the missing Jews. The Jews were merely a ministerial flourish, a poor mark handed out to inattentive schoolboys. Better yet: the film project had secured the Minister's glowing approval, including the plan to show the film over two evenings, and as the production costs were going to be very high, the Minister had even deigned to make one and a half million Reichsmarks available for the film from a special fund. Everyone was cheering for joy, everyone heaved a huge sigh of relief, everyone threw himself into the practical work that could now begin; the only one who was weeping was the author. Jannings and the director Froelich took him to one side and passed on a special message from the Minister for the author, Hans Fallada, stating that it was of course absurd to have the film end with the trip to Paris! There was – of course – only one possible way for the film to end, and that was with the seizure of power by the National Socialists! So the stories of the individual characters would have to be continued up until the seizure of power, especially in the case of old Hackendahl, ‘Iron Gustav', who had to be shown developing into an ardent Nazi in the years between the trip to Paris and the seizure of power.