A Stranger in My Own Country (4 page)

Such were our landlords, and such were the circumstances of their lives at the time, which they made no secret of. In general we got on very well with them; as tenants we were not the petty-minded type, and if something needed repairing I had it done at my expense, even though it was technically the landlord's responsibility. The fact is that the Sponars were destitute. I even paid the old man a small monthly allowance, in return for which he pottered about a bit in my part of the garden, strength and health permitting. But we were more cautious in our dealings with the dethroned princess: she acted all condescending and friendly, but we never quite trusted her. Her big eyes often lit up with something like pain, and I sometimes thought that she hated us because we had what she had lost: property, a carefree life, happiness. The days passed and turned into weeks and months, and we felt more and more at home in our villa on the Spree. Our little boy cheered every tug boat that went past almost under our windows, belching
thick black smoke and towing long lines of barges in the direction of Berlin. We went for long walks in the woods, and sometimes we forgot for hours on end that Berlin even existed, even as the Nazis there continued to strengthen their hold on power, banning other political parties and confiscating their property. I remember saying to my wife in outrage, when the Liebknecht House was taken over and changed into the Horst Wessel House with a lot of pomp and ceremony (as if they had won a huge victory or something): ‘It's so brazen, the way they carry on! It's just theft, pure and simple! But they get away with it precisely because they are so shameless about it, as if it's the most natural thing in the world!'

But if we happened to be in Berlin and came across formations of brownshirts or stormtroopers marching through the streets with their standards, singing their brutish songs – one line of which I still remember clearly: ‘. . . the blade must run with Jewish blood!' – then my wife and I would start to run and we would turn off at the next corner. An edict had been issued, stating that everyone on the street had to raise their arm and salute the standards when these parades went past. We were by no means the only ones who ran away rather than give a salute under duress. Little did we know at the time that our then four-year-old son
²⁵
would one day be wearing a brown shirt too, and in my own house to boot, and that one day I too would have to buy a Nazi flag and fly it on ‘festive days'. If we had had any notion of the sufferings that lay ahead, perhaps we would have changed our minds after all and packed our bags. And when we returned home to Berkenbrück we congratulated ourselves on our peaceful village existence. We looked at each other and said: ‘Thank God! The farmers out here in the country are not bothered about the Nazis! They till the soil and are happy just to be left in peace!' What naive fools we were! Our eyes would soon be opened to the realities of Nazism in rural life!

Meanwhile we had grown to like our villa so much that we decided to stop looking for somewhere else and to stay where we were – but to become owners rather than tenants. That would not be possible without the consent of the Sponars. So we went to see them and made
the following proposal: I would buy up the mortgages from the individual mortgage lenders, and he would agree to let the house be put up for compulsory auction. At the sale I would then acquire the house for the value of the mortgages, the property being so heavily mortgaged that there was no danger of anyone outbidding me. In return for his consent to the auction I would grant him and his wife a lifelong right of residence in the ground-floor apartment – admittedly half the size of what they had now – and in addition I would pay them both a monthly annuity that was twice as much as the pension they were getting from social services. In return, he would help out in the garden as far as his strength permitted.

I was offering the Sponars an incredibly good deal here. The protection against foreclosure would not last indefinitely; the house would come under the hammer one day, and he would lose the right of residence there, lose the garden, and not get a penny in compensation. So I was astonished when the couple seemed unsure about accepting my proposal. I pressed them, and eventually he came out with it. He felt that by agreeing to let the house be put up for auction he was placing himself entirely in my hands. Once the house had been sold at auction, he said, the Sponars would have no rights at all, and I could do with them whatever I wanted. It was easy to make promises – no offence intended – but keeping them in these uncertain times was even less certain . . . I said with a laugh that his concerns could very easily be laid to rest: all we needed to do was go and see a notary together and put our mutual obligations in writing. He promised to think it over for a day or two. I couldn't understand it – I thought he should have been grateful to me, simple as that. What I was offering was a pure gift. But people are strange, and old people especially. But he came to me next morning – it always pays to sleep on things – and gave his consent. I suggested that we go straight to the notary and get it all down in writing, exactly as he wanted. But all of a sudden he wasn't in such a hurry any more. He had a touch of bronchitis, he claimed. Besides, there was no great hurry, he said: he knew I was a man of my word, the end of this week or the beginning of the next would be soon enough.
Which was fine by me. I was exhilarated by the prospect of owning a house of my own, when just a short time ago I had had nothing to my name. Thinking that everything was settled, I travelled to Berlin and went to one of the big banks to arrange the transfer of the prime mortgage. They were happy enough to give it to me, and were just pleased to be rid of this instrument that had hardly ever yielded any interest. Then I set about buying up five or six smaller mortgages with a value of a few thousand marks each, which Sponar had presumably taken out when he was really up against it, in order to keep his head above water from one month to the next and carry on making alabaster lampshades that nobody wanted to buy. Having sorted all this out, I sat at home feeling very pleased, and waited for my landlord to get over his mild attack of bronchitis so that he could come with me to the notary.

Now comes a strange interlude, not without deeper significance, on the eve of Easter, when we planned to organize an Easter egg treasure hunt for our little boy. On Maundy Thursday
²⁶
we had a visit from a Mr von Salomon,
²⁷
who worked at my publisher's. Mr von Salomon was not Jewish, as one might assume from his name (and as some people did assume), but came from Rhineland aristocracy. Salomon was a Germanized form of the French ‘Salmon'. He had three brothers, and anything more different than these three brothers it would be hard to imagine. They perfectly exemplified the condition of the German nation: disunited and riven by conflict. One of the brothers was a respectable bank clerk,
²⁸
an upright citizen, who was only interested in his own advancement. The second was a committed Communist,
²⁹
and if one is to believe his brother, the one I knew (although one certainly shouldn't believe everything he said!), this brother had been honoured by Stalin in person with a distinguished award. At all events, this Mr von Salomon was soon one of Germany's ‘most wanted' men, defying the Nazi terror regime as he travelled constantly back and forth between Paris and Moscow as a courier, wearing a hundred disguises, braving dangers of every kind, and stopping off regularly in Berlin too, where the brothers met up from time to time. The third Salomon brother was a big cheese on the staff of the later notorious Mr Röhm,
with whom, however, he did not perish: on the contrary, he rose ever higher through the ranks. He had the – for me – unforgettable first name ‘Pfeffer'. Pfeffer von Salomon – now that's what I call aristocracy! And my Salomon too, still young as he was, had already had a fairly chequered past. As a young lad he had fought with the Iron Division in the Baltic,
³⁰
then he had joined the Consul Organization,
³¹
had taken part in the Ruhr resistance campaign, and finally had been involved somehow in the murder of Rathenau.
³²
For that he spent some time in prison, where the fiercely nationalist sympathies of the prison staff at the time meant that he was feted as something of a celebrity. He even made a habit of going into town with the prison governor for an evening in the pub, where he found an admiring audience among the bar-room regulars for the tales of his exploits, although it was not unknown for him to get so carried away in the heat of the moment that he mixed up other people's exploits with his own – for example, telling anecdotes from the Battle of the Marne as if he had been there in person, whereas he couldn't have been more than twelve or thirteen at the time. When he came out of prison he wrote a couple of books about his experiences; he wrote well and fluently, as long as he stuck to his own adventures. In one of these books,
Die Geächteten
[
The Outcasts
],
³³
he sought to glorify the murder of Rathenau, turning things round somewhat to present the murdered Rathenau as a better kind of man, but with a dark and sinister side to him, while the poor murderers were forced to go on the run in Germany, innocents hunted like wild game. Another book, called
Die Stadt
[
The City
],
³⁴
is something of a curiosity, a hefty volume, written and printed as a continuous stream of words without any chapter breaks, or even paragraphs, to enliven the tedious uniformity of the text, or give the reader's eye a chance to rest and pause. Booksellers were quick to dub the book ‘the book with no returns' – and they were right on both counts: no paragraph breaks, and the book failed to sell, much to the chagrin of my good friend Rowohlt. Mr von Salomon soon discovered, however, that the business of writing books requires a lot of hard work, and often brings in very little money. Like many people who have bright ideas and don't care
for hard work, but do like to live well, he went into films instead. That suited him very well, and when I last saw him on the Kurfürstendamm he had put on a lot of weight, and the acquaintance of a minor writer was clearly a thing of very little importance for a man who was constantly hobnobbing with the film stars of the day. But back then, when he visited me that Maundy Thursday, all this still lay in the future. At that time Mr von Salomon was as lean as a whippet, to which he bore a striking resemblance with his aristocratic, sharp-featured face. I don't remember any more why he came to see me, he probably just wanted to tell me the latest jokes about Hitler and the Party: back then it was a sort of parlour game – people couldn't spread the word fast enough! Von Salomon was a funny and talkative man, who knew everybody in the world of literature and art, and the hours passed quickly enough in his company. It would have been a bit wiser, perhaps, to have had this conversation not out in the hall, but in a room where we could have closed the door behind us: but which of us is wise all the time? At that time, certainly, we were anything but. And which of us can always keep in mind that someone downstairs only needs to leave a door ajar in order to hear every word that's spoken upstairs? The acoustics of a house are unpredictable: sometimes you can hear everything, sometimes nothing at all, and on this Maundy Thursday afternoon someone damned well heard just a little too much!

Now comes interlude Number 2, again not without deeper significance, particularly for the study of the human character. By now it was Good Friday, my wife and I were walking in the garden, while our son tottered gamely along between us on his three-year-old legs. It was still mid-morning, the bell up in the village had just started to ring for the morning service, so it must have been shortly before ten o'clock. We were just admiring the crocuses and tulips and hyacinths that had pushed their way up through the withered leaves, their blooms a blaze of colour in the bright sunshine. We did our best to stop our son picking the flowers – with varying degrees of success.

And then the Sponars emerged from the house, prayer books in hand, ready to set off for church; she looked, more than ever, every inch
the dethroned queen, while he, having exchanged the velvet jacket for a black frock coat, was the eternal artist, playing the part of a graveside mourner. They marched straight up to us and halted in front of us. ‘It is our custom', said Mrs Sponar in that deep and slightly doleful voice of hers, ‘to take Holy Communion on Holy Friday.' (This excess of holiness was already making me feel uncomfortable.) ‘It is also our custom', Mrs Sponar went on, ‘before we take Holy Communion, to ask forgiveness of our friends and acquaintances and relatives for any evil that we might have done them in thought or deed, either knowingly or unknowingly. And so, Mr Fallada, Mrs Fallada, we ask your forgiveness – please forgive us!' Tears of emotion actually welled up in their eyes, while we, my wife and I, felt so angry and embarrassed that we wanted the ground to swallow us up. ‘They can keep their private religious claptrap to themselves!' I thought, thoroughly infuriated. ‘It's all sanctimonious humbug! The queen never regrets anything, is without fault, and cannot ask for forgiveness, and he's just an old fool! It's sickening – why can't they just leave us alone!'

But what can you do? We're brought up to hide our true feelings and just put on a good face in these situations. I'm afraid my face wasn't up to much as I assured them we had nothing to forgive them for, and as far as we were concerned they could take communion with a clear conscience. They thanked us again very emotionally, while the tears coursed down the old hypocrites' faces. Had I known then what I suspected twenty-four hours or so later, and what I knew with absolute certainty some twelve days after that – that these two bastards had already shopped us to the Nazis even as they begged us for forgiveness, and that in return for money they had stored up trouble, illness and mortal danger for us – I think I would have strangled them there and then with my bare hands! But as it was, I just watched them walk out of the garden in their solemn black garb, prayer books in hand, and turned to my wife: ‘What do you make of that?'