This is the background story to the writing and eventual publication of Hans Fallada's A Stranger in My Own Country (Polity), a memoir of life in Nazi Germany written secretly by him while in prison in the autumn of 1944 and smuggled out under his clothing during a day trip home. It is a fascinating book with revealing insights into the ordinary life as lived in Hitler's Germany but it also give us many glimpses of the singular personality of Fallada.
I don't understand why it has been called The 1944 Prison Diary. This is, most assuredly, a memoir. That slight gripe aside, all praise is due to Polity for publishing not only Fallada's words but the collaborative scholarship of Prof Jenny Williams and Sabine Lange, in Allan Blunden's superb translation.
Many books tell strange and wonderful stories, while some are themselves surrounded with mystery as to how they ever got written, never mind published. Novels have appeared lost or been rediscovered years after the deaths of their authors. Novels that had been assumed to have existed merely in their author’s imaginations had actually been written, at times, not finished, yet manuscripts have been found by willing champions. Other books have been banned or heavily censored. Writers from Latin America in particular devised a distractingly lush allegorical style, magic realism, to disguise or deflect the political message contained within exciting fictions. There are brave legions of books that first won a readership by being passed around in samizdat, or underground, editions. Instead of the hype generated by conventional publishing, these books eventually triumphed by word of mouth, by the power of readers.
Writers are artists, entertainers and teachers. Yet they can also be heroes. Many have written books, poems and plays that could, and did, cost them their lives. Art is often about dangerous truths. Rudolf Ditzen, known to literature as the German writer Hans Fallada, eccentric by nature, may not immediately appear to be of heroic material. Yet he was, most certainly, a truth teller and a writer very aware of his reader.
Born in Greifswald in 1893, the son of a high court judge, he began adult life as a wayward youth surviving a suicide pact in which his friend died. His father had to plead the boy’s insanity to protect him from a murder charge. Fallada was always a maverick. After various breakdowns, difficulties with drugs and alcohol, and ultimately heart trouble, he died following an accidental morphine overdose and cardiac complications, in 1947.
His posthumous career began in earnest with the publication of Michael Hofmann's English-language translation of Alone in Berlin in 2009. This would be followed by Wolf Among Wolves (2010), The Drinker (2010) and possibly his finest novel, A Small Circus, in 2012. Still, it should be stressed that Fallada did not have to wait for literary glory courtesy of translations. He had enjoyed bestselling success from early in his career, initially with Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben (Farmers, Bosses and Bombs) based on his experiences as a newspaper reporter in Schleswig-Holstein which coincided with a period of rural revolt. Then he turned to the short story form, again with success. A major breakthrough came with the publication in 1932 of Little Man – What Now? Within months it had been published in English.
Fallada was a literary writer who was also a popular one and he shared a feel for the ordinary trails and tribulations of life so brilliantly handled by his hero, Charles Dickens. Much of his huge body of work is now available in English translation while his life and motivations have been explored in an outstanding biography by Prof Jenny Williams, More Lives Than One, which was published in 1998 and in a revised edition drawing on additional material in 2012.
Unlike many German writers, who left Germany as the Nazis came to power, Fallada, in common with Wolfgang Koeppen (1906-1996) who was also born in Greifswald, stayed. This drew the suspicion of writers such as Thomas Mann. But Fallada didn’t care. He was apolitical and loved his country. He fathered three children by his first wife, divorced and married a beautiful drug addict 28 years his junior. He was often in trouble with the authorities because, as he enjoyed saying – he was famously indiscreet – under the Nazis paranoia ruled. As did betrayal. Fallada pointed out that during those years, anytime three people got together, at least one of them would prove to be a spy.
So how did this most apolitical of men end up writing a scathing, and at times, very funny, memoir of life in Nazi Germany from a prison cell? In August 1944 he had been arrested, for allegedly attempting to murder Suse, his wife. They were already estranged at the time, although living in the same house. She later claimed that he was merely drunk. Anyhow he was committed “under observation” to a psychiatric prison, Neustrelitz-Strelitz.
Ever the writer, Fallada requested paper, announcing that he had some stories to develop. His request was granted. On September 23rd, he began, secretly, writing his memoirs of the Nazi period. Just two weeks later he was granted a day trip home for the purpose of gathering material for a project that the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, was keen on, an anti-Semitic novel. Iron Gustav had originally been intended as movie.
Fallada smuggled the manuscript he had been working on in his cell out of the prison by concealing it under his shirt. The manuscript, written in tiny handwriting, included a novel, The Drinker, as well as short stories and the memoir. Fallada wrote incredibly quickly. Those two weeks proved productive. He was to be accompanied by a prison guard. On leaving his cell, he cleverly offered to show the guard the contents of his briefcase. The guard showed little interest. One can imagine Fallada smiling to himself, his main concern being that he had not the time to write more.
Fast forward to May 1945; the war in Europe is over. The Soviet army arrived in Feldberg and as Jenny Williams explains, the Soviet cultural attaché knew of Fallada's work and asked him if he had any work pending. Fallada mentioned the memoir – he said nothing about The Drinker as he intended that to be published only after his death. The cultural attaché suggested that he edit and prepare the memoir for publication. Fallada began work, and quickly produced about 100 typed pages but did not finish the job. Possibly, Prof Williams suspects, because he had just been made mayor.
After his death on February 5th 1947, his second wife, Ulla Ditzen (formerly Losch, nee Boltzenthal), a young widow whom he had married on February 1st, 1945, was declared his heir. But she was a morphine addict and had caused Fallada to resume his addiction after a 20- year abstinence. Her addiction dominated her life. She had also by then married a con man. Together they began selling off Fallada’s papers. Eventually Ulla, alone and desperate, ended up in Brunswick in West Germany where the local butcher, Hey, took pity on her and purchased the remaining manuscripts.
The butcher made no pretence at establishing a literary archive but the material was kept safe. For more than 30 years, scholars such as Prof Williams and other interested parties wishing to research Fallada had to make their way to the butcher’s cellar in Brunswick. One regular visitor was Guenter Caspar, of the Aufbau Publishing House in Berlin which published the standard GDR edition of Fallada’s collected works.
The GDR purchased the Fallada papers from the by then widowed Frau Hey in the late 1970s and set up a Fallada archive in a beautiful lakeside villa in Feldberg. By the time all of the papers had been catalogued, there was no trace of The Drinker manuscript. It was assumed that it had been lost.
Time passed. In 1996 the missing manuscript reappeared, apparently, as Prof Williams surmises, in the Academy of Arts in Berlin. Caspar had borrowed it from Frau Hey and had not returned it. Its belated appearance solved the mystery that had kept many Fallada scholars, including Prof Williams, guessing as to how Caspar appeared to have access to material which he alone seemed to have and had used in his editions of Fallada’s work. It was known that in the interval between Fallada’s death and Ulla Ditzen being declared his heir, Fallada’s papers had been stored in the Aufbau offices.
Caspar had consulted the borrowed documents and when he was finished returned them to the temporary archive in Berlin. He died soon afterwards.
In 2001 Jenny Williams as his biographer and poet Sabine Lange, archivist at the Fallada Archive from 1984 until 1999, were given a contract by Aufbau to transcribe and edit the memoirs. They had to work with a Frau Giesecke, an editor who had been trained by Caspar. She believed that the manuscript should be edited in the reader-friendly style of Fallada who was always aware of his audience. From looking at the 100 typed pages he had left Williams and Lange could see that he had intended the memoir for a wide readership. Changes had been made and the casual anti-Semitic references had been removed. The women began their transcription of the microscopic handwriting in December 2001 and completed it six months later, in July 2002.
By February 2003, they had submitted their manuscript to Aufbau. Fallada’s elder son, Uli (named for Fallada’s beloved younger brother who had died in the first World War) had been very helpful. He had read the edited manuscript and answered various queries.
Then the long wait for publication began. “We rang up twice a year,” recalls Prof Williams, “and were always told that Aufbau were concentrating on other authors”.
After reunification, a wealthy west German with an interest in Fallada and the arts in general, purchased the Fallada Archive in Feldberg. On hearing of the plight of the completed, edited but still unpublished memoir, he instructed a West German lawyer to approach Aufbau. This elicited a speedy response from Aufbau. Williams and Lange were invited to meet the managing director and given assurances, along with a new, and very different, Aufbau editor, who insisted that the editors do a new edition of the original manuscript. Aufbau wanted authenticity – including original typos and abbreviations. “Not very reader-friendly,” says Prof Williams, conscious of Fallada’s instinctive awareness that he was writing for posterity.
By late 2008 the new edition had been submitted. But another problem arose. Both of Fallada’s sons objected to Sabine Lange’s name appearing on the book. Aufbau held all rights to Fallada’s works, but his family owned the personal papers, including the memoir. Lange had been dismissed from the Fallada archive for refusing to read her poetry at a writer’s centre that had supported the Stasi. The centre was known to have continued working with authors who had been Stasi informers. Lange took her case to court and won. The experience encouraged her to write a book about the involvement of the Stasi in the literary life of the GDR, including the Fallada Society. Fallada’s younger son was the president of the Fallada Society and he took Lange and her publisher to court.
Prof Williams refused to have only her name on the book. A letter written by Fallada’s older son, praising the work, proved vital in helping the publication. The German edition was published in 2009. The names of both editors appear, admittedly only once and in very small print. There was no publicity in Germany.
To date that German edition has been translated into Polish, Dutch, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, French and now English as well as having been the Book of the Month in November 1913 on the most influential arts programme in the Netherlands. Aufbau has been very quiet. Hans Fallada is not.
He remains one of the most exciting and human of storytellers, to which the English-language edition of the strongly Dickensian Iron Gustav published last year, testifies. It means that for the first time, that entire novel, charting the life and times of a Berlin cab driver, is available, as Fallada wrote it. All of the cuts, many due to censorship, have been re-instated. The English edition is more complete than the current German edition. Hans Fallada or rather Herr Ditzen would smile gleefully at the chaos.
