A Stranger in My Own Country (2 page)

(23.IX.44.)
One day in January 1933
¹
I was sitting with my esteemed publisher Rowohlt
²
in Schlichters Wine Bar
³
in Berlin, enjoying a convivial dinner. Our lady wives
⁴
and a few bottles of good Franconian wine kept us company. We were, as it says in the Scriptures, filled with good wine, and on this occasion it had had a good effect on us too. In my case you couldn't always be sure of that. The effect wine had on me was entirely unpredictable; generally it made me belligerent, self-opinionated and boastful. But this evening it hadn't, it had put me in a cheerful and rather jocular, bantering mood, which made me the ideal companion for Rowohlt, who is increasingly transformed by alcohol into a huge, two-hundred-pound baby. He sat at the table with alcohol evaporating, in a manner of speaking, from every pore of his body, like some fiery-faced Moloch, albeit a contented, well-fed Moloch, while I regaled everyone with my jokes and anecdotes, at which even my dear wife laughed heartily, even though she had heard these gags at least a hundred times before. Rowohlt had by now reached the state in which his conscience sometimes directs him to make a contribution of his own to the general entertainment: he would sometimes ask the waiter to bring him a champagne glass, which he would then crunch up between his teeth, piece by piece, and eat the lot, leaving only the stem behind – to the horror of the ladies, who couldn't get over the fact that he didn't cut himself at all. I was present on one occasion, though, when Rowohlt met his match in this quasi-cannibalistic practice of glass-eating. He asked the waiter for a champagne glass, a quiet, placid
man in the company did the same. Rowohlt ate his glass, the placid man did likewise. Rowohlt said contentedly: ‘There! That did me good!' He folded his hands across his stomach, and looked around the table with an air of triumph. The placid man turned to him. He pointed to the bare stem of the glass that stood on the table in front of Rowohlt, and taunted him: ‘Aren't you going to eat the stem, Mr Rowohlt? But that's the best part!' And with that he ate the stem himself, to gales of laughter from the assembled company. Rowohlt, however, cheated of his triumph, was furious, and he never forgave the placid man for this humiliation!

But appearances could be deceptive with Rowohlt: even though he sat there like a big, contented baby, with eyes half-closed as if he could barely see a thing, he was actually wide awake and right on the ball – scarily so, when it came to figures. Not realizing this, one time when I was strapped for cash I thought to pull a fast one on him in this baby state and negotiate a particularly favourable contract with him. I can still see us both sitting there, scribbling endless columns of figures on the menus. The contract was finally agreed in something of a boozy haze, and I was laughing up my sleeve at having finally put one over on this sharp businessman. The end result, of course, was that I was the one who'd been suckered – and how! Afterwards Rowohlt himself was so horrified by this contract that he voluntarily gave back most of what he had taken from me.

But on this particular evening there was no eating of glasses or transacting of business. The mood on this particular evening was one of satisfied contentment. We had done full justice to Schlichter's wonderful chilled salads, his bouillabaisse, his beef stroganoff and his peerless mature Dutch cheese, and with the wine we had taken the odd sip of raspberry brandy to warm our stomachs. Now we were gazing at the little flames of the alcohol burners under our four individual coffee machines, heating up our Turkish coffee while we sat back and savoured another mouthful of wine from time to time. We had every reason to be pleased with ourselves and with what we had achieved. True,
Little Man – What Now?
had already peaked as an ‘international best-seller';
⁵
like every international best-seller, it had been succeeded by something else that did even better, and I can't remember now if it was Pearl Buck's
The Good Earth
⁶
or Mitchell's
Gone With the Wind
.
⁷
In the meantime I had written
Once We Had a Child
, which the public didn't like, although the author liked it very much, and now I was working on
Jailbird
.
⁸
Maybe
Jailbird
wouldn't be a new international best-seller either. But give it time – all in good time. It was the easiest thing in the world to create an international best-seller; you just had to really want it. For the present I was busy with other things that interested me very much: if it interested me one day to have an international best-seller, then I could easily manage that too.

Listening to these remarks, which were more drunken ramblings than seriously intended, Rowohlt nodded like a Buddha and seconded my words with an occasional ‘Quite so!' or ‘You're absolutely right, my friend.' Our good lady wives were by now rather tired of hanging on the lips of the famous author and his famous publisher and imbibing words of pure wisdom, and were now talking in whispers at the other end of the table about housekeeping matters and bringing up children. The coffee, giving off its rich, intense aroma, was slowly starting to drip into the little cups positioned beneath the spouts . . . Into this supremely relaxed and contented scene there now burst an agitated waiter, to remind us that beyond our perfectly ordered private world there was a much larger outside world, where things were currently in a state of real turmoil. With the cry ‘The Reichstag is burning! The Reichstag is burning! The Communists have set fire to it!' he dashed from room to room spreading the word. That certainly got the pair of us going. We leapt from our seats and exchanged a knowing glance. We shouted for a waiter. ‘Ganymede', we cried to this disciple of Lucullus. ‘Fetch us a cab right now! We're going to the Reichstag! We want to help Göring play with fire!' Our dear wives blanched with horror. Göring had probably only been in the government for a few days,
⁹
and the concentration camps had not yet entered the picture, but the reputation that preceded the gentlemen who had now seized control in Germany was not such that one could mistake them for gentle lambs
meek and mild. I can still see it all in my mind's eye – a confused, anxious, and yet ridiculous scene: the two of us seized with a veritable
furor teutonicus
, looking straight into each other's eyes and shouting that we absolutely must go and play with fire ourselves; our wives, pale with terror, frantically trying to calm us down and get us out of this place, which was reputed to be Nazi-friendly; and a waiter standing at the door, hurriedly writing something on his pad – an extract from our manly declamations, or so we assumed from the amused applause. Eventually our wives succeeded in steering us out of the door, onto the street and into a cab, under the pretext, I assume, of going with us to see the burning Reichstag building. But we didn't go there all together; first we took Rowohlt and his wife home, then our car headed east out of town, to the little village on the banks of the Spree
¹⁰
where my wife and I were living at the time with our first son. Meanwhile my wife's soothing words had calmed me down to the point where, when we drove past the Reichstag, I could look into the leaping flames of the burning dome – that sinister beacon at the start of the road that led to the Third Reich – without feeling any incendiary cravings of my own. It's a good thing we had our wives with us that evening, otherwise our activities, and very possibly our lives too, would have come to an end on that January day in 1933, and this book would never have been written. We also heard nothing more about the head waiter and his furious scribblings, although his spectre haunted us for several anxious days: he was probably just making a quick note of the bills for his tables, since all the customers were then getting up to leave.

(24.IX.44.)
This little episode says a great deal about the attitude with which many decent Germans contemplated the advent of Nazi rule. In our various journals – nationalist, democratic, social-democratic or even Communist – we had read quite a bit about the brutality with which these gentlemen liked to pursue their aims, and yet we thought: ‘It won't be that bad! Now that they're in power, they'll soon see there is a big difference between drafting a Party manifesto and putting it
into practice! They'll tone it down a bit – as they all do. In fact, they'll tone it down quite a lot!' We still had absolutely no idea about the intractability of these people, their inhuman cruelty, which literally took corpses, and whole heaps of corpses, in its stride. Sometimes we had a wake-up call, as when we heard, for example, that a son of the Ullstein publishing family, when they came to arrest him,
¹¹
had asked if he could brush his teeth first; perhaps his tone had been a touch supercilious, because they promptly beat him half to death with rubber truncheons and dragged him away. People were being arrested left, right and centre, and a surprising number of these detainees were ‘shot while trying to escape'. But we kept on telling ourselves: ‘It doesn't affect us. We are peace-loving citizens, we have never been politically active.' We really were very stupid; precisely because we had not been politically active, i.e. had not joined the one true Party and did not do so now, we made ourselves highly suspect. It would have been so easy for us; it was in those months from January to March '33 that the great rush to join the Party began, which earned the new Party members the scornful nickname ‘March Martyrs'. From March onwards the Party put a block on new membership, making it conditional upon careful vetting and scrutiny. For a long time the ‘March Martyrs' were treated as second-class Party members; but the distinction became blurred with the passing years, and the March Martyrs for their part did all they could to demonstrate their loyalty and reliability. In fact, most of the Nazis who were later described as ‘150 per cent committed' came from their ranks; in their zeal they sought to outdo the older Party members in the ruthlessness with which they enforced the Party line – as long as such measures didn't affect them, of course. I shall shortly have occasion to speak about some of these fragrant flowers, whose acquaintance I was soon to make.

Strictly speaking, Rowohlt and I had every reason to be very careful indeed: we were both compromised, he more than I, but compromised nonetheless, and that was quite enough for the gentlemen in power, who didn't bother with the finer nuances. They have always ruled by brute force, mainly by the brutal threat of naked physical violence,
intimidating and enslaving first their own people, and then other nations. Even the relative subtlety of the iron fist in the velvet glove is too sophisticated for them – way beyond their powers of comprehension. All they ever do is threaten. Do this, or we'll cut your head off! Don't do that, or we'll hang you by the neck! These utterly primitive ideas constituted the sum total of their political wisdom, from the first day until what will hopefully soon be the last.

So, Rowohlt and I were both compromised. He was known to be a ‘friend of the Jews', and his publishing house had once been described by a Nazi newspaper as a ‘branch synagogue'. He had published the works of Emil Ludwig,
¹²
whom the ‘militant journals' persistently referred to as ‘Emil Ludwig Cohn', even though he had never been called Cohn in his life. Rowohlt was also Tucholsky's publisher, and in his magazine
Die Weltbühne
Tucholsky had conducted a dogged campaign to uncover the secret extra-curricular activities of the Reichswehr.
¹³
Furthermore, Rowohlt had published
Das Tagebuch
,
¹⁴
a weekly journal for economics and politics, which supported the League of Nations and the world economy, exposed the secret machinations of the ‘chimney barons', and was generally opposed to all separatist or nationalist tendencies. He had also – the list of his crimes is truly shocking – published Knickerbocker,
¹⁵
the American journalist who gripped his readers with his account of the ‘Red Trade Menace' and the rise of Fascism in Europe, and who, on the personal orders of Mr Göring himself, had been denied a press pass to attend the opening session of the Reichstag under the aegis of the Nazis. Finally, Rowohlt had also published a book entitled
Adolf Hitler Wilhelm III
,
¹⁶
which pointed out the remarkable similarities in character and temperament between these two men; he had published a little book called
Kommt das Dritte Reich?
[
Is the Third Reich Coming?
],
¹⁷
which was less than enthusiastic about the prospect; and worst of all he had printed and published
Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus
[
A History of National Socialism
],
¹⁸
in which all the contradictions, infamies and stupidities of this emerging political party were mercilessly laid bare. This book was subsequently sold under the counter for vast sums – officially, of course, it was
immediately consigned to one of those book bonfires
¹⁹
that burned all over Germany when the Nazis came to power, and on which pretty much everything with a Jewish-sounding name was burned indiscriminately. (The standard of literary education among the Nazi thugs was pretty dire, as was the standard of their education in general.) Add to that the fact that Rowohlt also had any number of Jewish literary authors on his list, and that his publishing house employed quite a few Jewish staff members. Enough already? More than enough, and then some! (One of these Jewish employees would later – officially at least – turn out to be his nemesis, but I shall come to that later.) Rowohlt had no interest in politics, and in mellow mood he liked to describe himself as a ‘lover of all forms of chaos'. He really was, and probably still is, someone who feels most energized in turbulent and chaotic times. The heyday of his publishing house was during the bad years at the end of the revolution and the beginning of the introduction of the
Rentenmark
.