The Führer has spoken. Solemn silence â then the German national anthem followed by the Nazi Party anthem, the Horst Wessel Song. âRaise high the flag, close tight the ranks, SA marches on . . .' Silence. The doctor has quickly turned down the volume knob on the loudspeaker to mute the sound. He glances at the people around him, and I do the same: quite a few of them are sporting Party badges in their buttonholes. âAnother incorrigible chancer', I think to myself. âThey'll take it out on you for not letting the Horst Wessel Song play out to the end when war was declared.' And I smile at him. It's the same doctor who shares my view that Germany would be better off as a Britishfuror teutonicus that seizes even the best of men when the call to arms comes! Poor, incorrigible Germans!
Notes 1 . Incorrectly dated: the Reichstag burned down on 27 February 1933. Fallada had to rely entirely on memory when writing these reminiscences, so there are occasional errors and misdatings.2 . The publisher Ernst Rowohlt (1887â1960). Fallada met him through Egmont Seyerlen (1889â1972). Seyerlen's wife, Anne Marie (Annia) Seyerlen (1885â1971), had encouraged Fallada to write. His first novelThe Young Goedeschal was published by Rowohlt Verlag in 1920, and all Fallada's subsequent works up until 1943 appeared under this imprint. Over the years Fallada and Rowohlt, who always addressed each other with the more formal second person form âSie', became not just business associates but close friends. The scene in âSchlichters Wine Bar' described here paints a fairly accurate picture of their relationship in February 1933. In November 1944, when Rowohlt was making plans to set up a new publishing house after the war, he went to see Fallada in the Neustrelitz-Strelitz facility with a view to securing his collaboration and support. On the relationship between Fallada and Rowohlt, see Hans Fallada,Ewig auf der Rutschbahn. Briefwechsel mit dem Rowohlt Verlag , edited by Michael Töteberg and Sabine Buck, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2008.3 . âSchlichters Wine Bar' in Lutherstrasse, which had been established in the 1920s by Max Schlichter, a brother of the painter and printmaker Rudolf Schlichter; popular with Berlin's bohemian set and a regular haunt of Bertolt Brecht, Theo Lingen, Heinrich George and others.4 . Anna Ditzen (1901â1990), Fallada's wife since 1929, and Elli Engelhardt (no biographical data available), Ernst Rowohlt's third wife, to whom he was married from 1933 to 1941.5 . The novelLittle Man â What Now? (1932) marked Fallada's national and international breakthrough. By the end of June 1932 more than 2,000 copies had been sold; four months later sales had reached 21,000. A film contract was soon signed; translation and reproduction rights were sold. Fallada was bombarded with inquiries from newspapers and devoted readers. He wrote to his parents on 16 July 1932: âWe are really happy, now we can easily move to a larger apartment, furnish it nicely, pay off our debts, and above all have a longer summer holiday.' (Letter to Wilhelm and Elisabeth Ditzen, Hans Fallada Archive, Neubrandenburg)6 . The novelThe Good Earth by the American writer Pearl S. Buck (1892â 1973) was published in German for the first time in 1933.7 . The famous epic of the deep South by the American writer Margaret Mitchell (1900â1949) appeared in June 1936, and immediately became one of the biggest best-sellers in the history of American literature. The film of the same name had its US cinema release in 1939, and became one of the most successful films of all time.8 . A chronological slip. Fallada was working on the novelOnce a Jailbird in January 1933, but did not begin writingOnce We Had a Child until November of that year.9 . Hermann Göring (1893â1946) was the Prussian Minister of the Interior at the time of the Reichstag fire (and as such in charge of the entire Prussian police force); in April 1933 he became Prime Minister of Prussia and Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe. Göring played a key role in the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship; it was at his instigation that the first concentration camps were set up, initially as prison-like facilities where opponents of the regime were incarcerated by the police and the SA. He was also responsible for the establishment of the secret state police, the Gestapo.10 . From 15 November 1932 to 23 April 1933 Fallada occupied the upper floor of the villa at Rother Krug 9 in Berkenbrück/Spree, to the east of Berlin.11 . The Jewish paper wholesaler Leopold Ullstein (1826â1899) had founded a newspaper publishing company in Berlin in 1878, which revolutionized the newspaper market of the day with theBerliner Illustrirte Zeitung , the first German mass-market weekly. When he died the company was12 . Emil Ludwig (1881â1948), son of the Jewish ophthalmologist H. Cohn, was the author of successful biographies of Goethe, Napoleon, Rembrandt, Bismarck, Wilhelm II, Michelangelo and Lincoln. His books were burned on 10 May 1933. Six days later the board of directors of the Association of German Booksellers pronounced his work to be âdetrimental to Germany's international standing', and recommended that it should not be disseminated. That same month Ludwig resigned from the German branch of the PEN Club. From 1940 onwards he lived in exile in America, moving back to Switzerland after the end of the war.13 . InDie Weltbühne , which had been founded in 1905 by Siegfried Jacobsohn as a theatre journal (Die Schaubühne ) and later turned into a political weekly, Kurt Tucholsky denounced militarism and the lack of democratic principles in many of the institutions of the Weimar Republic. In the article âMilitärbilanz' [âThe state of the military'] (22 April 1920) he called for âthe dissolution of the Reichswehr, the creation of a standing army of 100,000 men, as permitted under Article 160 of the Peace Treaty, a civilian police force, under the command of democrats. Summary dismissal of all officers who display even the faintest hint of monarchist sympathies.' Tucholsky was particularly exercised by the issue of the Reichswehr, as he explains in a later article: âThe barrack rooms are awash with imperial insignia, pictures of the Kaiser, nationalist pamphlets and newspapers. The officers, whether elderly staff officers or young pups, all have exactly the same outlook on life and on the state, and it is the backwardness of their outlook that led us into that catastrophe. Their political reliability does not bear close inspection.' (âDie Reichswehr', in:Die Weltbühne , 23 February 1922)14 . Das Tage-Buch , the weekly intellectual journal first published by Rowohlt Verlag in 1920, carried articles on literature, theatre, cinema and the press. In the first issue, which appeared on 10 January 1920, the founder Stefan Grossmann set out the aims of his new journal: âDas Tage-Buch can and will serve no political party, but I am hoping for a conspiracy of creative minds alongside, above and in despite of political parties.'15 . The American journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner H.R. Knickerbocker (1898â1949) had been living and working as a foreign correspondent in Berlin since 1928. In the early 1930s he published a series of books on current political issues, which were published by Rowohlt Verlag â includingThe Red Trade Menace (1931).16 . The much-discussed book by Weigand von Miltenberg (pen name of Herbert Blank, 1900â1959) had appeared under the Rowohlt imprint in 1931; it contained a savage critique of Hitler'sMein Kampf .17 . The book by Walter Oehme and Kurt Caro, which was published by Rowohlt Verlag in 1931, was a critical assessment of the NSDAP and its leading functionaries. The authors dismissed Hitler's âpropagandistic doctrines' inMein Kampf as âa demagogue's Bible'.18 . In 1932 the journalist and author Konrad Heiden (1901â1966) published hisGeschichte des Nationalsozialismus. Die Karriere einer Idee under the Rowohlt imprint; 5,000 copies were printed. Heiden, who was one of the earliest critical observers of National Socialism, published the first serious biography of Adolf Hitler in 1936, when he was living in exile in Switzerland.19 . In March 1933, as part of an âinitiative to combat the un-German spirit', the German Student Union organized a campaign against Jewish, Marxist and pacifist writers. This culminated on 10 May 1933 in public book burnings on the Opernplatz in Berlin and in twenty-one other German cities, when tens of thousands of works by proscribed authors were consigned to the flames by students, university professors and National Socialist agencies.20 . Fallada takes the view that the terms imposed by the Allies under the Treaty of Versailles (1919) â and in particular the vast sums demanded in war reparations â had weakened parliamentary democracy in Germany from the very outset and encouraged the rise of National Socialism. In the later version of the text that Fallada revised for publication (1945 typescript), the paragraph âAnd I'll say it here and not mince my words . . . in which we are now living!' has been cut out. In its place Fallada has inserted a new paragraph: âI myself, the author of these lines,Der unerwünschte Autor. Meine Erlebnisse während zwölf Jahre Naziterror . Typescript 1945, Hans Fallada Archive, Neubrandenburg, pp.10f.)21 . Winter Relief Organization [WHW in the German âWinterhilfswerk des Deutschen Volkes ]; it was established in September 1933 under the control of the Propaganda Ministry as an emergency aid initiative. Through door-to-door collections and street collections, plus the sale of badges, the WRO raised 358.1 million Reichsmarks in its first winter, which were used to help the unemployed and homeless.22 . During a hospital stay (21 Januaryâ22 February 1944) Fallada witnessed the heavy bombing raids on the German capital. In a letter to his sister Elisabeth Hörig of 2 March 1944 he mentions âthe series of terror attacks, which were probably the worst thing I have ever experienced'.23 . As well as the Prison Diary the âDrinker manuscript' contains the novelThe Drinker and five short stories, two of which are stories for children:Der kleine Jü-Jü und der grosse Jü-Jü [Little Jü-Jü and Big Jü-Jü ] andDie Geschichte von der grossen und der kleinen Mücke [The Story of Little and Big Mücke ] (published in: Hans Fallada,Drei Jahre kein Mensch , Berlin 1997, pp.79â95).24 . Anna Elisabeth Rowohlt (1930â?).25 . Ulrich (Uli) Ditzen, the eldest son of Hans Fallada, was born on 14 March 1930 in Berlin.26 . In his account of the events of Easter 1933 Fallada gets some of the dates wrong. The correct sequence of events is as follows: Friday 7 April27 . The writer and Freikorps combatant Ernst von Salomon (1902â1972); in 1922 he was sentenced to five years in prison as an accessory to the murder of Germany's Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau. In 1930 Rowohlt Verlag published his autobiographical novelDie Geächteten [The Outcasts ]. In 1933 Rowohlt hired him as a publishing editor. Ernst von Salomon took over the position of Franz Hessel, who â just like Paul Mayer â had to be dismissed because of the Nuremberg Laws. From 1936 Salomon became increasingly interested in cinema, and in 1939 he moved to Upper Bavaria to devote himself exclusively to film projects.28 . Probably Horst von Salomon; no detailed information available.29 . Bruno von Salomon (1900â1954).30 . Between 1918 and 1920 the Baltic Armed Forces orLandeswehr fought against Bolshevist troops and subsequently the Red Army; the Iron Division under Major Josef Bischoff took Riga on 22 May 1919. Ernst von Salomon joined the Freikorps in the Baltic in the same year.31 . Underground nationalist terror organization during the Weimar Republic; founded by Hermann Ehrhardt after the failed Kapp Putsch, the organization sought to undermine the political system of the young Republic by carrying out political assassinations (including that of Walther Rathenau). Ernst von Salomon was one of its most prominent members.32 . Walther Rathenau (1867â1922), Reich Foreign Minister, was murdered in Berlin on 24 June 1922 by members of the Consul Organization. Ernst von Salomon had been involved in the preparations for the assassination, and received a five-year prison sentence.33 . In the novelDie Geächteten (1930) Ernst von Salomon reappraises his part in the assassination of Rathenau from a critical perspective. Fallada's account of the book here is therefore quite misleading.