A Stranger in My Own Country (39 page)

The Prison Diary of 1944 is a record of growing resignation and despair, written in the hope of bearing witness.

The original text of the Prison Diary from the autumn of 1944 forms part of the so-called ‘Drinker manuscript', which is kept at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. The manuscript consists of 92 sheets of lined, A4 paper – i.e. 184 pages – with page numbers inserted by the author. On pages 1–6 Fallada wrote the short story
Little Jü-Jü and Big Jü-Jü
and the first five pages of the novel
The Drinker
: this portion of the manuscript was lost in the chaos of the post-war era. The surviving text begins on page 7: the rest of the novel
The Drinker
(pp. 7–131) is followed by the short stories
Looking for Father
and
The Story of Little and Big Mücke
(pp. 131–41, line 7).

Fallada had begun writing these literary works on 6 September 1944. As he was able to write relatively undisturbed in his confinement, he soon embarked on a highly dangerous undertaking: here of all places – ‘inside these four walls' – he sets about writing down his memories of the Nazi period. On 23 September 1944 he writes the date at the top of the last page (page 184) – ‘23.IX.44.' – and adds the title of a short story
Der Kindernarr
as a cover for the compromising content of his memoir. He then goes back to p. 141, line 7, inserts the same date again – ‘23.IX.44.' – and begins to write the account that we now know as the Prison Diary: ‘One day in January 1933 . . .'

In the weeks that followed he produced a highly intricate and virtually indecipherable manuscript. Fallada wrote 24 lines per page in the German form of cursive handwriting known as Sütterlin, until he reached the last line of page 183. At the end of the page he began
a new sentence with the word ‘And'. On page 184, where the date – ‘23.IX.44' – and the title
Der Kindernarr
were already noted at the top, he now wrote the short story of that name. When he got to the bottom of page 184 – having now used up all the 92 sheets of paper allocated to him – he turned the page upside down, wrote the page number 185 on the bottom edge, and continued writing in normal Latin script between the existing lines of Sütterlin script. He proceeded in the same way with the remaining pages: they were turned upside down, numbered in sequence, and Fallada carried on writing between the existing lines of text. On page 189, line 1, he ends the short story
Der Kindernarr
. On page 183 Fallada picks up the sentence he began earlier with the word ‘And' and continues to record his memories, in Latin script, until he reaches page 202, where he interpolates the short story
Swenda
–
A Dream Fragment, or My Troubles
. As the ‘Swenda story' is an integral part of the Prison Diary, it has been included here. It follows on from one of the three ‘separate entries' in which Fallada provides a commentary and an update on his present situation in the psychiatric prison.

The Prison Diary account is continued on pages 204 to 228 in Latin script. Fallada now inserts up to three additional lines at the top of the pages and up to two more lines at the bottom. Page 228 brings him back to the first page of his memoir – page 141. He continues to write between the lines of this page in Latin script, then inserts the page number 229 between the first and second lines at the top of the page; from this point he carries on writing between the lines again, this time in Sütterlin script, until he reaches page 241.

The last 14 pages – 228 to 241 – each contain three sets of handwritten lines, amounting to at least 72 lines on each page. The highly compromising notes became a kind of secret code or cryptograph, the minuscule handwriting zigzagging back and forth for up to eighty lines a page. The text ends with a final entry dated 7 October 1944.

The editors would like to thank the staff of the Archive Collection at the Academy of Arts in Berlin for their kind assistance in making the manuscript available, as well as the Hans Fallada Archive in Carwitz for
the opportunity to examine the later typescript version. The School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University, Ireland, facilitated the completion of the edition by granting Jenny Williams a period of sabbatical leave.