A Stranger in My Own Country (35 page)

Read A Stranger in My Own Country Online

Authors: Hans Fallada

BOOK: A Stranger in My Own Country

9.74Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

74
.Â Cf. note 67. Since 1932 S. Fischer Verlag had been run by Brigitte and Gottfried Bermann Fischer. In 1936 Bermann Fischer emigrated to Vienna, taking part of the publishing business with him. In 1938 he moved to Stockholm. The remaining part of the business in Berlin was managed by Peter Suhrkamp on behalf of the family. The challenging task of keeping the prestigious publishing house intact during the Nazi period led to quite a few misunderstandings and misinterpretations. The âlegacy hunter' accusation was the subject of widespread rumour. In Fallada's account the hand of the literary artist is unmistakable. He uses the relationship between Suhrkamp and Samuel Fischer to tell a story, inventing scenes, bringing them vividly to life, and treating the persons involved as characters in a work of literature. Each episode serves to create tension and drive the action forward.

86
.Â In the 1945 typescript this passage has been revised and extended. The changes show Rowohlt in an even more positive light. In the typescript, for example, he is no longer presented as a âgambler', and his âwaywardness' is toned down; the fact that he publishes American writers is emphasized instead. It is quite possible that Fallada was trying to do Rowohlt a good turn here, since his old publisher was facing a denazification tribunal in May 1945. The revised passage reads as follows: âIn Germany it was never seen as one of the top-ranking publishing houses. The publishing director, Rowohlt himself, was much too wayward for that. He never followed a clear, straight line with his publishing program, as Dr Kippenberg famously did with his Insel Verlag; instead Rowohlt, who always liked to be around people and needed the company of other people, was always much more attuned to
current social trends. He had a unique instinct for finding the book that people were waiting for, often without realizing it themselves. So for all the apparent waywardness his publishing house did have a guiding sense of purpose, bringing out more and more books over the years that reflected the contemporary zeitgeist. The fact that Rowohlt always sought to promote foreign novelists as well as German ones is entirely consistent with that aim. Ideally he wanted foreign authors who did not tread the conventional path, but who were themselves contemporary in a higher sense. So for example he published â often at great sacrifice â the work of American authors who seemed to him (and not only to him) to sound an entirely new note, such as Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and Faulkner. He knew that these men would never be widely read by the German reading public, but he published them anyway, despite this, or perhaps because of it. He was never the kind of man who wanted to turn a publishing house into a purely money-making enterprise: instead he was always prepared to reinvest the profits from a current best-seller in an author who was only ever likely to make a loss for him.' (Hans Fallada,
Der unerwÃ¼nschte Autor. Meine Erlebnisse wÃ¤hrend zwÃ¶lf Jahre Naziterror
. Typescript 1945, Hans Fallada Archive, Neubrandenburg, pp. 121f.)

99
.Â Ernst Udet (1896â1941), German First World War fighter pilot, on whom Carl Zuckmayer's play
Des Teufels General
was based; in the 1920s and early 1930s he played parts in a number of films with an aviation theme, including (alongside Leni Riefenstahl)
Die weisse HÃ¶lle von Piz PalÃ¼ [The White Hell of Pitz Palu]
(1929) and
S.O.S. Eisberg [S.O.S. Iceberg]
(1933). In 1935 GÃ¶ring made him a colonel in the newly established Luftwaffe. Udet was appointed Inspector of Fighters and Dive-Bombers, and in 1939 he became the Director of Air Force Ordnance; in 1940 he rose to the rank of Colonel General. After the failures of the Luftwaffe air offensive against Britain, and the resulting accusations levelled by Hitler and GÃ¶ring, Udet took his own life. Nazi propaganda presented his death as a flying accident. Rowohlt, who had also trained to be a pilot, had got to know Ernst Udet during the First World War.

103
.Â Erhard Milch (1892â1972), German army and air force officer (appointed Field Marshal General in 1940), served from 1933 to 1945 as secretary of state at the Reich Air Ministry and Inspector General of the Luftwaffe; following the death of Ernst Udet in November 1941, be became Director of Air Force Ordnance until July 1944. His Jewish ancestry is debated to this day. The rumours current at the time are also recorded in Victor Klemperer's published diaries; in the entry for 18 October 1936 we read: âAnd Marta talked about Milch, the air force general, who had a Jewish father and an Aryan mother: he claims he was the offspring of his mother's adultery with an Aryan.' (As quoted in: Victor Klemperer,
The Klemperer Diaries 1933â1945
, abridged and translated by Martin Chalmers, London 2000, p. 189.) GÃ¶ring is said to have remarked, Ã propos Milch: â
I
decide who is a Jew!'

104
.Â Ernst Alfred Schmidt (1895â1943); the nickname is an acronym, derived from his birthplace Schlegel in eastern Germany, close to the Czech-Polish border: Schmidt aus Schlegel [Schmidt from Schlegel]. After the First World War, from which he returned a convinced pacifist, Sas trained as a music teacher, and in 1929 he found a full-time job teaching in Leipzig. At the beginning of the 1930s he joined the KPD, and was arrested by the Gestapo for the first time in 1933. In 1934 he moved to Berlin, where he set up a private music school close to the KurfÃ¼rstendamm. Here he made contact with the resistance group around Hanno GÃ¼nther, and in the autumn of 1941 he was arrested along with other members of the group. Released in March 1942, he was arrested again in July. On 9 October 1942 he was sentenced to death for plotting high treason, and executed on 5 April 1943 in PlÃ¶tzensee. Fallada met Sas in 1937 through the actress Marga Dietrich (1897â1978), with whom he had been on friendly terms since the stage adaptation of
A Small Circus
by her first husband, Heinz-Dietrich Kenter (1896â1984), in 1931. Marga Dietrich had been Sas' live-in partner since 1934. (See Manfred Kuhnke,
. . . dass ihr Tod nicht umsonst war!
, Neubrandenburg 1991, pp. 51â5.)

Other books

Faint Trace by M. P. Cooley

Imprinted By The Alpha (BBW Paranormal Shape Shifter Romance) (The Marked One - Book 1) by Jocelyn Thomas

Double Dare by Walker, Saskia

Beach Winds by Greene, Grace

Die for Me by Amy Plum

Beyond Eighteen by Gretchen de la O

The Ghost King by R.A. Salvatore

Christmas and Forever by Delilah Hunt

Unexpected Eden by Rhenna Morgan

The Legacy by Stephen Frey