By Thomas Sanfilip

There is no question the diary can be adapted into other literary forms of narrative—it has been done countless times over the centuries and lent its form particularly to fiction, yet the cheap, first-person narratives that litter modern fiction today exploit the intimacy of the form and spoil its inherent sincerity. And though the reader is drawn into its private world—where all is revealed and hidden at the same time—there is another side to the diary that carries greater significance and bears absolutely no relation to its fictionalized off-spring, that is, in its true form to witness reality that establishes a fixed point in history that cannot be erased.

Editors Jenny Williams and Sabine Lange have provided just such a careful and thoughtful edit of the German novelist Hans Fallada’s 1944 prison diary, and in so doing have not allowed context to overwhelm substance. An afterword rather than a long, highly contextualized introduction allows Fallada’s text to speak for itself, and in the process answers all questions the reader finds themselves asking after the fact. Not to be overlooked is Allan Blunden’s translation, neither over-stylized nor wholly academic, both aspects of the book balancing each other in form and substance.

In 1944, Hans Fallada was committed to a psychiatric prison after shooting a pistol off during an argument with his wife. He was to remain there for observation for an indefinite period of time. While there, he asked for pen and paper—a request that was surprisingly granted. Ninety-two sheets of paper, to be precise, on which he wrote a number of short stories and one novel. In addition, he kept a diary wherein he poured out his distain and hatred for the Nazi regime. He knew the risk, but forged ahead regardless. In order to conceal his words, he wrote in a mix of abbreviations and micro/calligraphic cryptography, turning the pages upside down and writing in the spaces between the lines in order to save paper. Two months later he was released, smuggling the diary out of the prison under his shirt. In writing the diary, his purpose was clear.

“I’ve told the story at some length in order to give the reader some idea of how, under the National Socialist regime, every artistic activity was inhibited and rendered almost impossible by the need to defer to the tastes and prejudices of senior government figures . . . They systematically took away from us our real work, they wouldn’t allow us to follow the call of our own heart. For them there was only one call, and that was the sound of them calling the shots. They are frightened of the individual and individuality, they want the shapeless masses into which they can drone their slogans. And they’ve done very well with that, especially during the war.”

At a particular moment of despondency, when he was denied release from the prison, he confesses he would have stopped writing if released, though the diary was ultimately abandoned without recording his thoughts on what he felt was the most important chapter yet written, specifically, on the war. “I embarked on this project with great expectations, but now I’m rather disappointed. . . When I think how much I myself had to change in writing my books! I had to abandon all thoughts of writing the books I really cared about. Any portrayal of darker characters was strictly forbidden. I had to be optimistic and life affirming, in an era that was negating the very meaning of life through persecution, torture and executions.”

Fallada singled out Nazi propaganda minster, Joseph Goebbels, as the chief culprit in the destruction of a free German culture. writing that “within the group of hysterics, psychopaths, monomaniacs and sadists who make up our ‘people’s government’ today, he is the embodiment of pure evil, Beelzebub in person,” adding—”It is the peculiar prerogative of the Nazi Party to have deliberately used such people as an instrument of their rule, promoting them to high office and inciting them to enslave their fellow citizens, giving them encouragement and rewards. Filth at the top and filth at the bottom, and everything plastered with empty slogans in which divine providence features prominently.”

Fallada stayed in Germany after the Nazis came to power, even though he was urged by friends to leave the country. Living under the regime, his diary is all the more important given his first-hand witnessing of conditions, the German people themselves, and the state of publishing in Germany under the Third Reich. In one instance, he tells the story of a Party member, “a very good man, highly esteemed by the Party,” he writes, “having written a fine novel about the father of Frederick the Great. But this man had committed the crime of marrying a Jewish woman, and now persisted in the much worse offense of standing by her, despite all the threats he received, The head of the publishing house fought long and hard to ensure that this man was able to carry on working. He succeeded in holding on to this author, but when he himself was ousted, the author soon followed him—and then shot himself.”

The fear and disillusionment living under such cultural authoritarian was often too much for Fallada to bear, but he forged ahead without folding after a number of harrowing situations. “I have always firmly believed that self-abasement gets you nowhere with the Nazis, and the best tactic is just to carry on with what you are doing—but avoiding direct confrontations, of course. It is never sensible to enter a field carrying a big red flag when you know perfectly well that there is a raging bull in there. But nor is it any good just to crawl into a mouse hole and never come out again.”

Fallada concluded by saying he did not share the “wooly, sentimental view” that German boys were shedding their blood for a worthy cause. “I wanted the Nazis to be defeated, and the sooner the better. Under no circumstances did I want Germany to become the dominant power in Europe: with the rise of National Socialism the country had just given another spectacular demonstration of its political immaturity. A nation that fell for every beguiling slogan without thinking for itself was not yet ready to become the leader of other nations.”

This sounds remarkably familiar given the irrational attack on Western culture today by extremists claiming the high ground. Fallada’s words are a moving reminder of how necessary it is to resist anything that would ultimately curtail human liberty, a cautionary tale that bears relevance to our time, particularly for those writers and artists today who feel it necessary to claim a moral and ethical high ground solely around a political ideology. This mind-trap is merely for those who have barely a notion of the commitment and sacrifices necessary to create a true art of authenticity.

I think every writer comes to this crossroad at least once in their life, and depending on their decision, either concedes to societal tastes and expectation or pursues their own way regardless of expectations, and by so doing assuming all the responsibilities that goes along with preserving and protecting their individuality from destruction. The difference is living a life of high moral calling or one with no values whatsoever. Fallada would surely baulk at the pervasiveness of the latter drifting through today’s cultural miasma.

In the end—using film as an analogy for the ultimate goal of the writer—Fallada lays out the problem for our time as he did for his own—”The issue was never: how do I make a good film? The issue was not even: how do I make a film that will please the public? Instead it was all about the one issue: how do I make this film project palatable to my minister? Every artistic consideration and every question of taste took second place to this one overriding issue.”

As such, Fallada’s diary is offered as a remarkable testament to a kind of revealing need to achieve genuine authenticity as an artist, if one is to survive and flourish. Anything less from those who claim artistic sensibility is simply art without substance.

###

*A Stranger in My Own Country, The 1944 Prison Diary by Hans Fallada, edited by Jenny William and Sabine Lange, translated by Allan Blunden (Polity Press)