Right to write

A Stranger in My Own Country: The 1944 Prison Diary. By Hans Fallada. Translated by Allan Blunden. Polity; 267 pages; $25. Buy from Amazon.com

GERMAN intellectuals in the 1930s faced a painful choice between exile and danger. Hans Fallada chose to stay. Even as war was looming, after years of harassment and humiliation, he turned down an offer of life abroad for himself, his wife and his three young children. He loved Germany too much to leave it. “What kind of German would I be if I had slunk away to a life of ease in my country’s hour of affliction and ignominy?” he wrote.

Those words were scribbled in a psychiatric prison in 1944, in tiny and all but illegible handwriting in a secret diary. The result is one of the most powerful accounts of life in the Third Reich. It was published in German only in 2009 thanks to the extraordinary editing skills of Jenny Williams and Sabine Lange, who deciphered the text, unravelled the deliberately confusing structure, and reconciled the original with a post-war typescript in which the author settled some personal scores and toned down some embarrassing passages. In an excellent translation by Allan Blunden, it is now available in English too.

Fallada was an unattractive character: a heavy drinker and a morphine addict, he was self-centred, spendthrift and quarrelsome. He repaid his loyal and long-suffering wife Suse with infidelity and violence (which led to his incarceration in the psychiatric prison). But he was a fine writer with an acute sense of the nuances and paradoxes of German society. His breakthrough novel, “Little Man, What Now?”, was an international bestseller in 1932.

The story which comes across in this book is of a sensitive, damaged and desperate man, caught between loathing for the cowardly, vicious and vulgar Nazis and a wily survival instinct. A particularly poignant part is an elaborate fantasy about a huge and lavish bunker in which he and his family would retreat for many years, to emerge only when the war was over.

Most of the diary consists of anecdotes, cameos and reflections on the squalid compromises and degradation that Nazi rule had brought. “Oh, how they bled us dry! How they robbed us of every joy and happiness, every smile, every friendship! And then they plunged us into this most disastrous of all wars…they destroyed our cities, destroyed our families.” The best hope for north Germans like him, he reckoned, was speedy defeat followed by British occupation.

Fallada was no hero. He tried to save his skin by collaborating with Goebbels. Though he blithely moved his family to a boarding house in Berlin run by a Jew (assuming, wrongly, that as this was not actually illegal, no harm would come of it), the book contains some jarringly prejudiced language. Many may also flinch at his explanation for the rise of the Nazis: that Germans, “so true, so forbearing, so steadfast”, were also too trusting and easily led astray by charlatans.

Thomas Mann, the author of “Death in Venice”, who fled Hitler, was caustic about writers who remained. Anything published between 1933 and 1945 was tainted with the “stench of blood and shame” and should be pulped, he wrote. Fallada’s exquisite and troubling book, published after far too long a wait, does not contradict that argument, but complements it.