It was still 1933, and the Nazis had only been in power for a few months; they had not yet managed to stamp out all sense of decency and humanity. I very much doubt if such a thing would be possible in any German jail today, in 1944. People like these two police officers simply don’t exist any more, because whatever sense of justice they still had has been systematically destroyed. Today it is seen as a disgrace to display leniency, or even common decency, towards one’s enemies. It’s become a crime, in fact. The Nazis have been going about their dirty business out in the open for so long now, and shouting about it as if it’s something to be proud of, that they’ve got everyone used to it now. Everyone’s just so apathetic. It’s quite something if someone so much as sighs these days – only to say in the next breath: ‘But what can you do? That’s just the way it is!’

The truth is I had chosen a good time to be arrested, a time of transition, and the remnants of decency that had not yet been destroyed allowed me to live a pretty tolerable life. The pair I played cards with, ‘the old Yids’, were cultivated and amusing companions. The card games were just a pretext for us to socialize, and we spent most of the time just sitting and talking. They had been teachers at a school not far from Fürstenwalde, which combined classroom teaching with a large farm estate; the idea was for young Jews to learn a trade that was unusual for Jews, namely agriculture. Both these gentlemen, the headmaster and one of his teachers, were idealists and Zionists; their dream was to bring world Jewry back to Palestine, the land promised to the Jews by God Himself, and to persuade all Jews to turn away from money and become a nation of farmers. They were so innocent and naive that they actually welcomed the arrival of the Nazis, believing that Hitler’s reign of terror would help their plans. For now their school had been shut down and expropriated by the Party, and the pupils and teachers had been carted off and scattered to the four winds – but all this just made them smile. They sat there in their cell, pretty shabbily dressed, with the hands of men used to working in the fields, and looking very Jewish. They said: ‘The Jews have suffered so many persecutions and have successfully survived them all. In fact, the persecutions only served to focus their minds on their strengths as a nation, and persecutions made the Jews stronger, not weaker. During the Russian pogroms a huge wave of nationalism swept through world Jewry. Jews in every country, who were normally at daggers drawn, now helped each other.’

All three of us were dismissive of the ‘thousand-year Reich’ that the Nazis wanted to establish, which Hitler, and in particular the delusional Mr Rosenberg,46 were always rabbiting on about. I was more sceptical than the others, giving the Nazis four years, five at the most. (I turned out to be a false prophet.) One of the Jews, the headmaster, smiled and said with that inimitably subtle, ironic Jewish smile: ‘A thousand years! I tell you, Mr Fallada, you’ll wake up one day and rub your eyes in astonishment and cry: “What, have the thousand years ended already? It felt more like one day!”’

I must just tell a little story at this point about my dear old publisher, ‘friend Rowohlt’, who sometimes liked to boast that he was always ahead of his time. By way of example he cited the time he stopped making his payments. What happened? Four weeks later the Dresdner Bank copied his example, and then hundreds and hundreds of firms followed suit. ‘And then take my family life, my friend. As you know, I’ve been married twice before and am now on my third marriage. What is that if it’s not the third Reich? Else was the first Reich, Hilda was the second Reich, and now Elli is my third Reich.47 And now I’ll let you into a little secret, friend Fallada’, dropping his voice to a hollow whisper, ‘whenever I quarrel with Elli I’m convinced that the fourth Reich will be along soon! Mark my words, friend Fallada, we’ll both live to see the fourth Reich yet!’ A few pages further on it will become clear that there are indeed some prospects of a fourth Reich – not least in Rowohlt’s private life.

Anyway, outwardly I had very little to put up with in the courthouse jail at Fürstenwalde. They did take away my big glass of beer a week later, after some official, having got wind of this alcohol abuse, which was completely inadmissible in the prison system, had forbidden it. It was no great sacrifice. What was harder to bear was the brief message from my lawyer that they finally gave me after five or six days of fruitless waiting: he’d been forbidden to contact me or represent my interests.

So I didn’t need any legal counsel. They took care of it.