‘You must always go straight to the top’, said Rowohlt, and telephoned a high-profile lawyer,48 a man who had defended the Reichstag arsonist on the authority of the Party, who in the end was executed himself. They arranged a meeting: the famous lawyer, the famous publisher Rowohlt, and the writer’s wife. The wife was rather indignant when she realized that the lawyer, a man of the utmost coarseness and an old Party member, found nothing remotely surprising about her story; to him it was just another run-of-the-mill case. Instead the lawyer cheerily assured her: ‘You’ve come to the right man, dear lady! The district council leader of Lebus is an old school friend of mine. We’ll take a car and scoot straight over there, and I’ll bet you anything: in half an hour I’ll get your husband released!’ This completely unexpected prospect of my early release banished all my wife’s indignation at his blasé acceptance of such a blatant injustice. She gladly climbed into a car with the lawyer, waved goodbye to the publisher, and off they went. What the lawyer and the district council leader talked about in private, regarding conspiracies against the person of the Führer, good and bad political jokes, and Mr von Salomon, we shall never know. We are and always have been entirely unpolitical people, and this kind of thing is a closed book to us. At any rate, the lawyer came hurrying into the anteroom where my wife had been waiting with pounding heart, pressed a sheet of paper into her hand and said: ‘Take the car and drive like the wind to Fürstenwalde! This is an order for your husband’s immediate release, but it’s Saturday today, and after twelve noon no German courthouse jail will release a prisoner until the Monday! So if you get a move on you might just make it!’ And make it she did: at five to twelve she got the decrepit-looking clerk of the court to stop chewing his pen and stir his stumps, and by five past twelve we were standing out on the street together again – and oh so happy!

The first thing we did, of course, was to drive to Berlin to my publisher and thank him for his splendid intervention. Then we went for a celebratory dinner (we viewed my release as a definitive victory over our enemies!), collected our son and went home – for my part, I must admit, with a heart full of feelings of triumph and revenge.

It was still light when we got back to our village. From the railway station we walked along the narrow path through the forest to our house. The sentry in the street had gone, but Mr Sponar happened to be standing in the garden, and he just stared at the three of us, stared and stared . . . We walked past without a word and went upstairs to our apartment. Oh, if only I had been a little more worldly-wise and diplomatic, I would have done nothing now and just left Sponar and his friend Gröschke to fret and stew, safe in the knowledge that I had the district council leader’s release order in my pocket. In time everything would have settled down again, I would have acted as though I knew nothing about the treachery of the Sponars, somehow or other I would have got rid of these dangerous enemies and so would have quietly and gradually come into possession of the villa.

But I just couldn’t wait, I couldn’t hold my tongue, I had to charge at it like a bull at a gate! I sat down at my typewriter and hammered out a letter to Mr Sponar: ‘Dear Mr Sponar, 1. I hereby give you notice that I am terminating your tenancy. 2. I hereby withdraw my offer of such and such a date giving you rights of residence and a lifetime annuity. 3. . . . 4. . . .’ The list went on, as I exacted my revenge by numbers. I sealed the letter, put it downstairs on the hall table, and climbed into the bathtub, where I bathed my body in hot water and my soul in hot feelings of revenge.

And what did it all get me? A second visit from the SA! Next morning, when we had barely finished our breakfast, they turned up again. This time there were only three of them, accompanied by a leader I hadn’t seen before, who was not wearing quite so much gold braid; but still, there they were, and just as determined as their predecessors to do whatever it took.