To those who warned me that it would be suicide to go and live in a Jewish guesthouse, which couldn’t be kept secret, given the growing number of spies and informers – another fruit of the Nazi regime! – I replied loftily: ‘But I like it there! If they ban Aryans from living in Jewish guesthouses, then I’ll move out. But until then, I’m staying put!’

Incidentally, the story of my application for membership of the Reich Chamber of Literature has a curious ending: despite several written submissions from me and my lawyer, I never heard back from them. I never did become a member of the RCL, I was just allowed to carry on working ‘provisionally’, since my application had not been rejected as such, i.e. it had not yet been processed. And that is still the case today, eleven years after the Nazi seizure of power. For the gentlemen at the RCL this arrangement has the advantage that they won’t need to expel the author if he makes a serious nuisance of himself, since he was never a member in the first place! Moreover, an author in that situation, living in a constant state of uncertainty, is going to behave himself better than one who is already a member, and against whom formal proceedings have first to be initiated before he can be expelled. (Not that it did make me behave myself any better: I continued to cause those gentlemen a good deal of trouble.) In the early years I used to ask my lawyer from time to time how things were going with my membership application, to which he replied with a wave of the hand: ‘Let sleeping dogs lie! Whatever you do, don’t remind them! As long as they haven’t turned you down, you can carry on working. So there!’

Although we have hardly got our foot in the door at the Stössinger guesthouse, so to speak, I must just mention the biggest faux pas that I committed round about that time. I received a letter from the Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, signed by Mr Goebbels himself, which read as follows: ‘Dear Mr Fallada, I am obliged to point out that your works in Swedish translation are published by the Bonnier publishing house, which is in the forefront of anti-German agitation. I must ask you to be mindful of this in future. p.p. Dr Goebbels’

I showed this letter to my trusty Rowohlt. We thought the letter uncommonly well composed – for a minister. We particularly liked the closing sentence, which followed on so lyrically from the one before. But much as we enjoyed it, we still had the problem of having to write a reply, and in particular of having to ‘be mindful in future’, which we were not at all disposed to do. In the end we drafted something along the following lines: ‘Dear Minister, At the time when I signed my longterm contracts with the Bonnier publishing house, I was not aware that it engaged in anti-German agitation. What I was aware of, however, was that the memoirs of Reich President von Hindenburg52 were published under this imprint, and remain in print there to this day. Heil Hitler! Hans Fallada.’ And I actually sent this wonderful missive to the Minister! So neither of us should really be surprised that this seed, so foolishly and rashly sown, would one day bear evil fruit. I myself haven’t been all that badly affected, but poor Rowohlt had to pay dearly for this and other matters that I may get round to talking about later.

Anyway, we enjoyed our time at the Stössinger guesthouse very much. Not just on account of the food, which really was uncommonly good – my wife learned a great deal there. Not only were there beautifully prepared Austrian pastries, from apple strudel to Kaiserschmarren [sugared pancakes with raisins], but we were also introduced to colonial dishes such as chicken with curried rice, stuffed peppers, and all kinds of good things. But the most interesting part of the experience was the constant succession of other guests. Most of them were just passing through on their extended ‘trip’, spending four or five days in Berlin, while Paris always rated four or five weeks, which offended my sense of local patriotism hugely at the time, before I discovered that magnificent city for myself. Some of them were real oddballs, and Mrs Stössinger would often bring them to my table. We’d then sit for a quarter of an hour over an excellent cup of strong coffee, smoking foreign cigarettes and chatting. There was one lady I recall from the USA,53 a real lady, but divorced from her husband, who earned her living – and a very good living too, judging by the fact that she was staying in an expensive guesthouse – entirely from doing parachute jumps. At the time, in 1933, parachute jumping was not yet the commonplace activity that it has now become as a result of this war. And especially not for a woman! She was an attractive woman, aged around thirty, with a wonderfully toned body. When she walked, she didn’t so much walk as waft. She had fascinating stories to tell about her life of adventure, moving around from one city to the next in the vast expanses of the States, with six or eight old Army aeroplanes and a couple of veteran pilots from the World War, who performed their aerobatic stunts for paying crowds of onlookers. They lived a kind of itinerant circus existence, often short of money, then suddenly, if the crowd for some unknown reason took a special liking to them, very comfortably provided for.