In our various journals – nationalist, democratic, social-democratic or even Communist – we had read quite a bit about the brutality with which these gentlemen liked to pursue their aims, and yet we thought: ‘It won’t be that bad! Now that they’re in power, they’ll soon see there is a big difference between drafting a Party manifesto and putting it into practice! They’ll tone it down a bit – as they all do. In fact, they’ll tone it down quite a lot!’ We still had absolutely no idea about the intractability of these people, their inhuman cruelty, which literally took corpses, and whole heaps of corpses, in its stride. Sometimes we had a wake-up call, as when we heard, for example, that a son of the Ullstein publishing family, when they came to arrest him,11 had asked if he could brush his teeth first; perhaps his tone had been a touch supercilious, because they promptly beat him half to death with rubber truncheons and dragged him away. People were being arrested left, right and centre, and a surprising number of these detainees were ‘shot while trying to escape’. But we kept on telling ourselves: ‘It doesn’t affect us. We are peace-loving citizens, we have never been politically active.’ We really were very stupid; precisely because we had not been politically active, i.e. had not joined the one true Party and did not do so now, we made ourselves highly suspect. It would have been so easy for us; it was in those months from January to March ’33 that the great rush to join the Party began, which earned the new Party members the scornful nickname ‘March Martyrs’. From March onwards the Party put a block on new membership, making it conditional upon careful vetting and scrutiny. For a long time the ‘March Martyrs’ were treated as second-class Party members; but the distinction became blurred with the passing years, and the March Martyrs for their part did all they could to demonstrate their loyalty and reliability. In fact, most of the Nazis who were later described as ‘150 per cent committed’ came from their ranks; in their zeal they sought to outdo the older Party members in the ruthlessness with which they enforced the Party line – as long as such measures didn’t affect them, of course. I shall shortly have occasion to speak about some of these fragrant flowers, whose acquaintance I was soon to make.

Strictly speaking, Rowohlt and I had every reason to be very careful indeed: we were both compromised, he more than I, but compromised nonetheless, and that was quite enough for the gentlemen in power, who didn’t bother with the finer nuances. They have always ruled by brute force, mainly by the brutal threat of naked physical violence, intimidating and enslaving first their own people, and then other nations. Even the relative subtlety of the iron fist in the velvet glove is too sophisticated for them – way beyond their powers of comprehension. All they ever do is threaten. Do this, or we’ll cut your head off! Don’t do that, or we’ll hang you by the neck! These utterly primitive ideas constituted the sum total of their political wisdom, from the first day until what will hopefully soon be the last.

So, Rowohlt and I were both compromised. He was known to be a ‘friend of the Jews’, and his publishing house had once been described by a Nazi newspaper as a ‘branch synagogue’. He had published the works of Emil Ludwig,12 whom the ‘militant journals’ persistently referred to as ‘Emil Ludwig Cohn’, even though he had never been called Cohn in his life. Rowohlt was also Tucholsky’s publisher, and in his magazine Die Weltbühne Tucholsky had conducted a dogged campaign to uncover the secret extra-curricular activities of the Reichswehr.13 Furthermore, Rowohlt had published Das Tagebuch,14 a weekly journal for economics and politics, which supported the League of Nations and the world economy, exposed the secret machinations of the ‘chimney barons’, and was generally opposed to all separatist or nationalist tendencies. He had also – the list of his crimes is truly shocking – published Knickerbocker,15 the American journalist who gripped his readers with his account of the ‘Red Trade Menace’ and the rise of Fascism in Europe, and who, on the personal orders of Mr Göring himself, had been denied a press pass to attend the opening session of the Reichstag under the aegis of the Nazis. Finally, Rowohlt had also published a book entitled Adolf Hitler Wilhelm III,16 which pointed out the remarkable similarities in character and temperament between these two men; he had published a little book called Kommt das Dritte Reich? [Is the Third Reich Coming?],17 which was less than enthusiastic about the prospect; and worst of all he had printed and published Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus [A History of National Socialism],18 in which all the contradictions, infamies and stupidities of this emerging political party were mercilessly laid bare. This book was subsequently sold under the counter for vast sums – officially, of course, it was immediately consigned to one of those book bonfires19 that burned all over Germany when the Nazis came to power, and on which pretty much everything with a Jewish-sounding name was burned indiscriminately. (The standard of literary education among the Nazi thugs was pretty dire, as was the standard of their education in general.) Add to that the fact that Rowohlt also had any number of Jewish literary authors on his list, and that his publishing house employed quite a few Jewish staff members. Enough already? More than enough, and then some! (One of these Jewish employees would later – officially at least – turn out to be his nemesis, but I shall come to that later.) Rowohlt had no interest in politics, and in mellow mood he liked to describe himself as a ‘lover of all forms of chaos’. He really was, and probably still is, someone who feels most energized in turbulent and chaotic times. The heyday of his publishing house was during the bad years at the end of the revolution and the beginning of the introduction of the Rentenmark.

I hardly need to relate my own catalogue of sins at such length, and in the pages that follow it will become clear how much I was loved, how fervently my work was encouraged and supported, and what joyous years I and my family experienced from 1933 onwards. I probably only need to mention that leading and ‘respected’ Nazi newspapers and journals described me as ‘the poster-boy goy for all the Jews on the Kurfürstendamm’, that they called me ‘the notorious pornographer’, and right up until the end disputed my right to live and write in Germany.

From the other side of the fence it has been much held against me that I didn’t draw the natural conclusions from these hostile attitudes towards me and leave Germany like the other émigrés. It’s not that I was short of generous offers. Back in the days when Czechoslovakia was being occupied, I was invited to escape the impending war and travel with my family to a nearby country, where a comfortable home, excellent working conditions and a carefree life awaited me, and where I would have been naturalized overnight. And once again, even after everything I’d been through since ’33, I said ‘No’, once again, obstructed in my work, constantly under attack, treated as a second-class citizen, menaced by the approaching shadow of a necessary war, I said ‘No’, and chose rather to expose myself, my wife and my children to all the dangers than to leave the country of my birth; for I am a German, I say it today with pride and sorrow still, I love Germany, I would not want to live and work anywhere else in the world except Germany.