Better to do it now – even at the risk of my life. I’m living here with eighty-four men, most of them quite deranged, and nearly all of them convicted murderers, thieves or sex offenders. But even under these conditions I still say: ‘I was right to stay in Germany. I am a German, and I would rather perish with this unfortunate but blessed nation than enjoy a false happiness in some other country!’

Reverting now to Rowohlt and me and that time of innocence in January ’33: yes, we were badly compromised, and sometimes we admitted as much to ourselves. But then we kept on reassuring ourselves with the fatuous observation: ‘It won’t be that bad – at least, not for us.’ We fluctuated wildly between utter recklessness and wary caution. Rowohlt had just told his wife the latest joke about G., only to turn on her angrily because she had told the same joke to my wife. Did she want to ruin them all? Did she want to land them all in a concentration camp? Was she completely mad, had she taken leave of her senses?! And then the very same Rowohlt went and pulled the following stunt. His wife was actually by far the more cautious of the two, and since she knew very well that they were not exactly renowned in the neighbourhood as a model Nazi household, she took great care to greet everyone she met with the proper Hitler salute and the words ‘Heil Hitler!’ Trotting along beside her was her little daughter, who was probably four at the time24 and just called ‘Baby’, who raised her arm in greeting just like her mother.

But her dear father, Rowohlt, who was always full of bright ideas and loved to play tricks on his wife, took Baby aside and trained her and drilled her, so that the next time her mother was out on the street with her, dutifully greeting everyone with ‘Heil Hitler!’, Baby raised her left fist and yelled in her clear little voice: ‘Red Front! Blondi’s a runt!’ What tears and fits of despair the poor mother went through to get the child to unlearn this greeting, which really wasn’t exactly in step with the times! But Rowohlt, the overanxious and cautious one, just laughed; his enjoyment of this excellent joke far outweighed any fear of the very real danger. Giving the ‘Red Front’ salute meant being sent to a concentration camp at the very least – and probably much worse than that.

At other times Rowohlt would phone me in my little village, where the young postmistress, with too much time on her hands, was always very curious about the telephone calls of the ‘famous’ local author, and he would greet me with a full-throated: ‘Hello, my friend! Heil Hitler!’

‘What’s this, Rowohlt?’ I would ask. ‘Have you joined the Party now, or what?’

‘What are you on about!’ cried the incorrigible joker. ‘We’re all brown at the arse end!’

That was Rowohlt for you, and basically he never changed. And I was the same, perhaps not quite so active or inventive, and certainly not as witty; but in those days I developed a dangerous penchant for little anecdotes and jokes poking fun at the Nazis, I stored them up in my mind, so to speak, and shared them readily with others – though I was often rather careless in my choice of listeners, especially if the anecdotes were particularly good and I was bursting to tell. This was bound to end badly, and end badly it very soon did. But before I tell the story of my first serious clash with the Nazi regime, I need to say a little more about the circumstances in which we were living at the time. As already stated, the success of Little Man came and went very quickly, I had spent the money none too wisely, and when my wife called a halt to my extravagance we had a little money left, but not very much. To ensure that what little we had left would not drain away too quickly, we decided to move out to the country, far removed from the temptations of bars, dance halls and cabarets. After looking around for a while we found a villa on the banks of the Spree in the little village of Berkenbrück; we rented the upstairs rooms and decided to use this as a temporary base, living here while we looked for a place of our own to buy further out from the city. Everything about the place seemed to suit us down to the ground. The villa lay at the far end of the village, overlooking the forest, one of a small number of townhouses that had been built on the outskirts of what was basically a rural farming village. The garden facing the road, which had hardly any passing traffic, was on the level, while round the back it sloped steeply down to the river, which here flowed past in a straight line between engineered banks. There was an abundance of fruit trees, lots of outbuildings, and it all looked a touch neglected, on the brink of dilapidation. The reason for this was that our landlords were entirely without means. The husband, Mr Sponar, in his seventies, with a smooth, chiselled actor’s face and snow-white hair, always wore velvet jackets and little loose, flapping cravats, and fancied himself a bit of an artist. He certainly had an artist’s lack of business acumen. He had owned a small factory in Berlin, where they manufactured alabaster shells to his own designs in a range of attractive soft colours, intended for use as lampshades. At one time the factory had been doing very well, when these alabaster lampshades were all the rage, but then people’s taste turned to other kinds of lamps. Sponar had doggedly defied this shift in taste, continuing to produce his beloved alabaster shells to his own designs. He had sunk all his savings into this pointless protest, mortgaging his house on the Spree down to the last roof tile. And then the economic collapse had come, before alabaster lampshades were back in fashion again. When you heard the seventy-year-old talk about this, his dark eyes flamed beneath his white hair; he still believed in the enduring appeal of alabaster lampshades, as others believe in the second coming of the Messiah. ‘I shall live to see the day when everyone will be buying alabaster shades again!’ went up the cry.