Water? We both swim too well. The noose? Couldn’t face that! Gas? But we don’t even have a kitchen with a gas stove any more. And yet a little later, despite all this, a gleam of hope appears briefly on the horizon, a tiny shred of optimism: ‘But the world out there, this vast, sprawling, chaotic Berlin, is so weird and wonderful, so full of wondrous things!’

Qualities of this kind, unique to Fallada, the qualities of a strong book about a weak human being, earned him the respect of contemporary arts reviewers, who were starting to find their feet again. Berlin’s Tagesspiegel wrote: ‘Nightmare in Berlin is emblematic of what went on in Germany after the capitulation.’ The Berliner Zeitung noted: ‘A piece of concentrated contemporary history whose value transcends the personal […]. It need hardly be said that the writing is both gripping and vivid.’ The Frankfurter Neue Presse wrote: ‘A supremely honest book, a human testament.’ And the Norddeutsche Zeitung: ‘Nightmare in Berlin is the quintessence of Fallada’s realisation that the ruins are not important, that the only thing that matters is life and living.’ It is best summed up by the journal Der Zwiebelfisch: ‘In his excellent book Nightmare in Berlin, Hans Fallada paints a picture of the despondency and apathy felt by Germans. The final months of wartime life are portrayed in masterly fashion, along with the end of the war, the entry of the Russian troops, the “respectable” bourgeois world as it adjusts to the new environment, and the moral decline of the population.’

Fallada himself achieved one of those wondrous things that Berlin, by his own account, was full of. In one last push he succeeded in producing the two late works, Nightmare in Berlin and Alone in Berlin, that have cemented his enduring literary reputation. But before these last two books could appear, the man behind the writer, Rudolf Ditzen, died of heart failure on 5 February 1947, his strength finally exhausted.

The Schwäbisches Tageblatt lamented the fact that when Nightmare in Berlin was first published, the moving obituary penned by Becher for his writer friend appeared at the end of the book: ‘It would have been better as a foreword.’ The present brief introduction is an attempt to make good that deficit — even if the passage of time has made it easier for today’s reader to judge the book’s merits and its place in the canon. The personal directness of this ‘strong book, which tells us so much about the author’ (to quote the then director of Aufbau Verlag, Erich Wendt), bridges the time gap as only literature of enduring relevance can do. It would be wrong to deny the reader access to such literature — even if it means that he or she may learn more about the dark side of an admired author than he or she is comfortable with. For this is the only way we can learn real answers to the basic question: how can we build a happy world again on the ruins of a world that has been defiled?

Berlin, April 2014

Nele Holdack & René Strien

AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

The author of this novel is far from satisfied with what he has written on the following pages, which is now laid before the reader in printed form. When he conceived the plan of writing this book, he imagined that alongside the reverses of everyday life — the depressions, illnesses, and general despondency — that alongside all these things which the end of this terrible war inevitably visited upon every German, there would also be more uplifting things to report, signal acts of courage, hours filled with hope. But it was not to be. The book remains essentially a medical report, telling the story of the apathy that descended upon a large part, and more especially the better part, of the German population in April 1945, an apathy that many have not managed to cast off to this day.

The fact that the author could not alter this, and could not introduce more elements of levity and gaiety into this novel, is not simply due to his own outlook on life, but has to do much more with the general situation of the German people, which today, fifteen months after the end of hostilities, remains grim.

The reasoning behind the decision to place the novel before the public despite this shortcoming is that it may perhaps be of some value as a document humain, a faithful and true account (to the best of the author’s abilities) of what ordinary Germans felt, suffered, and did between April 1945 and the summer of that year. The time may soon come when people are no longer able to understand the paralysis that has blighted this first post-war year to such disastrous effect. A medical report, then, and not a work of art — I’m sorry to say. (The author, too, is a child of his times, afflicted by that same paralysis.)

I have just called the book ‘a faithful and true account’. But nothing that is related in the following pages happened exactly as it is described here. For reasons of space alone, a book such as this cannot possibly record everything that happened; I had to be selective, to invent material, and things that were told to me could not just be set down verbatim, but had to be recast in a different form. None of this means that the book cannot — therefore — be ‘true’: everything related here could have happened in the manner described, but it is nonetheless a novel, or in other words a product of the imagination.

The same is true of the characters who appear here: none of them exists outside the pages of this book exactly as they are portrayed here. Just as the events described had to obey the laws of narration, so too did the characters. Some are pure invention; others are amalgams of several different people.

Writing this novel has not been an enjoyable experience, but to its author the book seemed important. Amidst the changing fortunes of life, the upturns and the reverses, what remained important to him throughout was what people went through after the end of the war, in mind and in body. How nearly everybody lost faith, yet in the end rediscovered a little bit of courage and hope — that is the story that these pages tell.

Berlin, August 1946

PART ONE

Downfall

CHAPTER ONE

The first illusion

Always, during those nights around the time of the great collapse, Dr. Doll, when he did eventually manage to get to sleep, was plagued by the same bad dream. They slept very little those first few nights, constantly fearful of some threat to body or soul. Well into the night, after a day filled with torment, they stayed sitting by the windows, peering out onto the little meadow, towards the bushes and the narrow cement path, to see if any of the enemy were coming — until their eyes ached, and everything became a blur and they could see nothing.

Then someone would often say: ‘Why don’t we just go to bed?’

But usually nobody answered, and they just carried on sitting there, staring out, and feeling afraid, until Dr. Doll was suddenly overcome by sleep, as if ambushed by some bandit clapping his great hand over his whole face to smother him. Or else it was like some tightly woven spider’s web that went down his throat with every breath he took, overpowering his consciousness. A nightmare …

It was bad enough, falling asleep like that, but, having fallen asleep in this hideous fashion, he was immediately visited by the same bad dream — always the same one.