A Stranger in My Own Country: The 1944 Prison Diary

Time has passed far enough to disregard the old controversy, sparked by Thomas Mann. Mann, and those like him, who escaped Germany as the Nazis came to power wrote despicable things about those who elected to stay and try to endure, and write and record life for ordinary people as the Nazis tightened their grip on the German population. Fallada was one who stayed. Fallada was already established as a brilliant recorder of the lives of ordinary people suffering under the yokes of monstrously destructive hyper inflation and then the great depression, which fueled the rise of Nazi hegemony. - If you've read Fallada already you'll know how really good he is as a story teller with a point. - This story is extraordinary. Both for what it contains in itself, but also how it came to be written adn under what circumstances. Written while he was under close scrutiny in prison; daily expecting his writing to be discovered and his views on Nazi authority exposed. It took years of very patient and careful "decoding" and unraveling to finally be fit for publication. I get chills just thinking about reading it for the first time. Highly recommended.Time has long since passed when categorizing Germans who lived during the Nazi times can be sorted into Good Germans and bad Germans. Surely enough time has passed when we can look upon the awful, mostly self inflicted fate of people. And wonder at it.

This is a very moving book, it pulls at the emotions and will not let you tear away from it. I had to take a break of 3 days from reading after finishing it. I had to walk among trees and nature, I had to refresh my mind in meditation, I had to find my space again, find the present moment. It is not the first book by Hans Fallada I have read. I read 'Alone in Berlin' some time ago. In 1944 Hans Fallada was imprisoned in Neustrelitz-Strelitz State Facility for so called 'mentally ill criminals' in Mecklenburg, Germany. He took a massive risk in writing his diary in his prison cell, he wrote everything that was on his mind and held nothing back about his life under Nazi rule. In the prison he was surrounded by murderers, thieves, sex offenders and all categories of dangerous people. He managed to keep the diary secret by using various techniques, his writing was tiny, he scrambled the text, writing in spaces between the lines and the highly compromising notes, part micrography, part calligraphic conundrum became a kind of secret code or cryptograph which can only be deciphered with great difficulty and with the aid of a magnifying glass and this is why it took fifty years or so to decipher the diary.Hans Fallada died of heart failure brought on by the cumulative effects of mental and physical exhaustion on 5 February 1947, in Berlin.The endpapers, front and back of the hardcover first edition which I have contain examples of his actual writing taken from the diary. The dustjacket cover is beautiful, haunting and leads into the diary to perfectly, it is by Mediabureau Di Stefano, Berlin. I relate all this because sometimes, it is a joy to own and to hold a hardcover copy, a first edition and not just read on digital devices, well that is my opinion anyway.

Really enjoyed reading this book, fascinating as well.

For those interested in everyday life in Germany during the Third Reich I highly recommend this book. It's German author was a well known author in Germany, practically since WW I, and was very observant of the details of life around him and highly capable of describing it.

This is a better document of Fallada's time in the war compared with a Nightmare in Berlin. The book is raw and is sad to see the author with such a developed sense of character and humour become the author of this work.