In the Garden of Beasts

trailed by a young boy of about four and Fallada’s blond and buxom wife, who held their second child, a baby. A dog bounded out as well. Fallada was a boxy man with a square head, wide mouth, and cheekbones so round and hard they might have been golf balls implanted under his skin. His glasses had dark frames and circular lenses. He and his wife gave the new arrivals a brief tour of the farm, which they had bought using the proceeds from
Little Man
. Martha was struck by the apparent contentment of both.
    It was Mildred who brought to the fore the questions that had been in the air since the group’s arrival, though she was careful to shade them with nuance. As she and Fallada strolled to the lake, according to a detailed account by one of Fallada’s biographers, she talked about her life in America and how she used to enjoy walking along the shore of Lake Michigan.
    Fallada said, “It must be difficult for you to live in a foreign country, especially when your interest is literature and language.”
    True, she told him, “but it can also be difficult to live in one’s own country when one’s concern is literature.”
    Fallada lit a cigarette.
    Speaking now very slowly, Fallada said, “I could never write in another language, nor live in any other place than Germany.”
    Mildred countered: “Perhaps, Herr Ditzen, it is less important where one lives than how one lives.”
    Fallada said nothing.
    After a moment, Mildred asked, “Can one write what one wishes here these days?”
    “That depends on one’s point of view,” he said. There were difficulties and demands, words to be avoided, but in the end languageendured, he said. “Yes, I believe one can still write here in these times if one observes the necessary regulations and gives in a little. Not in the important things, of course.”
    Mildred asked: “What is important and what unimportant?”
    THERE WAS LUNCH AND COFFEE . Martha and Mildred walked to the top of the Bohnenwerder to admire the view. A soft haze muted edges and colors and created an overall sense of peace. Down below, however, Fallada’s mood had turned stormy. He and Ledig-Rowohlt played chess. The subject of Fallada’s introduction to
Jailbird
came up, and Ledig-Rowohlt questioned its necessity. He told Fallada it had been a topic of conversation during the drive to Carwitz. Upon hearing this, Fallada grew angry. He resented being the subject of gossip and disputed whether anyone had a right to judge him, least of all a couple of American women.
    When Martha and Mildred returned, the conversation continued, and Mildred joined in. Martha listened as best she could, but her German was not yet expert enough to allow her to pick up enough detail to make sense of it. She could tell, however, that Mildred was “gently probing” Fallada’s retreat from the world. His unhappiness at being thus challenged was obvious.
    Later, Fallada walked them through his house—it had seven rooms, electric light, a spacious attic, and various warming stoves. He showed them his library, with its many foreign editions of his own books, and then led them to the room in which his infant son now was napping. Martha wrote: “He revealed uneasiness and self-consciousness, though he tried to be proud and happy in the infant, in his self-tilled garden, in his simple buxom wife, in the many translations and editions of his books lining the shelves. But he was an unhappy man.”
    Fallada took photographs of the group; Boris did likewise. During the journey back to Berlin, the four companions again talked about Fallada. Mildred described him as cowardly and weak but then added, “He has a conscience and that is good. He is not happy, he is not a Nazi, he is not hopeless.”
    Martha recorded another impression: “I saw the stamp of naked fear on a writer’s face for the first time.”
    FALLADA BECAME, ULTIMATELY , a controversial figure in German literature, reviled in some quarters for his failure to stand up to the Nazis but defended in others for not choosing the safer path of exile. In the years that followed Martha’s visit, Fallada found himself increasingly compelled to bend his writing to the demands of the Nazi state. He turned to preparing translations for Rowohlt, among them Clarence Day’s
Life with Father
, then very popular in the United States, and to writing innocuous works that he hoped would not offend Nazi sensibilities, among them a collection of children’s stories about a child’s