In the Garden of Beasts

pull toy,
Hoppelpoppel, Wo bist du?
(Hoppelpoppel, Where Are You?).
    He found his career briefly invigorated with publication in 1937 of a novel entitled
Wolf Among Wolves
, which party officials interpreted as a worthy attack on the old Weimar world and which Goebbels himself described as “a super book.” Even so, Fallada made more and more concessions, eventually allowing Goebbels to script the ending of his next novel,
Iron Gustav
, which depicted the hardships of life during the past world war. Fallada saw this as a prudent concession. “I do not like grand gestures,” he wrote; “being slaughtered before the tyrant’s throne, senselessly, to the benefit of no one and to the detriment of my children, that is not my way.”
    He recognized, however, that his various capitulations took a toll on his writing. He wrote to his mother that he was not satisfied with his work. “I cannot act as I want to—if I want to stay alive. And so a fool gives less than he has.”
    Other writers, in exile, watched with disdain as Fallada and his fellow inner emigrants surrendered to government tastes and demands. Thomas Mann, who lived abroad throughout the Hitler years, later wrote their epitaph: “It may be superstitious belief, but in my eyes, any books which could be printed at all in Germany between 1933 and 1945 are worse than worthless and not objects one wishes to touch. A stench of blood and shame attaches to them. They should all be pulped.”

    THE FEAR AND OPPRESSION that Martha saw in Fallada crowned a rising mountain of evidence that throughout the spring had begun to erode her infatuation with the new Germany. Her blind endorsement of Hitler’s regime first faded to a kind of sympathetic skepticism, but as summer approached, she felt a deepening revulsion.
    Where once she had been able to wave away the beating incident in Nuremberg as an isolated episode, now she recognized that German persecution of Jews was a national pastime. She found herself repulsed by the constant thunder of Nazi propaganda that portrayed Jews as enemies of the state. Now when she listened to the anti-Nazi talk of Mildred and Arvid Harnack and their friends, she no longer felt quite so inclined to defend the “strange beings” of the fledgling revolution whom she once had found so entrancing. “By the spring of 1934,” she wrote, “what I had heard, seen, and felt, revealed to me that conditions of living were worse than in pre-Hitler days, that the most complicated and heartbreaking system of terror ruled the country and repressed the freedom and happiness of the people, and that German leaders were inevitably leading these docile and kindly masses into another war against their will and their knowledge.”
    She was not yet willing, however, to openly declare her new attitude to the world. “I still attempted to keep my hostility guarded and unexpressed.”
    Instead, she revealed it obliquely by proclaiming in deliberately contrarian fashion a new and energetic interest in the Hitler regime’s greatest enemy, the Soviet Union. She wrote, “A curiosity began to grow in me as to the nature of this government, so loathed in Germany, and its people, described as so utterly ruthless.”
    Against her parents’ wishes, but with Boris’s encouragement, she began planning a journey to the Soviet Union.
    BY JUNE, DODD HAD COME to see that the “Jewish problem,” as he continued to call it, was anything but improved. Now, he told Secretary Hull in a letter, “the prospect of a cessation appears far less hopeful.” Like Messersmith, he saw that persecution was pervasive,even if it had changed character to become “more subtle and less advertised.”
    In May, he reported, the Nazi Party had launched a campaign against “grumblers and faultfinders” that was meant to reenergize
Gleichschaltung
. Inevitably it also increased pressure on Jews. Goebbels’s newspaper
Der Angriff
began urging readers “to keep a sharp eye on the Jews and report any of their shortcomings,” Dodd wrote. The Jewish owners of the
Frankfurter Zeitung
had been forced to abandon their controlling interest, as had the last Jewish owners of the famed Ullstein publishing empire. A large rubber company was told it must provide proof that it had no Jewish employees before it could submit bids to municipalities. The German Red Cross was suddenly required to certify that new contributors were of Aryan origin. And two judges in two different cities granted