The novel he smuggled out of Nazi Germany in a fruit cake.
In 1934 Jan Petersen finished the manuscript for Our street, a true story about life on Wallstrasse, a street in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin during Nazi rule. It is an account of left wing resistance to Nazism between January 1933, just before Adolph Hitler’s ascension to Chancellor, and June 1934, the initial period of the Nazi government’s reign over Germany.
To get his manuscript out of the country after a number of failed attempts, Petersen pulled off a trick of the eye that would guarantee his manuscript see the light of printed day. Dressing in ski clothes to look as though he were going for a holiday, he set off to the border heading for Prague with his manuscript in his rucksack. After an initial search led to nothing, the guards turned to the rucksack, only to find a beautifully baked fruit cake. Inside the cake was the manuscript, but Patersen managed to avoid detection by joking that his wife had made them for his holiday.
When the book was published in his lifetime, it sold more than a million copies and now Faber Finds are bringing it back for republish on their print on demand process.
To protect left wing resistance movements still in Germany, Petersen wrote the book as a fictionalised account of the reality of death lists and stormtroopers on Wallstrasse.
Despite exile and hardship – being twice placed on the Gestapo’s black list – Jan Petersen eventually returned to East Germany after the war and won a various of literary prizes.
