Then in Tittmoning there was a splendid shrine church, the Ponlach Chapel, which is officially called Maria Brunn zu Ponlach and is situated somewhat above the town. Tittmoning is framed, so to speak, on one side by a flat mountain, or better, a hill. On it is located a big, imposing castle that was later used as a country boarding school. But at that time we were more interested in and liked very much the Ponlach shrine, which is located quite close to the castle. We often went with Mother to this bright, friendly little Rococo church. It stood in the middle of the woods, over a ravine, and the rushing water of the Ponlach made such a beautiful sound there. I have a wonderful memory of this magnificent church and then the rushing stream in the wooded ravine through which we so liked to walk.
The late-Baroque central structure of the shrine church with the front steps and niches where spring water flowed was dedicated in 1717. Even at that time a statue of Mary made out of linden wood attracted pilgrims. The miraculous image was produced by a sculptor from Salzburg, Hans Pernegger, in the years 1639-1640, in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War. Only later was the Blessed Mother clothed in a festive garment. The side altars of the chapel are decorated with figures by a sculptor from Tittmoning, Johann Georg Itzlfeldner, and the ceiling is painted with four scenes from the life of Mary. Over the choir loft, nine frescos refer to Marian shrines all over Europe, while an inscription tells:
Maria Plain, / der Trost allgemein;
(Alt-)Oetting reich an / Gnad für jedermann;
Allzeit Ettal / ein Gnadensaal;
Hilf zu Passau / bringt die Schutzfrau;
Maria Zell / beschutzt Leib und Seel;
Maria Schnee bringt Trost im Weh;
Loretto floriert / vom Himmel ziert;
Einsiedeln weicht, / von Gott selbst geweiht;
Monserat fruet / die ganze Christenheit.
(Maria Plain—a consolation for all;
[Alt-]Oetting is rich in grace for everyone;
In every season Ettal is an abode of graces;
At Passau the Protectress offers help;
Maria Zell protects body and soul;
Mary of the Snow brings comfort in woe;
Loreto is in flower, adorned by heaven;
Einsiedeln retreats, consecrated by God himself;
Montserrat gives joy to all Christendom.)
In the Ponlach rift valley, which has an abundance of springs, the stream flows through the shady glen over a series of little waterfalls.
Then there was a so-called bienenheim, a little park where the citizens could keep their bees and through which Mother liked to walk with us. Then she sat down on a bench and did her needlework while we played, and so she spent the afternoon with us. Another spot where we liked to spend our free time was, of all places, the prison in Tittmoning. It was part of the girls’ school that Maria was attending, and along its back wall there were benches set up, to which we were drawn on many a summer day. The town square in Tittmoning was framed by two old city gates, the Burghauser-Tor and the Laufener-Tor. If you walked through the Laufener-Tor, you came at first to the train station. When a train arrived with its locomotive, it resounded mightily and kicked up dust and soot. From there you could travel from Tittmoning to Wiesmühl an der Alz, and we often made a day trip to that town. But then, behind the train station, you arrived at the cemetery with its beautiful chapel, which we often went out to see. Out there, close to the cemetery, lived a man who owned a harmonium. His name was Max Auer, but we called him “Auer Maxl”, and he gladly showed his harmonium to anyone who came to visit him. So I always used to beg Mother, “Can’t we go to Auer Maxl’s house and look at his harmonium?” Then we did, and he even let me work the keys on his instrument. The sounds that I produced with two fingers were not very artistic.
Tittmoning had a port suburb. The city itself is situated somewhat on an elevation, but the port suburb is located lower down, right at the bridge over the Salzach. The river was also the border with Austria. There was a toll booth there, and ten pence was collected from everyone who went over the bridge, and then we were abroad. Of course that fascinated us to no end. Our mother got along well with the wife of the border official, and so there was always a little snack before we continued our trip to Austria.
The first place on the other bank of the Salzach was called Ostermiething. On that street, a blacksmith had his workshop. When my brother was still very little, he once asked loudly, “Is that a blacksmith?” From inside resounded the answer, “Nope, a gingerbread baker.” Evidently he was a man with a good sense of humor. Not far from the border, to the north of Ostermiething, there was another little town by the name of Sankt Radegund, in honor of Saint Radegund, who had a very interesting life story.
The Thuringian princess Radegund (518-587) was taken hostage along with her brother after the victory of the Merovingian King Clotaire I over her father and brought to the Frankish royal court. There she received baptism. After the death of the queen, Clotaire forced Radegund to marry him. Once she was married, she wanted to devote herself to a life of penance and charitable work instead, which repeatedly led to conflicts with her husband, the king. After her brother was murdered, she took refuge with the Bishop of Noyon, who consecrated her a religious. In 560 she founded a convent in Poitiers, which she herself entered as a simple nun. Soon women from all over the empire followed her example and wanted to become nuns, too. Even the Byzantine emperor heard about the pious former queen and in 569 sent to her a relic of the true Cross, which is why she renamed her convent Sainte-Croix.
There in Sankt Radegund they regularly performed Passion plays, which I attended together with our mother. Another time we saw in an open-air theater in Tittmoning a performance of Andreas Hofer. Generally we loved the theater. A friend of ours even had a marionette theater, which little Joseph in particular enjoyed very much.
Tittmoning was really romantic, I must say. Above all, the city square was a magnificent sight during the Advent season, if it snowed then, too, just because the display windows of the shops were so festively decorated. In Marktl, there was only one shop that had a display with a Christmas theme, the Kaufhaus Lechner mentioned before. But in Tittmoning, they were lined up one after the other. The house next door to us belonged to the Pustet bookshop. That is an old family of booksellers going back to Friedrich Pustet (1798-1882), who was originally from Passau and later settled in Regensburg. He founded a publishing house and bookstores in many cities, not only in Bavaria, but actually all over the world. His nephew Anton, in turn, founded the Verlag Anton Pustet, a publishing house in Salzburg. And then there was the Pustet bookstore right by us in Tittmoning, which always had a wonderful display that was decorated very beautifully at Christmastime.
Tittmoning, city square—historic postcard. At the left front, with the bay window, the Stubenrauchhaus, in which the Ratzinger family lived
Generally books played an important role in our family. Our mother always told us about what she had just read. She liked novels best, for instance, on historical themes like the Fuggers [an influential merchant family]—a fine book that I still own today—but also romantic stories. I remember, for instance, a novel with the title Roma, the Pearl of the Eternal City, by Kurt Allmendinger, that was published in 1930. Just at that time I was taking first-year Latin in school and supposed that Roma was the name of the city of Rome, but in the novel it was also a woman’s name. She told us wonderful stories about it, including spiritual stories, since the books she read were usually by popular Catholic authors. Father, then, especially on Saturdays, read “the Goffiné”, as people used to call the masterpiece by Father Leonhard Goffiné (1648-1719), the Christkatholische Handpostille (Catholic handbook of prayers). The book contained the readings at Mass for Sundays and holy days, but it also explained them quite well and related them to themes from everyday spirituality. Father frequently read to us from it. And then, of course, there was the Schott, named after its publisher, the Benedictine priest Anselm Schott (1843-1896), who in 1884 pu
blished the first “Missal for Laymen”. Since then his name has become synonymous in German with all sorts of missals for the laity. When we were little, we had a children’s missal, a little book with pictures and tiny captions that explained the sequence of sacred actions, so that we could follow what was happening at the altar quite well. Later we received a Schott for children, which contained the essential texts of the liturgy. We then studied it diligently. My parents, of course, owned the real Schott, which their pastor had given to them for their wedding in 1920. Thus we were introduced step by step into the mystery of the liturgy, about which we became more and more enthusiastic as we matured.
In Tittmoning, “life began to get serious” for us brothers in the fall of 1930. I started elementary school as a six-year-old, while my brother continued to go to the kindergarten in the basement of the Augustinian convent. The Kinderbewahranstalt (child-care center), as it was called then, was run by the religious order of the Englische Fräulein (English ladies). It was directed by Sister Maria Korbiniana Kreuzburg, a small but energetic nun.
Earlier I liked going to kindergarten, but my brother at first did not like it at all; he would have preferred to stay home with Mother. Only later was he quite happy to go to kindergarten. When he came home one day, it had obviously made a powerful impression on him. On the feast of Saint Nicholas (December 6), not only Saint Nicholas came to visit, but also Krampus, his wicked attendant. Of course the sisters used this pedagogically and staged it accordingly. He really pounded on the door and made a racket, and two auxiliary sisters had to hold the door closed so he could not come in. Then she told the children who this Krampus was, and that they must prevent him from doing them any harm. With that, they gave the children a healthy fear of the Evil One.
Yet what sounds like a childhood idyll—and probably was one, too—was soon disturbed by the events of that time. Poverty and unemployment did not stop at Tittmoning, and here, too, the political climate became noticeably more intense. There were constant elections; the city was plastered with garish posters and pithy slogans; and some political gatherings degenerated into riots. Again and again, the father of the Ratzinger family had to intervene as a policeman. In particular the NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party [the Nazis], proved to be a constant cause of unrest, always ready to resort to violence. They intentionally incited people so as to pose as the only alternative to the threatening chaos.
I can still remember well that at that time there were walls for posters in Tittmoning, which were used by various parties for their propaganda and to invite people to political gatherings and rallies. As a policeman, my father of course always had to be present, as things were often very heated and sometimes also quite dangerous. He always used to tell about it when he came back home; of course we never experienced it firsthand.
Five-year-old Joseph and his brother sensed that their father was increasingly worried about the future. Adolf Hitler, the self-appointed savior of the Nazi Party, was utterly repugnant to that devoutly Catholic man. Instead, the police officer was an enthusiastic reader of the newspaper Der gerade Weg (The straight path), which had become the mouthpiece of politically involved Catholicism. The editor-in-chief of the paper, Doctor Fritz Michael Gerlich, did not mince words where Hitler was concerned. “National Socialism is a plague”, he started one editorial on July 31, 1932, only to predict prophetically: “National Socialism, however, means: hostility toward neighboring countries, tyranny at home, civil war, international war. National Socialism means lying, hatred, fratricide, and boundless misery. Adolf Hitler proclaims the law of the lie. You who have fallen for the deception of a man obsessed with tyranny, awake! Germany, your fate and the fate of your children are at stake!” After the party seized power, the editor who had courageously warned his readers had to pay for such great candor with his life. Storm Troopers (SA-Männer) beat him almost to death in his office, only to arrest him afterward. For fifteen months they held him in prison and tortured him; then he was brought to the concentration camp in Dachau and murdered there.
I am not sure whether Father subscribed to it, but I remember clearly that Der gerade Weg was often in our family’s house and was very much appreciated. Father spoke with us very little about politics at that time, for he knew the proverb: “Children and fools speak the truth.” He feared that we might blurt something out that could be detrimental to him and us. Our mother said a little more; she was more open in that regard. At any rate, our parents made no secret of the fact that they were anti-Nazi and despised Hitler wholeheartedly. In any case, they admired Fritz Michael Gerlich for his courage.
My father, of course, read Der gerade Weg because it spoke to his soul, as it were. Besides that, he subscribed to the Münchner Tagblatt, which reflected somewhat the views of the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP). At the time, that was the Catholic party here in Bavaria, which especially in the countryside was the strongest opponent of the NSDAP. After the Nazis seized power, unfortunately, it was forcibly dissolved.
The Church, too, at that time took a public stance against the Hitler movement. As early as October 1930, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano explained in a front-page article that membership in the NSDAP “could not be reconciled with a Catholic conscience”. The Archbishop of Munich, Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber, used even clearer words and characterized the National Socialist ideology as a “heresy”—as blasphemous heterodoxy. It was “strictly forbidden” for Catholic clergymen to support the Nazis in any way whatsoever. After a series of identically worded instructions at the diocesan level, the German Bishops’ Conference in August 1932 issued uniform guidelines for dealing with National Socialism. The party platform of the NSDAP was declared “heretical”, the “anti-Catholic character” of the Brownshirt Movement was publicly denounced. Catholics were forbidden to belong to the Party; anyone who disobeyed this directive was as a rule excluded from the sacraments. Catholicism and National Socialism were thus clearly irreconcilable.
Our path, on the other hand, led in quite a different direction. Music fascinated me from the beginning, especially church music. It began in Marktl, when Andresl was my great example, and continued in Tittmoning when I met Auer Maxl with his harmonium. In church I saw a clergyman who was active as an organist and a layman who conducted the church choir. So I became extremely interested in church music and was captivated by it. Luckily my parents supported my inclinations from the start. As our stay in Tittmoning was coming to an end, my father learned through a newspaper advertisement that a used harmonium was being sold somewhere. It cost—I still remember precisely—241 reichsmark and was soon afterward delivered to our new address in Aschau. That is how my music career began, which eventually led to a position as cathedral choirmaster. Once I asked Father what the word was for the man who conducted the choir in the bishop’s church. Father answered that he was called the cathedral choirmaster. “Then someday I will be a cathedral choirmaster”, I told him. Later doubts came. But at the time, when I was so young and naive, I was sure about it. Just as my brother, back then in Tittmoning, was quite certain that he would become a cardinal someday. That was of course, to put it quite bluntly, nothing but childish prattle. We had no idea that one day it would come about exactly as we had said.
At the photographer’s studio, the Ratzinger siblings appear in their best Sunday clothes: to the right, with a ball in his hand like an imperial orb, the future Pope
Joseph Ratzinger (circled) in the kindergarten in Tittmoning
At that time Cardinal Faulhaber, the Archbishop of Munich and Freising, came to Tittmoning to celebrate the sacrament of confirmation.1 He was an impressive figure and arrived in a black limousine, the likes of which did not exist in Tittmoning. We had never seen such a fine automobile as the Cardinal’s. The driver stopped, and the door did not open until Father, as the police officer of the place, who on this occasion wore his freshly cleaned uniform with polished saber, helmet, and belt, finally opened it wide. Then the Cardinal clim
bed out with great dignity and surveyed the crowd with a majestic glance. That made an extraordinary impression on us all, while my brother laconically noted, “I’ll be a cardinal someday!”
A few days later, our apartment was painted. The painter did the job so skillfully that my brother at first watched, utterly fascinated, and then announced to us: “I’ll be a painter someday, too.” Of course those two professional goals were somewhat far removed from each other. But he still had all the time in the world to make up his mind about his vocation.
IV
Aschau
(1932-1937)
Even during the pre-Nazi period, our father had already taken on the Storm Troopers, broken up meetings, and thereby identified himself politically as a blunt anti-Nazi, which was generally known in Tittmoning. He did not talk much about it with his family, probably intentionally, so as to protect us. Then, as it became clear that the Nazis were going to come into power, his superior advised him to leave Tittmoning, because it could become dangerous for him there. So after serving there for only three years, he requested a transfer from the rural town to a village and came to Aschau.
In mid-December 1932, shortly before Christmas and only six weeks before Adolf Hitler seized power, the five-member family moved. Aschau am Inn, their new home, is described by Joseph Ratzinger in his memoirs as “a well-to-do agricultural village consisting of large, imposing farms. . . . In the middle of the village, as is always the case in Bavaria, there was a large brewery whose restaurant was the meeting place for the men on Sundays. The actual village square was at the other end of the place, with yet another nice restaurant, a church, and a school” (M 13). Their new residence was a modern house, by the standards in those days, with a bay window and balcony, which a wealthy farmer had built and now rented to the police. The future pope, in any case, regarded it as “a cozy home” (M 13).
My Brother, the Pope Page 5