My Brother, the Pope

by Georg Ratzinger

  Does he play regularly?

  Rarely, he says. But usually he opens the hymnal. Max Eham, the cathedral choirmaster in Freising, who then became cathedral choirmaster in Munich, wrote a lot of hymn settings at that time for the seminary choir in Freising and compiled them later into a little hymnal that my brother still has today. It is often lying on the piano, and he plays the most common hymns from it. But occasionally there is “more difficult” piano literature on the music stand. Unfortunately, he plays less now since he broke his hand (on June 17, 2009), he says. Then, too, with age your fingers naturally become stiffer. I notice, too, how my ability to play has diminished over the years.

  The rural idyll, the seemingly carefree existence of the Ratzinger brothers was deceptive. The dark shadows of politics did not stop at the entrance to the village of Aschau. On January 30, 1933, President Hindenburg transferred the office of chancellor of the Reich to Adolf Hitler, which was celebrated by the Nazis as their “seizure of power”. “And that is exactly what it was, too”, Joseph Ratzinger explained later in his memoir, Milestones, “From the first instant power was exercised” (M 14).

  We had been living for just six weeks in Aschau when it was announced that Hitler had been elected. Most people were shocked. Yet it was decreed that the whole elementary school would process through Aschau; practically speaking, they organized a demonstration or a parade for the “Führer”. So we walked through the village and then back again. It rained in torrents that day, and we marched bravely through the puddles, which in itself was rather ridiculous.

  Our father was very angry and of course also very worried about this development. From our parents we children knew only that Hitler was very wicked, a thoroughly evil criminal, and that Hitlerei, as they called National Socialism, was a bad thing—but not much more than that. The people in the village reacted in various ways. Those who until then had not dared to show their sympathy for the brown “pied-pipers” now appeared publicly as Nazis, whereas others tried to cope somehow with the new reality. A few Nazis started up a local branch and, of course, pressured our father to become a member of the NSDAP. Then Father said that under no circumstances whatsoever would he join the Party, but so as not to put our family completely at risk, he advised Mother to join the women’s organization. It was headed by Frau A.,1 a very pious lady who used to pray the Rosary while walking down the street. She even held the Rosary in her hand when she made the Hitler salute! Our mother then told us about what went on at the meetings of the National Socialist Women’s Organization in Aschau. In fact, they did not talk about Hitler but instead exchanged recipes, chatted about their gardens, and sometimes even prayed the Rosary together. Of course that was a rather atypical “Nazi” gathering that had nothing at all to do with the Brownshirt ideology.

  The assistant policeman, Herr W., while not a Party member, was nevertheless very ambitious. One day he heard that another day of recollection was going to be held in the church. He hoped he could blacken the reputation of the priest from Gars who was supposed to come and preach on that occasion. For at that time, a policeman received a decoration if he informed on a priest. So he went into the church with a notepad, hoping the priest would say something against the Nazis that he could then report and thus score points and further his career. But the pastor had learned that W. intended to take notes and warned the priest not to preach under any circumstances. Instead, since it was Lent, he took the opportunity to make the Stations of the Cross with the people who went to church. Then the assistant policeman, instead of taking notes, had to kneel down and stand up again fourteen times. The people, of course, knew he had come for another reason and grinned with schadenfreude to see him “on bended knee”.

  Joseph Ratzinger, Sr., reacted to the seizure of power in 1933 in his own unique rational, logical way. “Now war is coming; now we need a house!” he announced to his family. That same year, he purchased with his savings—a total of 5,500 reichsmark—an old, run-down farmhouse (built in 1726) in Hufschlag near Traunstein, to which the family was to move after his retirement.

  Shortly thereafter, Joseph started school. A class photo from that time shows him in the third row, slightly bent over, with a somewhat skeptical look. In the background stands an instructress looking sternly at them, and on the blackboard one can see the results of the first arithmetic assignment: 1 + 1 = 2. The first attempts at writing had already been made also: the blackboard reads “Au meine Nase” (Ow, my nose). On the wall hangs a crucifix, and beside it two photos. They show President Hindenburg—and alongside, Adolf Hitler.

  People in the village were still divided. At first, most of the inhabitants of Aschau had a wait-and-see attitude toward the new government. Thus, Joseph Ratzinger recalls, for instance, the battle that was sparked in 1933 over denominational schools. Until then the “Catholic elementary school” was the common model: the pastor or the assistant pastor was also the religion teacher and taught the catechism in religion classes. The Nazis wanted to cut off this connection. The schools were to be subordinate to the State alone and would no longer communicate the Christian faith but, rather, the ideology of the “Führer”. In order to placate the Church, Hitler offered a concordat immediately after seizing power—in other words, a fundamental agreement that supposedly would secure the Church’s rights. The bishops hoped thereby to prevent the worst from happening and were at first willing to deal with the regime. They did not suspect that the new government never had any intention to abide by existing agreements. Only when it was much too late did the bishops attempt in their pastoral letters to exhort Catholics to break the law. Uselessly, as it turned out.

  Aschau, 1933: Joseph Ratzinger in the first grade (third row, second from the right)

  Only a few of Joseph’s teachers were really rooted in the faith. Many older teachers had their own grievances against the Church and had felt they were being led by the nose with the previous clerical supervision over the schools. In the younger generation, there were many convinced Nazis. One of them even tried to redesign village life, which was traditionally shaped by the Church’s liturgical calendar. He organized solstice celebrations and explained that it was high time to turn to sacred nature and one’s own ethnic heritage instead of continuing to believe in sin and redemption. Those were all foreign, Jewish ideas that were only imposed on our Germanic ancestors by the Romans who occupied the land. Now, though, it was important to free oneself from the yoke of this foreign religion. On May 1, he had a Maypole set up with great pomp. In a “prayer” that he himself had composed, he praised it as a “symbol of a life force perpetually renewing itself” (M 16). It was supposed to help reestablish a bit of Germanic religion and drive out Christianity. Yet the indigenous farmers who lived in Aschau just smirked. And the village youths were more interested in the sausages that hung on the Maypole and were to belong to the fastest climber.

  Joseph Ratzinger’s First Holy Communion in 1936; he is in the first row, the second boy from the left

  Nevertheless, politics did not stop even at the door to the elementary school. So Joseph had to take a stand early on and defend what he believed in. His strict religious upbringing contributed to the fact that he never had problems keeping his distance from the brown spook.

  As Joseph Ratzinger was preparing for his First Communion in 1934, his father bought him his own Schott, the missal that translated into German the prayers of the Mass, which were still in Latin then. Consequently the book, which was published in a handy popular edition, became his guide through the mysterious world of the liturgy, which at the time was still celebrated in Latin. Understanding it was for the staunchly Catholic youth a veritable voyage of discovery. “To move forward into that mysterious world is always something beautiful for a child and a young person”, he said later about his enthusiasm. “In this way love for the liturgy has its roots in this event, and consequently what is alive in the real centerpiece of the Church of course also grows very early on—precisely as an answer to fantasies and dre
ams as well” (L).

  The Ratzinger family around 1937

  So it was only logical that one day Joseph wanted not only to follow what was happening at the altar but to become part of it. “Not to be there yourself, you would have felt somehow excluded from what was most important”, (L) he admitted—and he became an altar server, like his brother before him.

  At some time or other a lighthouse was set up on the Winter-berg in the immediate vicinity of Aschau. At night when it patrolled the skies with its glaring light, it appeared to be summer lightning foreboding an uncertain danger. Soon people were saying they could sight enemy aircraft that way. But until then,

  there had been no airplanes at all over Aschau, much less those of an enemy. Something sinister was in the air like a front of dark clouds on the horizon. We had a premonition that something was being prepared that no one in the village wanted to admit was true. Maybe Father was in fact right, and the Nazis wanted war.

  V

  Traunstein

  (1937-1946)

  Ever since Hitler seized power, our father had been anxiously looking forward to his retirement, for it was profoundly repugnant to him to serve an executive branch of government made up of criminals. He would have preferred to retire early; after all, he had sworn his oath of office to the king and not, as he put it, to a stromer, an evil scoundrel. But then he held out after all, as difficult as it was for him, because at that time all officials who remained in service until their retirement date received a settlement of several thousand marks, which our family bank account of course needed urgently. He even took sick leave for awhile and used the time for extended hikes with Joseph, the only one who was still living with our parents. At that time, I was already in boarding school, at the Archdiocesan Minor Seminary of Saint Michael in Traunstein. Then my brother would always say, “Father, tell a story”, and our father, who was a gifted storyteller, began an impromptu story. These tales always began with the words, “A husband and a wife lived in. . .” and took place somewhere in the Bavarian Forest.

  Then, on March 6, 1937, the policeman had finally reached his sixtieth birthday and could go into retirement. The family moved to Hufschlag bei Traunstein, into the old farmhouse he had bought after the Nazis seized power. They arrived there in a borrowed automobile. It was spring, early April, and the meadow in front of the house was strewn with primroses. The house itself was very simple. The roof was still covered with wooden shingles that were weighed down with stones so they would not be blown away by the wind. There was no running water; fresh water had to be fetched from the well. In hot summers it happened now and then that it dried up completely. Yet despite this, it seemed to the ten-year-old Joseph like a paradise “beyond our wildest dreams” (M 22). He found all that highly romantic, adventuresome, and mysterious. Right behind the plot of land the woods began, and in the morning when the curtains to the bedroom window were opened, Traunstein’s two “local” mountains, the Hochfelln and the Hochgern, seemed close enough to touch. Joseph was happy, although he was now at home without his siblings. In the abandoned shed on the property, he could pursue his daydreams but, above all, read, and read a great deal. His first writing attempts also date back to this period. He composed a whole series of romantic poems about nature and everyday life. During the holidays and on weekends, his brother returned from boarding school, and the boys played ball together on the meadow in front of the shed or gathered berries in the forest and wood for the heating stove.

  It was a very old farmhouse; on one of the beams you could still read the year in which it had been built, namely, 1726. The front part was the living quarters, while in the back there was a stall and rooms in which to store wood and hay. When you entered the house, on the right was the combination living room and kitchen with the stove at which Mother cooked, the couch, and the table at which we always sat. When the war began, my father bought a radio, for it was clear to him that the Nazis were really just lying to us. He wanted to know what was actually happening. With the radio, which also was in the kitchen, he could receive foreign stations; that was actually a punishable offense, but he did not care. More important to me, on the other hand, was the fact that one could also listen to music on the radio, which at the time interested me much more. Besides, our father was not the only one who thought that way. At the beginning of the war, he was recalled to active duty and therefore had to go back to work as a policeman; a colleague asked him then whether he would listen to the PTT, too. That was a Swiss station, which of course was always quite neutral and objective in its reporting. Later he used to listen also to French and English military stations, which for propaganda reasons alone transmitted German-language programs. Anyone who was not a staunch Nazi listened to these stations, although it was strictly forbidden. Naturally, you always made sure no one heard anything about it and put the radio on very low so that it was unobtrusive, because there were a lot of informers. Reception was always poor because the Nazis did everything they could to block the transmissions. But it simply was not worthwhile to listen to German stations, which merely spread Nazi propaganda. “The only thing on them that is true is the time and maybe also the weather”, my father used to say.

  The house stood in the middle of our plot of land, which was a good day’s work, in other words, covered about five-sixths of an acre. There was a large garden in front and another garden just as large behind the house. In front of the house, mother had planted an herb and vegetable garden, in which she herself grew the most essential things we needed: beans, lettuce, radishes, even strawberries, but also flowers, which she loved so much. The birds loved them, too, and so we always had a birdhouse in which she hung a cake of suet and strewed bird food so they had provisions in winter. In addition, a few fruit trees grew in front of the house: one apple tree had tiny little apples that tasted excellent, however, and then there was a pear tree, and finally, behind the house, there were also plum and cherry trees. Also a meadow that Father always used to mow. During the war, when there was nothing to eat, he fed a sheep with the hay. Later he sold the hay so as to add a bit to the family’s cash on hand. To store the hay we had a separate hayloft. We boys were often up there, and the pussycat we had in Traunstein felt very much at home there, too.

  One book maintained that we secretly smoked up there, but that is not true. My brother never smoked, and I did exactly twice in my life: when I was released from the labor service, the unspoken rule was that every man had to have smoked, and so I smoked, too, in order to try it. Then during our theology studies, there was a Professor Johann Auer, who taught us dogmatics and the history of dogma. Once when it was his name day, the feast of Saint John the Baptist (June 24), we sang him a serenade, and then he gave each of us a cigarette, which we were supposed to smoke. I immediately had a coughing fit, and since I already coughed so much anyway, I certainly did not need to smoke as well. On the other hand, our father liked to smoke; he loved “Virginia cigars”. Of course he did not indulge in smoking during his working hours but, rather, in the evening, when he had free time. He could smoke one cigar for days; over and over, he would put it out and light it again, so as to enjoy it for as long a time as possible. A Virginia cigar was of course expensive, and so he had to divide it up. But we brothers never smoked.

  The house in Traunstein was really a home for us, a little paradise. We had just moved in when we experienced the Georgi-Ritt (George’s ride), which is still carried out on Easter Monday in honor of Saint George. The whole city was on its feet. Previously a group had performed a medieval sword dance on the city square, and then began the actual ride up to the little church in Ettendorf. Ettendorf is the next locality over from Hufschlag and is located perhaps ten minutes away. The mayor and the local pastor usually rode in a coach, although there were also clerics who rode on horseback like the rest. It was very festive and a great event for the whole city. Several hundred splendidly decorated horses and just as many riders participated in those days.

  In Traunstein, which e
ven today he calls his real “hometown”, a new phase of life began for the ten-year-old Joseph Ratzinger, also. He now started the first year at the “humanistic” gymnasium, the secondary school that offered classical languages. It now took him a half hour to walk to school, but that did not bother him at all, for now at least he had “ample time for looking about and reflecting, but also for reviewing what I had learned in school” (M 22). The instruction in Latin suited him. For the rest of his life he would be grateful that he had learned the language of the Church “with old-fashioned rigor and thoroughness” (M 23), for later as a theologian he could read source material from almost two thousand years of Church history in the original texts. Greek, the language in which the New Testament was originally composed, was also in the curriculum. These two ancient languages became his favorite subjects.

  What he liked even better was the fact that at the gymnasium in Traunstein, National Socialism had not yet gained any more of a foothold than it had at the primary school in Aschau. Now he witnessed twice the firing of the headmaster because he would not say what the Party wanted to hear. Somehow he had the impression that a classical education and grappling with the intellectual world of antiquity made a person immune to the delusions of the Brownshirts. When the music teacher opened the songbook, in which there were a lot of classics along with the Nazi songs, he immediately told his students to cross out the words “Juda den Tod” (Death to Judah = the Jews) and to replace them with “Wende die Not” (dispel our plight). But after only one year, even this island of intellectual freedom was flooded. By law, all the gymnasiums in the Reich were combined with the science schools into a so-called Oberschule [generic high school]. Greek instruction disappeared completely from the curriculum, Latin was cut back substantially and was offered only from the third year on. Modern languages and the natural sciences were stressed more instead. With the new type of school came a new generation of teachers to the school, almost all of whom were decided Nazis. Soon religious instruction was totally banned from the curriculum, and the quota of physical education classes was increased accordingly (see M 23-24).