To make the book more readable I have also taken the liberty of reproducing some of my notes as direct speech. A historian could not possibly proceed in such a way, but it may be permitted the memoirist. Wherever possible these dialogues maintain the tone as well as the content of what was said. When individual remarks are placed in quotation marks they faithfully reproduce a comment, as far as memory allows.
Like all biographical notes, my observations make no claim to be indisputably valid. What I write about the friends of my parents, about teachers and superiors, remains my view alone. I present Hans Hausdorf and Father Wittenbrink, the Ganses, Kiefers, Donners, and others only as I remember them. That may not be accurate or even fair in every respect. Nevertheless, I was not prompted by any prejudice.
In several historical accounts I have dealt more analytically with the years covered in the following pages.2 For that reason in the present book I could largely dispense with abstract reflections. They are left to the reader. At any rate I have not written a history of the Hitler years, but only how they were reflected in a family setting. That means actual living experiences, sometimes even the merely casual and occasionally the anecdotal, will predominate here, as they do in real life. When, as a teenager in the early 1940s, I described the grimaces of a friend of my parents who had a nervous disorder, my father admonished me, “Don’t look too closely!” I responded that I neither could nor would close my eyes. Thanks to the generally nurturing environment in which I grew up that has never been difficult for me, nor was it used against me. It was actually a necessary prerequisite for writing this book. The temptation was much greater either to repress the grimaces of my youthful years or, even worse, to view them through a glorifying lens.
In writing this book I have accumulated many debts of gratitude. Here I would like to mention only Frau Ursel Hanschmann, Irmgard Sandmayr, my friend Christian Herrendoerfer, and my fellow prisoners of war Wolfgang Münkel and Klaus Jürgen Meise. The latter successfully escaped from the POW camp some time before my failed attempt. I owe particular thanks to my editor Barbara Hoffmeister for her numerous important comments. Finally, the many friends of my youth who helped me with the order of events, dates, and names should be acknowledged.
Joachim Fest
Kronberg, May 2006
1 J. B. Gradl (1904–88) and H. Krone (1895–1989) were both prominent members of the conservative, Catholic Zentrum party during the Weimar Republic and became founding members of the conservative Christian Democratic Union party in the Bonn republic. E. Niekisch (1889–1967) was an antifascist National Bolshevik imprisoned by the Nazis; he later taught in the German Democratic Republic. A tellingly odd collection of witnesses.
2 Fest is referring to the books which established him as one of Germany’s foremost experts on the Nazi period. These books range from The Face of the Third Reich (1970) and Hitler (1974) to Plotting Hitler’s Death (1996), Speer: The Final Verdict (2002), and Inside Hitler’s Bunker (2005), to name some of the titles available in English translations.
ONE
•
How Everything Came Together
The task I have set myself is called recollection. The majority of the occurrences and experiences of my life have—as with everyone—faded from memory, because memory is ceaselessly engaged in casting out one thing and putting something else in its place or superimposing new insights. The process is unending. If I look back over the whole time, a flood of pictures presses forward, jumbled up and random. Whenever something happened, no idea was associated with it, and only years later was I able to discover the hidden watermark in the documents of life and perhaps interpret it.
But even then images intervene, especially when it comes to the early years: the house with the wild undergrowth at the sides (later, to our sorrow, removed thanks to our parents’ sense of orderliness); catching crayfish in the River Havel; our much-loved nursemaid Franziska, who one day had to return to her home in the Lausitz; the trucks which raced down the streets with a bright flag, packed with bawling men in uniform; the excursions to Sanssouci or Lake Gransee, where our father told us a story about a Prussian queen, until we began to get bored with it. All unforgotten. And once we children had reached the age of ten, we were taken one Sunday in summer—when the band was playing and the aristocrats’ two-wheeled carriages were standing in front of the emperor’s pavilion—to the racetrack. Like the district of Karlshorst in Berlin, it had been developed by my grandfather on the out-of-the-way Treskow Estate, and had later gained the reputation of being the largest steeplechase course in the country. As if it were yesterday I see the parade of huge horses with the little jockeys in their colorful clothes, and the solemnly pacing gentlemen in their mouse-gray morning coats with bow ties at their throats and bulging starched fronts. The women, on the other hand, mostly stuck together and watched one another in the shadow of hats as big as wheels in the hope that some rival could be discovered and dismissed with a crushing remark.
It was a strange, genteel world that had brought my grandfather to Karlshorst. He had been born into the respected Aachen drapers’ family of Straeter, whose branches were spread across the Lower Rhineland and which was so wealthy it could afford every two years to hire a train for a pilgrimage to Rome, where its members were received by the pope in a private audience. Circumstances had brought him into contact with the high nobility; in his twenties he was already travel marshal of the Duke of Sagan, and a little later he went to Donaueschingen as inspector of Prince Fürstenberg’s estates. His early years were largely spent at aristocratic residences in France, and at Château Valençay (once the property of Prince Talleyrand) he had got to know my grandmother, who came from a Donaueschingen family and was a lady-in-waiting to the Fürstenbergs. It was a great love that like Philemon and Baucis’s, lasted until old age, when the Second World War smashed everything.1 For a long time French was mostly spoken in the family and the cooking—onion soup, duck pâté, and crème caramel—was also French. Most of the classics of the neighboring country were in my grandfather’s library in awe-inspiring, leather-bound editions. I sometimes heard him declaiming Racine as he walked up and down in front of his desk, but his favorite authors were Balzac and Flaubert.
My grandfather had arrived in Berlin in 1890, at the time of a sensational murder case. The Heinzes, a married couple, had killed a night watchman. The Heinze case, which my grandfather and many others often compared to the murders of Jack the Ripper, had the side effect of drawing attention to the housing conditions of the poor. As a result two—and later three—groups of wealthy families joined together to establish philanthropic societies to build housing estates. The largest of these projects was initiated by the judge Dr. Otto Hentig, with Prince Karl Egon zu Fürstenberg in charge. Also involved were the Treskows, who had resided in nearby Friedrichsfelde (outside Berlin) since 1816, as well as August von Dönhoff, the Lehndorffs, and other respected families. The well-known architect Oscar Gregorovius also played a part, as did, somewhat later, the more famous Peter Behrens.
My grandfather had never accepted the Heinzes’ excuse that the misery of the slums or the horrors of backyard housing in Wedding had driven them to it. So he tried to find out everything he could about Gotthilf Heinze, whom he often called “Gotthilf the Slasher.” He even carried out detective work to discover masterminds, secret societies, and above all the depraved, red-haired beauty, who was mentioned in some sources, albeit dubious ones: the “angel of the gutter,” as he once described her to me, years later. It was never clear to me, as a boy, whether she had been a prostitute victim or an accomplice of the murderer. My grandfather believed she was an accomplice, and growled, “Typical! He involves his wife in the murder. His lover stays in the background and is there for pleasure.”
In May 1895 the district administrator signed the permit to build on the 150-acre Karlshorst Estate and immediately a kind of competition got under way for the best plots of land. The philanthropic society of Prince zu Fürstenberg proved mo
re than a match for its competitors and appointed my twenty-seven-year-old grandfather as manager. His task, working with Oscar Gregorovius and the local authorities, was to establish a suburb on the land acquired, to lay down the street plan, to parcel up the plots, and to sell them at reasonable prices. At each stage of expansion a new quarter was added: there were streets named after the nobility, those with Rhineland names, the legend quarter, the Wagner quarter, and so on, step by step.
My grandfather mastered his task with great skill, but soon recognized that beyond the comfortable living quarters which still dominated Karlshorst when I was growing up, the place needed certain centers of attraction. So a hospital and a Protestant and a Catholic church were added, and a little park with a small lake that was laid out on previously marshy terrain soon began attracting strollers from a wide area. With prudent planning, the Treskow racecourse was expanded into a center of social life. In later years—in fact, just after my grandfather’s time—a military school also came to Karlshorst. In the end the “little place of troubles,” as he liked to call it, or the “barren sandy heath,” as it was once described in an official document, which on his arrival had consisted of eight houses or rather farms with fewer than a hundred residents, had more than thirty thousand inhabitants.
In the years when I was consciously aware of him, my grandfather was a withdrawn, imperious, austere man, who, during crowded family gatherings, could silence a room with a single dry remark. On the street he was usually to be seen wearing a frock coat and a bowler and carrying a stick. Even then he had an old-fashioned aura, which he played up to with stubborn determination. Unlike my three younger siblings, who kept out of his way as much as possible, my elder brother Wolfgang and I enjoyed talking to him, no matter how monosyllabic he often was, because he was an attentive listener, who always knew how to ask questions that led somewhere. One of my sisters later complained that his face was all-too-glum and “the corners of his mouth always drooped so dreadfully.” But even his silences, so Wolfgang and I found, carried weight. His handkerchief was always sprinkled with a couple of drops of eau de cologne. Passersby greeted him respectfully and doffed their hats with a low gesture that reached almost to the knee and often made us laugh. Older people still remembered that Karlshorst was, in part, his creation.
The woman at his side, my grandmother, was graceful and devoted, and was able to talk to each of her grandchildren in a different way, appropriate to their age. Her life had not always been easy and although the many troubles had left their mark on her face, she displayed no sign of unhappiness; instead, she was cheerful and practical. She was happy when she could make herself useful—that feeling made up for all the burdens, I often heard her say. They had five daughters and—to their everlasting sorrow—no son. Two of the daughters had entered a religious order: one worked on a mission station in Africa; the other (given the beautiful name of Sister Alcantara) was assigned by her superiors to a convent in Merano. She was tall and bore herself with the poise of an abbess but seemed oddly fragile. She had what she called “chest trouble” and contracted in the “chilly convent vaults,” as my mother sometimes complained, a lung infection, from which she died before she was even thirty.
In 1917, during the First World War, the youngest daughter fell ill with diphtheria at the age of fourteen, resulting in complete physical paralysis. My grandparents spent a fortune on distinguished medical specialists and even consulted quacks without ever gaining any relief for her. All day long my aunt Agnes lay on the chaise longue in the dining room and, as she could not move her head, every time someone entered she looked sideways at the door with wide-open eyes, in which there was a reflection of the futile effort of life. In the evening my grandfather had to carry her into her bedroom, casting aside, as I once observed, the pride of an elderly gentleman. If one alluded to her suffering, she would merely respond: “Please! I can manage!”
Dorothea, whom we called Aunt Dolly, was the elegant daughter. She was slim and striking in appearance and, like my mother, had been educated at a boarding school for young ladies in Silesia. Her wardrobe revealed a fondness for bold patterns, which sailed close to the limits of good taste. She usually turned up wearing the very latest hat, a fox fur over her shoulders, its silvered claws glinting in the sun, and discreet gold jewelry around her neck. She was well-spoken and frequently admonished us for talking in a Berlin accent. My father thought that she had acquired an affinity for the big wide world at boarding school in the small town of Liebenthal, whereas my mother left there with poetry and good sense.
Emma Straeter, Joachim Fest’s grandmother, during her years at Valençay
Indeed, my mother, whose name was Elisabeth, but who was called Tetta by the family, was considered the strict one of the sisters. In contrast to her manner, however, which was self-confident and not without a touch of pride, she had a charming side and an attractive warmth in company. The complexity of her character was also evident in her liking for “gentle music,” to which her poetic tastes corresponded. She liked Eichendorff and Mörike, above all, but also Heinrich Heine, except that when she recited his poems she would leave out the last two lines.2 “He doesn’t stand by his feelings,” she would say. “He’s ashamed of them. When you are older and have the aptitude”—she said, turning to my brother and me—“you must write new endings to Heine’s poems. Then I will at last be able to love him completely.”
There was something to my father’s otherwise quite unfair judgment on Dolly. She wanted to make an entrance. The moment her noisy children were out of the house, my mother sat down at the piano and improvised a little before playing her favorite pieces: Beethoven’s “Für Elise,” some Mozart variation or other, and many Czerny études. Finally, she would sing in a pleasant voice a few songs by Schubert and Schumann, and best of all some pieces by Carl Loewe, such as the one about “Herr Heinrich am Vogelherd” (Sir Heinrich at the fowling floor) or “Die Uhr” (The clock). “Why do you do that?” asked Aunt Dolly, puzzled. “Who benefits from it? Why don’t you organize house concerts with guests?” But Tetta, my mother, would not be won over to anything like that.
Thanks to some family connections, my mother had been invited to balls at the Imperial Stables on a number of occasions and, even at an advanced age, she would talk enthusiastically about the cavaliers in tails and colored sashes who had paid court to her. She also talked of chests covered with military decorations and how a young man might let a monocle drop, significantly and revealingly, from the eye at a coarse joke or in feigned surprise. And then there were the lieutenants, who (as she said, losing herself in her memories) “were indeed dashing—I know how much foolish pink from a girl’s face you can still see in that remark.” She no longer remembered whether the attendants who stood around attentively everywhere, intercepting searching looks, wore escarpins with buckles. “But the servants had a matchless way of looking expressionless when one of the cavaliers helped me out of my coat. Beautiful, brilliant, and superficial, like some baroque music,” she said—then, in her turn, without expression, “but gone, gone!” Yet she didn’t mourn those days; because who would mourn a fairy tale once it was over?
For Aunt Dolly, on the other hand, who so relished talk of “higher things,” which she loved for their inimitability, theater and especially music only became significant and affecting in a social context. She came to life in the hum of the gradually filling stalls or to the sound of the instruments tuning up, but she also enjoyed strolling in the lobbies and probably above all seeing the soigné gentlemen who, with a slight inclination, threw her reserved or occasionally brazen glances. She sometimes mentioned these to the accompaniment of girlish giggles, although she was by then almost thirty. It was then that I began to suspect that between men and women there were mysterious understandings that one would have to find out about later.
Everyone wondered why Aunt Dolly, who was everywhere courted by a certain type of experienced gentleman—the kind who (as my mother liked to say) had “unfor
tunately been around a bit”—never found a husband. Only much later was the answer discovered: she had for years been enslaved to a great love, which had robbed her of all sense: a married naval officer from Kiel. Around him she constructed an endless theater of dissemblance. Only my parents knew something of it, and after dropping a few hints they made us promise never to breathe a word. Once, when Aunt Dolly took me to the Gloria Palast at Karlshorst Station, where we saw a romantic film with a tragic ending, she began sniffling surreptitiously into her handkerchief, and then wept quietly to herself through the whole screening, sighing ever more deeply. At the exit, with a strained smile on her still-tearful face, she asked me to leave her alone and find my way home without her.
A couple of days later she turned up at Hentigstrasse at an unusual time and chatted away awkwardly. On my arrival she pulled me into the drawing room and apologized for her “faux pas.” When I said there was nothing to apologize for, she retorted that at her age, too, one had to maintain one’s composure and, even more important, have manners. “My weeping was discourteous.”
Proud Aunt Dolly! I thought. To me, a fourteen-year-old, her every word seemed to betray how much she envied my mother. At the end of 1919 my mother had joined the Bleichröder banking house as an assistant and was going to the city center every day. There she got to know people, gained experience, and even climbed a rung up the career ladder. Aunt Dolly, on the other hand, had set limits to her ambitions early on and become a librarian because she had succumbed to the courtship of that damned naval officer, whose future she hoped to share. Tetta, by contrast, was not at all histrionic; reserved by nature, she did not need to make a splash emotionally or socially. She was not a diva, I once heard her say to one of my father’s friends, who had reproached her for not showing her feelings sufficiently, and, for a while, the remark became a favorite saying in the family: “Mama isn’t a diva!” Less than two years after starting at the bank she had got to know my father and (as she liked to say) “taken a girlish fancy to him,” then “fallen a little in love with him,” subsequently “really fallen in love with him,” and married him soon after. All “quite unsurprising,” all quite “normal,” Aunt Dolly would sometimes say, and perhaps even a little boring, but promising so much more happiness than her own life.
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