Despite so many things continuing unaffected by current events, it was sometimes possible to discern signs of the strain being placed on society. From the end of 1934, a few months after the so-called Röhm Putsch, following which Hitler raised himself to unchallenged leader, the powers-that-be visibly intervened in everyday life.16 Already six months earlier, one or two petitions by my father for reemployment had been turned down. Then he had brought home from conversations with friends the information that the subject of “racial science” had been introduced in schools, and that air-raid drills in anticipation of war had begun. He also came back from his monthly meetings with news of the imminent ban on Neudeutschland (New Germany), the Catholic strand of the youth movement. Soon there were no more hikes on which, as part of a group, we watched the fire burn down in some clearing as night fell; without much fuss, the Hitler Youth took over the songs of the old youth organizations as if they had always belonged to it.
In the summer of 1934 my father was once again summoned to Lichtenberg Town Hall. A counter clerk told him—in a voice loud enough to be heard by the half dozen other people waiting—that the ban on employment imposed on him was comprehensive. It had come to the knowledge of the authorities that he was giving private lessons. He was therefore informed (and in relating this episode my father imitated the official’s deliberate pauses) “as—a—final—warning—that—he—was—also—forbidden—to—give—private—tuition.”
In the course of the autumn, my grandfather, then seventy years of age, went back to work. He had been a wealthy man for most of his life until the war loans took half of his fortune and the currency devaluations of the postwar years eliminated the rest. He no doubt had a pension, but his own needs and, above all, his desire to help my parents in the difficult position they now found themselves, caused him to become active again. Although as managing director of a private company he had had no professional training, the Köpenicker Bank, simply on the basis of the respect he enjoyed, offered him the opportunity, after a short period of training, to work for them. And so, only a few months later, as manager of the Karlshorst branch of the bank, he went to work every day as an employee, which was something he had never done before.
Personnel file card for Johannes Fest, with entries on his suspension and later dismissal in April and October 1933
One momentous, never forgotten experience of the year that was drawing to a close remains to be mentioned. I no longer know what I expected after its announcement; at any rate I could hardly wait—given all the mysterious hints, of which I tried to make sense—for Aunt Dolly to take me to the opera for the first time. Weeks beforehand she asked to speak to me and demanded a clean collar and polished shoes for “our great evening.” Apart from that she emphasized that I must read the libretto, and two weeks before the performance quizzed me about scenes and arias. I am grateful to her to this day that she chose for me (I was not yet nine years old) Mozart’s The Magic Flute as my entry to the magical world of music. For all my reading efforts and Aunt Dolly’s additional explanations I didn’t understand a word of the meaning of the thing, of Sarastro’s order of priests, the Queen of the Night, or the Trial of Fire and Water, and only Papageno made sense to me, even though no one could tell me why Papagena appeared as an old witch for so long and only toward the end of the piece, when Papageno played his magic music, as an enchanting maiden. But the music has stayed with me all my life. “And once again: no Berlin accent!” Aunt Dolly admonished me as we entered the theater; theaters were “hallowed halls” and she hoped I knew where the term “hallowed halls” came from. In fact, if I remember rightly, it was merely the foyer of the Rose Theatre.17
But overall, the performance was an overwhelming experience. I am even supposed to have asked whether we couldn’t see the opera again the next day. Aunt Dolly merely laughed. But when she realized what a success her invitation had been, we saw Lortzing’s Zar und Zimmermann only five weeks later, then Il Seraglio in a local hall, and later Der Wildschütz, also by Lortzing.18 After many other performances we finally applauded, shortly before my departure from Berlin, The Marriage of Figaro, as well as (so my aunt said) its textual precursor and musical continuation The Barber of Seville. These early opera visits with an “aunt intent on higher things” awakened my taste for all music and gave it a solid foundation.
In early 1936, from our place by the wall, Wolfgang and I eavesdropped on a rare argument between our parents. There had been a strangely irritable atmosphere all day. My mother evidently started it, reminding my father in a few short sentences what she had put up with, politically and personally, in the last three years. She said she wasn’t complaining, but she had never dreamt of such a future. From morning to night she was standing in front of pots, pans, and washboards, and when the day was over she had to attend to the torn clothes of the children, patched five times over. And then, after what seemed like a hesitant pause, she asked whether my father did not, after all, want to reconsider joining the party. The gentlemen from the education authority had called twice in the course of the year to persuade him to give way; at the last visit they had even held out the prospect of rapid promotion. In any case, she couldn’t cope any more … And to mark the end of her plea, after a long pause she added a simple “Please!”
My father replied a little too wordily (as I sometimes thought in the years to come), but at the same time revealed how uneasy he had been about the question for a long time. He said something about the readjustments that she, like many others, had been forced to make. He spoke about habit, which after often difficult beginnings provides a certain degree of stability. He spoke about conscience and trust in God. Also that he himself, as well as my brothers and I, could gradually relieve her of some of the work in the household, and so on. But my mother insisted on an answer, suggesting that joining the party would not change anything: “After all, we remain who we are!” It did not take long for my father to retort: “Precisely not! It would change everything!”
My mother evidently hesitated for a moment. Then she responded that she knew that joining the party would be to lie “to those in charge,” but then let it be a lie! A thousand lies even, if necessary! She had no qualms in that respect. Of course, such a decision amounted to hypocrisy. But she was ready for that. Untruth had always been the weapon of the little people against the powerful; she had nothing else in mind. The life she was leading was so terribly disappointing! Now it seemed to be my father’s turn to be surprised. At any rate he simply said, “We are not little people. Not when it comes to such questions!”
Head next to head we pressed our ears to the wall in order not to miss a word. But we did not find out what happened in the longer intervals, amidst the clearing of throats, the adding of fuel to the tiled stove, and, if we really did hear it properly, occasional sobs. My mother said something about the reproaches of many friends, according to whom my father was too inflexible and only thought of his principles. My father, however, replied that he could not go along with the Nazis, not even a little bit. That, exactly that, was how it stood. Even if their expectations of life had been disappointed as a result. It happened to almost everyone that their dreams ended up on the rubbish heap. Once again there was a pause, before my mother replied, “My dreams aren’t in danger. I’m not talking about them! They were shattered long ago! Don’t fool yourself!” Both of them knew that nothing would change in their lifetimes. They would never get rid of Hitler again. And at the very end, after another of those long delays which were impossible to interpret: “It is just so hard to make that clear to oneself every day.”
Years later, after the war, when I asked her about this argument, my mother remembered it immediately. She had considered every word for some time and had to gather up all of her courage to speak, since she knew what the answer would be and that my father would be in the right; it had taken her a while to get over it. The ten years of their marriage before that had been untroubled. Then from one day to the next everything had turned “dark
.” She had only been in her early thirties. The argument I was talking about had been the beginning of a second phase in her being-in-the-world. After her eternally beloved young days with boarding school, piano and Eichendorff poems, and the early years of marriage, she had been forced to learn that life showed no consideration; more or less from one day to the next everything had been turned upside down.19 For her girlish mind it had been a catastrophe. Sometimes she had thought the rupture would destroy her life. “But we saw it through,” she said after a pause, which I did not interrupt, “even if to this day I don’t know how we managed it.”
On that February day Wolfgang and I became aware for the first time of a serious difference of opinion between our parents. It was a cold winter evening; there was snow on the balcony in front of our room and layers of ice had formed at the edges of the window panes. Only when the conversation ebbed away and we climbed down from the desk did we notice how frozen stiff we were. Wolfgang took me into his bed so that we would warm up and said, finally, “I hope it turns out well!” I responded that it had turned out well. What did he mean?
Once I was in my own bed again, our parents came into the bedroom to check that everything was all right. They whispered something I couldn’t make out. When they had gone I said to Wolfgang that now he could see that I had been right. He replied in a questioning tone, which to me at the time seemed exaggerated, “Perhaps.”
1 Karlshorst was a planned community laid out by architects using grids with geometric patterns, an unusual origin for a European settlement.
2 La Jana was a “scandalous” dancer and film star, whose real name was Henriette Margarethe Hiebel.—Trans.
3 Twilight of Man (Menschheitsdämmerung) is the title of a famous anthology of Expressionist poetry, published in 1919; Storm of Steel (Stahlgewitter) is Ernst Jünger’s 1920 memoir of the Western Front in the First World War; Decline of the West (1917) is a pessimistic work of historical speculation by Oswald Spengler.—Trans.
4 On that date, the German chancellor Franz von Papen removed the democratically elected government of Prussia from office.—Trans.
5 On that day Adolf Hitler became chancellor of the German Reich, which sparked massive public demonstrations of joy throughout Germany.
6 April 20 was Hitler’s birthday, hardly a coincidence.
7 The author is shown with this cone in the photograph on p. 34; traditionally it is filled with candies meant to “sweeten” the start of school and its discipline.
8 Pseudo-French, used in Berlin slang, showing the influence of the important Huguenot presence and tradition in Berlin.
9 A then quite recent song from Franz Lehar’s The Tsarevich.—Trans.
10 Fest is describing the appearance of the Gestapo or Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizei) and its typical mode of operation.
11 Roughly (and without the rhyme): You, nation from the depths / You, nation in the night / don’t forget the fire / stay on your guard!—Trans.
12 “The Seven Swans” appears in a collection by Ludwig Bechstein. “Dwarf Long-Nose,” “The Severed Hand,” and “The Cold Heart” are among Hauff’s tales.—Trans.
13 This mix of Germanic heroic tales, fairy tales, both ancient and modern, and classical literary masterpieces is typical for the exposure to literature of the Bildungsbürger, at least through the first half of the twentieth century.
14 Johann Peter Hebel (1760–1826) is the author of popular, humorous poems and stories of everyday life, some in his native Alemanian dialect. Ernst von Wildenbruch (1845–1909), the grandson of a Prussian prince, wrote patriotic and historical novels, poems, and songs, often on Prussian themes. Christian Morgenstern (1871–1914) is best known for his scurrilous nonsense poems with both a humorous and a melancholy tinge. His more serious poetry and his translations of Scandinavian literature are less known.
Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) was a Prussian officer and remains a major German dramatist whose plays, short prose narratives, and essays, while related to all the major intellectual currents of his time, are largely sui generis. His drama Prinz Friedrich von Homburg poses central moral questions in the context of Prussia’s military legacy and history, as does his most complex novella, Michael Kohlhaas, for the time of Luther and the Protestant Reformation.
Ricarda Huch (1864–1947) is the author of neoromantic and historical novels and novellas who renounced her membership in the Prussian Academy of the Arts in 1933 to protest its takeover by the Nazis.
15 Jakob Wassermann (1873–1934) specialized in novels with a sensationalist content; Der Fall Maurizius (The Maurizius Case) became a film.
16 “Röhm Putsch” was the Nazi designation for three days of murder by the SS (Schutzstaffel) at the end of June 1934, during which the entire leadership of the SA (Sturmabteilung or Brownshirts), including its head and Hitler’s close friend Ernst Röhm, was eliminated; the SS also used this opportunity to kill numerous political opponents within the Nazi movement and outside.
17 “Holy halls” is a quotation from The Magic Flute.—Trans.
18 Albert Lortzing (1801–51) composed and wrote the libretti for popular, often humorous operas.
19 The references from boarding school through early marriage are all intended to show how protected from real life the upbringing of a young “lady” like Fest’s mother was; they also set up the contrast to what she would endure later on.
THREE
•
Even If All Others Do …
One afternoon at the end of 1936, as Wolfgang and I were trying out new slides and leaps on our garden skating rink, my father told us to come to his study. The unusual tone he adopted as he did so made me ask, cheekily, “What’s the matter? Is there a problem again?” With visible reluctance, my father asked us to sit down at the smoking table. First of all he talked about the little summerhouse which had just been completed. He had decided to partition off the front part as living space—a sort of “den” with a desk, books, and drinks—and to keep a number of animals at the back. But, he interrupted himself midsentence—that was not why he had called us.
He wanted to talk to us about a subject, he began, that had been giving him a headache for some months now. He had been prompted by one or two differences of opinion with our mother, who was terribly worried and was hardly able to sleep anymore. No doubt it was also harder for her than for anyone else in the family, and, furthermore, she took everything more seriously than he did. Of course, he knew that with the Nazis taking power, her life—for the time being, at any rate—had come to a stop. Perhaps his trust in God was greater, or perhaps he was only more foolhardy, although to reproach him with being so, as Aunt Dolly did in her haughty moods, was quite wrong. He knew what his responsibilities were. But he also had principles, which he wasn’t going to let anyone call into question. Least of all the “band of criminals” in power.
He repeated the words “band of criminals,” and if we had been a little older we would no doubt have noticed how torn he was. He had discussed what he was about to say with my mother and they had with some effort reached an agreement. From now on there would be a double evening meal: an early one for the three younger children and another one as soon as the little ones were in bed. We belonged to the later sitting. The reason for this division was very simple; he had to have a place in the world where he could talk openly and get his disgust off his chest. Otherwise life would be worth nothing. At least not for him. With the little ones he would have to keep himself in check, as he had done for two years now whenever entering a shop, in front of the lowliest counter clerk, and—by force of law—every time he picked up his children from school. He was incapable of doing that, he said, and concluded with the words, more or less, “A state that turns everything into a lie shall not cross our threshold as well. I shall not submit to the reigning mendacity, at least within the family circle.” That, of course, sounded a little grand, he said. As it was, he only wanted to keep the enforced hypocrisy at bay.
H
e took a deep breath, as if he had got rid of a burden, and walked back and forth between the window and the smoking table a few times. In doing this, he began again, he was turning us into adults, so to speak. With that came a duty to be extremely cautious. Tight lips were the symbol of this state: “Always remember that!” Nothing political that we discussed was for others to hear. Anyone with whom we exchanged a few words could be a Nazi, a traitor, or simply thoughtless. In a dictatorship, distrust was not only a commandment, it was almost a virtue.
And it was just as important, he continued, never to suffer from the isolation which inevitably accompanied opposition to the opinion on the street. He would give us a Latin maxim for that, which we should never forget; it would be best to write it down, then brand it on our memory and throw away the note. The maxim had often helped him, at any rate, and even saved him from making some wrong decisions, because he had rarely made a mistake when he had followed his own judgment alone. He put a piece of paper in front of each of us and dictated: “Etiam si omnes—ego non! It’s from the Gospel According to St. Matthew,” he explained, “the scene on the Mount of Olives.”1 He laughed when he saw what was on my piece of paper. If I remember rightly, I had written something like Essi omniss, ergono. My father stroked my head and said, consolingly, “Don’t worry! There’s time enough for you to learn it!” My brother, who was already at Gymnasium, had written the sentence correctly.
That, more or less, was how the hour in the study passed. I have, understandably enough, reproduced only the gist of my father’s words, no matter how often I later thought of them. After we returned to our room, Wolfgang repeated, with all the superiority of an older brother, that we were adults now. He hoped I knew what that meant. I nodded solemnly, although I didn’t have a clue. Then he added that all of us together now formed a group of conspirators. He proudly pushed against my chest: “Us against the world!” I nodded once again, without having the faintest idea what it might mean to be against the world. I simply felt myself to be favored in some indefinable way by my father, with whom in the recent past I had increasingly got into arguments because of some piece of cheek or other. The way he sometimes acknowledged me from then on with a passing nod, I also interpreted as approval. That evening, after the parental “Good night,” my mother came into our room once more, sat down for a few minutes on Wolfgang’s bed, and later on mine. “I only say cheerful things—or prefer to say nothing,” she had once declared as a Liebenthal rule of life. She stuck to that now. But she looked depressed.
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