Not I

by Joachim C. Fest

  Perhaps, as some acquaintances suspected, the cause of Karl Vaupel’s depression was really his conspicuously attractive, very sporty wife. At any rate she was the reason the two friends drifted apart, because she, in the jargon of the time, was an enthusiastic Nazisse. She was capable of maintaining in all seriousness that the Führer had been “sent by God” and that the Lord had great things in store for Germany. Again and again there were arguments because of her, so that at some point both sides preferred to meet only occasionally and let the decades-old friendship peter out.

  Irmi Vaupel was active in a party organization and, after the outbreak of war, in a uniform-wearing one; it was even rumored that, driven by admiration and ambition, she had risen through the ranks of the guard unit of a women’s concentration camp. After the war she was interned together with her husband. I have forgotten her further career. Kalli Vaupel got to know a very attractive American Jewish woman while he was being interrogated in a camp in Bavaria. She was employed in the U.S. camp administration and he fell in love with her. Since he was not accused of anything he was released after a few months, obtained a divorce, and married the American. Kalli was a weaker and more fickle personality than he had thought, said my father. The times were full of lives which took an absurd course, often dramatically and crazily so. Many were unable to resist the folly of the times. When, toward the end of the Hitler years, they regained their senses, it was too late.

  One of my classmates, with whom I was friends and shared a number of interests, was Gerd Schülke, who lived in public housing close to the hospital. He had an alert, quiet character and lent me books that had made an impression on him. On a map of the world divided into squares we played Battleship; later we replayed historic sea battles from Salamis to Trafalgar and Jutland.17 We threw dice for each movement of a fleet. He also invented the impending naval war in which the German Reich always put to sea against the British fleet. England was the enemy, he said, no other, because one needed to have a strong opponent if the victory was to be worth anything. Yet the course of battle was left to the throw of the dice. Reality, Gerd said, was not so very different.

  Among the high points of the end of the year was the Christmas market around the royal palace. The memory of the majestic yet comfortable building designed by the architect Schlüter is for me always linked to the blissful fairground world of the days before Christmas, to colored lights, tinsel, and gingerbread. We admired the radiant Christmas tree, the merry-go-rounds and the Father Christmases bobbing up and down on them, and enjoyed the smell of baked apples and burnt almonds. And no visit was complete without explanations about the building of the palace or a look at the Schlüter courtyard. And, rising above it all, the somewhat squeaky harmoniums playing Christmas carols. At the booths one could shoot metal arrows at stars, rubber candles, or Christmas balloons, and once by a stroke of luck I won five sticks of candy floss, which was so good for making my sisters’ hair sticky. It was a world of magic, fairground, and pre-Christmas happiness, and every one of these excursions ended with a childhood tragedy: when our parents called out that it was time to go home. From the S-Bahn train we still saw the sky above the palace glowing red, before the image faded away in the twilight of the great city.

  Sometimes one of our parents’ friends also accompanied us. Once it was Felix Ernst with his sleeked-down hair who joined us, and whose little, mysterious smile never left him all evening. Not even on the ghost train, which Wolfgang and I had with a great effort persuaded him to go on, did it change. On another occasion we were joined by Hans Hausdorf, who, during the whole three hours in which we were pushed along between the booths and the candles, balanced a box of pastries for my mother on the tip of a finger. Sometimes the Goderskis also came with us, and once the Patzeks came, with (as we whispered to one another) the “whole flock of kids.”18 But there were always tears when we left.

  In the early days of 1938 we received a call from Dr. Goldschmidt. By chance I picked up the phone. He asked what the new school was like, what my favorite subjects were, and how I got on with the boys from the proletariat. Then he asked to speak to my father. There was something interesting he had to tell him. I stayed in the room and observed from the guest’s chair as my father listened with an increasingly somber expression. Now and then he came out with a “So!” or a “Really!” and toward the end of the conversation made an unintelligible remark. When he had put down the receiver he remained silent at his desk for a while, and then said that in his incorrigible patriotism Dr. Goldschmidt had been trying to convince him that people were making a misjudgment in their eternal touchiness about the Nazis. Today he had gone to a government office on behalf of a client. The official he had had to deal with had been altogether accommodating, despite the “big” party badge in his buttonhole, and in clipped sentences had assented to everything Dr. Goldschmidt had requested, or at least hinted at one or another loophole. When Dr. Goldschmidt had thanked him, the official had replied with a smile, “But Herr Doctor! We’re not monsters after all!”

  “I ask you!” Dr. Goldschmidt had added. “There you have it: not monsters! Just a little bit barracks square in tone! Too loud for our civilian world!” Nevertheless, he preferred that to noncommittal talking around a thing; he had always said that distrust makes one blind. At this remark, said my father, he had been dumbfounded, so that he had merely been able to interject: “And trust even more so.” After this remark Dr. Goldschmidt had said goodbye with a laugh and ironically urged my father to turn over a new leaf. “One more thing that’s incomprehensible,” said my father, when he came to talk about the incident at second dinner: someone who didn’t notice that he was down on the ground, “Even when you shout it in his ears.”

  As usual, when my father was beside himself, my mother’s lips began to tremble and it was easy to imagine that she was about to exclaim, “Please, Hans. Not in front of the children!” Instead, she only looked anxiously from one to the other and remained silent. Hardly had we swallowed our last mouthful when she began to clear the table to prevent any further conversation.

  1 This line, which gives Fest the title of his memoir, may be translated as “Even if all others do—I do not!” The King James translation of this verse (Matthew 26:33) reads rather differently: “Peter answered and said unto him: Though all men shall be offended because of thee, yet will I never be offended.” German Bible translations don’t really correspond, either.—Trans.

  2 Willi Domgraf-Fassbender was a famous and popular baritone, Elly Ney a pianist. Ney was a notably enthusiastic Nazi. Arthur Rother was likewise a keen Nazi; his career continued without a break after 1945.—Trans.

  3 This was the lowest rank of National Socialist party officials above the regular rank and file, the most zealous of whom enforced petty Nazi requirements, such as the hoisting of flags and attendance at rallies, often to the annoyance of their neighbors.

  4 Max Fechner (1892–1973), SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) member, survived the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and joined the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), but was demoted from his positions, imprisoned, and excluded from the party for supporting the striking workers in the uprising of 1953. He was rehabilitated in 1958.

  Fest mentions Fechner and Franz Künstler (SPD) to show his father’s connections to and openness for leftist ideas and persons, to counterbalance his father’s otherwise mainly right-wing leanings.

  5 This is a much higher estimate than professional historians would currently give.—Trans.

  6 Presumably a reference to the jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt.—Trans.

  7 The full title of the left-of-center paramilitary force supported by the SPD, the trade unions, and the Catholic Zentrum party, among others, was Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold (Black-Red-Gold, after the colors of the republican flag).—Trans.

  8 This invocation of the most notoriously deadly battles of World War One is often used to stress the bravery, patriotism, and sacrifices of Ger
man Jews in that war.

  9 The Spittelmarkt was the center of Berlin’s rag trade, in which Jews were very prominent.—Trans.

  10 Empress Auguste Viktoria, wife of the last German emperor, was noted for her promotion of church buildings to overawe the godless Berliners.—Trans.

  11 Adolf Stöcker (1835–1909) was a Protestant pastor and right-wing politician, central to whose program was anti-Semitism; for some years Stöcker was cathedral and court preacher in Berlin before being removed because of his extremism. Theodor Fritsch was an anti-Semitic journalist and pamphleteer, defender of the rights of small trade, active before and after the First World War; he compiled the Handbook on the Jewish Question.—Trans.

  12 Ernst Thälmann (1886–1944), German Communist leader who ran for the presidency of the Weimar Republic against Hindenburg and Hitler. The Führer hated him intensely and had him sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1933, where he was executed on August 28, 1944.

  13 The “mosque” mentioned above.—Trans.

  14 A Horch is the ultimate prestige motor car of the period; Adolf Hitler was driven in one.

  15 Paul Linke’s “Berliner Luft” song is to Germans what Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” is to Americans. And the big show People, Animals, Sensations was turned into a popular movie.

  16 These German schoolboy’s caps of various shapes, in the colors of the school, were normally the only item of uniform worn by Gymnasium students and identified them as such.—Trans.

  17 These are major historical maritime battles from the Greeks via the Napoleonic Wars to the First World War; to Germans it is the Battle of Skagerrak, not Jutland.

  18 This is an allusion to a children’s song in which all the birds return in spring: “Amsel, Drossel, Fink und Star, und die ganze Vogelschar” (Blackbird, thrushes, finch and starlings, and the whole flock of birds).

  FOUR

  •

  Don’t Ever Become Sentimental!

  It was an utterly politicized world in which we were growing up. Many conversations and almost all personal decisions were made with an eye to the prevailing situation. Certainly, I know contemporaries who also grew up in Berlin at this time who perceived things differently. Apart from the National Prayer, which in some schools was recited in chorus on National Socialist celebration days, the Hitler Youth uniform, and the youth movement songs like the one about the wild geese sweeping through the night with shrill cries, they were not affected by politics.1

  Nevertheless, the traditional rules of upbringing still applied, in our home perhaps even a little more than elsewhere. But they were never talked about, except in the form of the fixed formulas that we heard again and again, but whose cryptic meaning we did not understand until later: Don’t pout!, Don’t make such a fuss!, Children shouldn’t talk without being spoken to! And at table one was not to mention money, scandals, or the food being served. The principles expressed in such rules were never expanded on. No words were lost on them. They were taken as self-explanatory and were considered as basic to proper behavior. Once, when my mother complained about my impudence, my father said, “Just let him be! Let him be cheeky! Here at least. We just have to teach him where the limits are. If he doesn’t grasp it here, then outside he’ll be shown the limit soon enough.”

  With all of that, our almost implicit upbringing was the very antithesis of the regime with its anticivic impulse, and today, after the passing of the years, I see it as a kind of story of civil development in uncivil times. Those in power knew nothing of civilized social intercourse, my father assured us, and consequently they were not ruling over a thousand-year Reich, but one that went back at least five thousand years, “deep into the primeval forest.” In a paper on education he noted: “All theories of education derive from a chorus of many voices. It stretches from the Ten Commandments to the moral treatises of philosophy and the great works of literature, and to much else to which whole libraries bear witness. And all of it is directed at a really quite modest goal: to teach human beings a few self-evident truths.”

  Translated into everyday terms these self-evident truths amounted to setting store by “decency” and “good manners” and to showing “consideration.” Apart from which one should not regard formality, as Hans Hausdorf, my parents’ friend, with his love of paradox, once said, “as mere formality.” And my mother liked to conclude her educational epistles with a sentence we had heard countless times since early childhood, whether one of us had cut his knee and my mother was attending to it with her bottle of iodine, or one of us complained about unfair marks or about a referee whom we thought had constantly blown his whistle to penalize our football club SC Karlshorst: “Just don’t get sentimental!”—which for her meant don’t moan, don’t feel sorry for yourself, don’t weep tears for what can’t be helped. Once, when Christa, the wilder of my two sisters, had fallen and sought help from my mother with a bleeding knee, I heard my mother say, while soothingly stroking her, “Don’t cry, my dear! Don’t cry! Weeping is for the maid’s room!” A certain amount of social pride was always involved in the ban on self-pity. But far more important than that was the feeling of being subject to a stricter code of conduct.

  Much more often, however, there was the world of untroubled days, on which no homework had to be done, none of our duties—increasing in number as one grew older—had to be carried out, and there were no bottles of iodine to be seen far and wide. The summer holidays were the high point. When July came we regularly traveled to the Walken, my grandparents’ isolated farm, a couple of miles from the village of Liebenau in the Neumark of Brandenburg. My uncle Berthold had taken it over when he married one of my father’s elder sisters. He was a capable, hardworking man. Everyone feared his strictness; and his mustache, stiffly drawn out when he went to church, further increased the impression of a rough countryman’s temperament. The farm was situated in a landscape of frugal dignity, and the gentle hills across which plow and harrow had to be drawn made cultivation that much more difficult. But my uncle had two sons and two daughters, who were as hardworking as he was and blessed with as practical an intelligence. They were between five and ten years older than us. As far as we were concerned they coped quite effortlessly with a difficult role somewhere between that of minder and playmate. We children were particularly taken by the cheerful Irene. She taught us to swim, accompanied us as we lay in wait for and tried to hunt wild rabbits (usually in vain), and instructed us how to catch field mice, which bit us if they could, on the freshly harvested fields. Authority can often make children flinch, but she exercised it without the least trace of intimidation. We all loved her.

  The farmstead formed a square, with a domestic wing, two stable-and-stall wings, and a barn with a threshing floor. It had two gates, one opening onto the sandy road to Liebenau, the other onto a slightly sloping track, which led past a pine wood to nearby Lake Packlitz. The farm buildings with the large inner yard lay at the center of more than two hundred acres of scattered fields, which demanded at least ten months a year of exhausting work. When we were announced at holiday time, Uncle Berthold hitched up the horses and waited for us at Schwiebus Station twelve miles away. In his good suit, wearing a homburg hat and with an “anointed mustache,” as we called it, he sat on the “throne” of the shiny Sunday carriage. With awkward courtesy he invited one of us children to sit up on the driver’s seat beside him. If it was too hot my mother opened her little parasol, and we children poked fun at her and said she looked like a princess, who on some whim had ordered her liveried servants to climb down and make their way back to the castle on foot. She smiled then and hugged whichever of her children had the funniest idea as the story was spun out further and further. And sometimes, if the child was sitting farther away on the coach seat, she stroked his or her head.

  The drive from Schwiebus seemed endless and often took two hours or more. When it was along deep, bumpy, sandy tracks, the flanks of the horses were stained by sweaty foam in the afternoon heat, and the buzzing
horseflies circled excitedly around them. Once at the farmyard we used a couple of rags to kill the insects, which, exhausted by their bloodsucking, had mainly settled on the horses’ necks and haunches. Meanwhile, Uncle Berthold changed into his working clothes and with a long peel, which our aunt handed him, drew eight to ten trays of still-steaming cakes out of the oven: crumble-topped Bienenstich and apple cake, whose scent spread to the farthest corners of the house.

  As a tireless workingman, my uncle had only one blind spot: he could not imagine that beyond work and perhaps prayer there was any other meaningful activity in life. So it was usually already on the evening of our arrival that he allocated our tasks for the next day. “We rise at five!” he said. “That’s normal here, even for city layabouts!” Over the years a running battle developed between him and us boys, when, always at nightfall, he issued his instructions for gleaning, haymaking, or stacking sheaves. Only my sisters, gentle Hannih and boisterous Christa, were spared. In the beginning we asked or pleaded for a couple of hours of swimming in the lake or for time to read. But my uncle simply growled something about “nonsense” and that was the end of it.

  We, however, thought as obedient sons: No complaining! Just don’t get sentimental! Every evening, after we had gone across to one of the tiny bedrooms from the kitchen with our candles, Wolfgang, with Winfried and me, elaborated cunning strategies that would enable us to slip away while passing through a wood and gather mushrooms or on a hilly field chase partridges. But soon the cleverest tricks we thought up came to nothing, because my uncle kept an all too suspicious eye on us. Sometimes we also hid fishing rods in a hazel bush and the next morning made our way to the nearby lock, where the fish liked to linger in the bubbling water. But neither the pail with barbels, tench, eels, and puny whitefish we brought back or the middling pike we now and then transported in a second pail were enough to pacify my uncle. We had not obeyed his instructions, he barked.