Not I

by Joachim C. Fest

  12 Friedrich von Matthisson (1761–1831); Ludwig Heinrich Christoph Hölty (1748–76), author of ballads and emotionally evocative poems; the Stolberg brothers, Counts Christian (1748–1821) and Friedrich Leopold (1750–1819), are best known as Goethe’s travel companions; both dabbled in poetry and drama.

  13 August Count von Platen (1796–1835) was a master poet who preferred demanding forms like sonnets and ghasels; he also wrote popular ballads and political songs. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, whose complex and profound works span a wide variety of forms; the poems cited here and later are an integral part of any educated German’s cultural vocabulary.

  14 This is actually the last line of Goethe’s poem “Nachtgesang” and the first line of a poem by Hoffmann von Fallersleben written in 1840.

  15 Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825–98) is famous for his tightly constructed, powerful prose and poetry, including oft-quoted ballads blending form, rhythm, and content in masterful fashion. Emil Strauss (1866–1960) was a minor prose writer, mainly known for the novel mentioned here.

  16 This complex of several large museums, dedicated to major exhibits of ancient monuments and art as well as paintings through the ages, is located on an island and constitutes the heart of Berlin’s immense collection of cultural treasures even today.

  17 The reference here is to the de facto dictatorship of Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya, the plenipotentiary ruler of Hungary from 1920 through 1944.

  18 This reference to Hungary’s national dance, the csárdás, invokes the popular stereotype among German speakers of the Hungarians’ alleged fiery temperament, in love and argument.

  19 Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), writer and pacifist, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946 before his novels were discovered by British and American youth of the counterculture movement of the 1960s, especially his novel Steppenwolf.

  20 Thomas Mann (1875–1955), novelist and antifascist exile, received the Nobel Prize in 1929 and became controversial politically with his public pronouncements in critical essays; after 1918 he offended the German patriots on the right, after 1945 he was distrusted by the left. His many novels and novellas reflect on the incompatibility of ordinary life and the life of the spirit or mind, especially as manifested in the artist’s sensibilities. Refusing the blandishments of both postwar German states, he settled in neutral but German-speaking Switzerland.

  21 Felix Dahn (1834–1912) was a professor of history and writer of historical novels focusing on the conquest of the Roman Empire by the Germanic tribes. In his Struggle for Rome he describes the burial of the Gothic king, Alaric, in the River Busento somewhere near Cosenza, a scene immortalized—and memorized by German schoolboys—in August von Platen’s poem “Das Grab im Busento” (The grave in the Busento).

  22 The “German greeting” (der deutsche Gruss) was “Heil Hitler!” The Hitler salute was offered with outstretched right arm; most non-Nazis refused to use it on everyday occasions but had to comply at official functions and in government offices. It was also required in writing in official documents.

  23 Schalke 04 and Rapid Vienna were professional soccer clubs playing in the same league at the time within the unified German-Austrian entity created in 1938. The German shepherd reference is, of course, to Hitler’s favorite dog breed, now favored by those who would emulate the Führer.

  24 It was, in fact, a question whether they would ever see each other again, with good reasons to doubt it.

  25 These German masters of the Baroque were all primarily keyboard musicians who wrote many pieces suitable for piano exercises on any level.

  26 Variations by Mozart on a French tune best known in English as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”—Trans.

  27 The Song of the Nibelungs is a medieval Germanic epic about the glory and fall of the Burgundian royal house among the Huns led by Attila; its oldest extant written version dates from c. 1200, but it contains much older materials. It became something of a cult item because of Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung cycle and the Nazi interest in the Germanic past; both re- and misinterpreted the original epic and its ethos.

  Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) is often regarded as Germany’s greatest lyrical poet; his Hyperion (1797–99) is a poetic novel written in epistolary form, expressing the author’s deeply felt romantic yearning and his love for an idealized ancient Greece.

  Knut Hamsun (1859–1952), Norwegian Nobel laureate (1920), was a novelist of the simple stark rural life; he was much admired by the Nazis and published in the Quisling newspapers, for which he was fined after 1945.

  28 Alfred Döblin (1887–1957) was a neurologist and writer who left Germany in 1933 and returned in 1945. His novels, especially Berlin Alexanderplatz, paint a very dense and often depressing picture of the helplessness of the individual in both nature and modern society.

  29 Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), sometimes regarded as the chief ideologue of Nazism (although not by the Nazi leaders themselves), was the main publicist and developer of Nazi ideas; condemned to death by the Nürnberg Tribunal, he was executed in 1946.

  30 In the Battle of Jena and Auerstedt (October 14, 1806), Napoleon decisively defeated and destroyed the famed Prussian army, opening the way for a complete reorganization of the German Reich and Europe as a whole. It marked the end of the Holy Roman Empire and laid the groundwork for Prussian reforms leading to the Wilhelminian Reich of 1870.

  FIVE

  •

  Leave-takings

  I have very happy memories of the summer of 1939. One glorious day followed another, and it was so blissfully hot for so long that the driver of the milk delivery cart at best handed out only small splinters of ice. Sometimes the water cart came up the street, always surrounded by a crowd of boisterous children, and I have never forgotten the smell of the water sprayed on the steaming asphalt. For long stretches we would wait for an unguarded moment, so that we could stand under the curving jet of water, until, as with the milk cart, the driver chased us away. In the heat it was too much effort to throw the heavy ball we used for dodgeball, so we usually played Treibeball instead, the point of which was to drive the opposing team as far as possible up or down the street with a smaller leather ball.

  Despite the blazing heat we occasionally still played soccer. I know that when the legendary Breslau Eleven beat Denmark 8–0 (even today I can rattle off the names of the players, beginning with Jacob, Janes, Münzenberg, and going on with Kupfer, Goldbrunner, and Kitzinger), our Hentigstrasse 1937 lost 8–0 to Marksburgstrasse—a disgrace that over the years demanded revenge, which we managed a few times.1 In that last summer of peace the fruit bushes were heavy with fruit, and we were busy the whole day carrying water for the garden and the hens. At the end of the summer holidays we went to the Walken Farm as usual, but hardly were we back in Berlin again—after mischievous scraps with my uncle and swimming in Packlitzsee Lake—when the skies darkened.

  There would be war, my father reported from meetings with his circle, and it was imminent. Hardly anyone, however, to whom he passed on the information wanted to believe it. “You and your pessimism!” he was told, even by friends. Then, when the conflict did break out, he had yet another disappointment. He and his friends had been unanimous that Hitler was the “daredevil crybaby type”: such people often went to the limit, but when faced with determined resistance their nerve broke, and with whatever malice was left in them they put a bullet through their heads. In that sense, they were all agreed, Hitler was a born suicide. Now the English and the French had held firm, but Hitler had still not killed himself. “The rules,” said my father at second supper, “just don’t apply to him.”

  After church on Sunday, September 3, 1939—as the two-hour British ultimatum began to run out—we went to our grandparents’ for breakfast. My mother was very worried; a few days before I had heard her say to my father, “Now they’ll take our children as well!” They had already been trying to do that for yea
rs, he had replied, but hadn’t managed it. Then my grandfather had tried to reassure her by saying that Wolfgang and I were simply too young for this war; the technology would not permit the fronts to freeze into trench warfare again and the fighting would be limited to one or two years at most. In the early afternoon, when we set off home along Stechlinstrasse to the Seepark, past the tall rhododendron bushes and magnolias, it was striking how many of those out walking once again greeted my father; even those who had previously crossed the road to avoid him exchanged a few words. No doubt the majority of Germans were still “loyal to the Führer,” but a few seemed, for the first time, to have an inkling that the country had entered on a dangerous adventure.

  We first noticed the war because all the streetlamps were extinguished with one stroke. As night fell, black cardboard roller blinds were pulled down over the windows and, wherever they were forgotten, a chorus of “Lights out!” would sound from the streets below. There one encountered more and more pedestrians with a luminous patch on their coats or trying to find their way with a weak pocket flashlight. Instead of the water cart, a vehicle now came down the street whose driver called, “Firewood for potato peelings! Come on, people! Who’s still got potato peelings, raw or cooked? I can give you best firewood for the stove!” And at the same time he rang a bell.2

  Apart from that the war manifested itself in the acceleration of life. Passersby, among whom there were suddenly soldiers and nurses, seemed to walk more hastily down the street; the train conductors called out their commands more impatiently; the victory announcements on the wireless were louder than ever, interrupted by the so-called England song,3 alternating with the Erikas, and of course all the proud women whose heart Heinz Rühmann had broken with his stolid charm.4 A large winged bomb, which years before had been set up as a monument at the Rondeel, a circular flower bed, was one day given a floral decoration in the colors of the British flag, and many wondered whether the arrangement was intended for the brave German aircrews or their victims. Then again, from the open windows, the booming sound of speeches, rallies, shouts of Heil! from the radio receivers. A friend of my parents was supposed to have locked her two maids in the radio room for the broadcast of a Hitler speech, saying that since they had voted for the man, they should also hear word for word what he had to say. My father remarked one evening that he could no longer bear the never-ending “pathetic howls”; the only place pathos was still acceptable these days was when one ordered pea soup at Aschinger’s.5 I thought that a very witty expression. But Wolfgang was not impressed; he thought the joke was itself pathetic.

  At Christmas 1939 I found among my presents—next to a pullover, three pairs of socks, and a shirt—a book on English sea power written by a respected British historian. In explanation, my father said it was a substitute, as it were, for Buddenbrooks, because books on such topics were more useful than anything that had been “thought up,” and in this case it informed the reader about the kind of opponent Hitler had taken on. Close to tears, I insisted, when he tried to console me, that the book had spoiled my whole Christmas. At first my father thought he could change my mind with soothing words. But when I became rapidly more testy and asked why it could not at least have been a book about the Renaissance, he accused me of ingratitude and said I was ruining Christmas for everyone else. Angrily and with a degree of childish contrariness, I replied that he should not talk to me like that. After all, we were “facing the world” together. My father gave me a searching look, and I was afraid he was going to lose his temper. But then he simply hugged me. This wordless gesture was an expression of both acknowledgment and self-criticism. The episode was never mentioned again.

  We soon found support in “facing the world.” For some time we had observed the new priest, Father Johannes Wittenbrink, saying his breviary on the paths of the church garden next door. Once my father had exchanged a few words with him, the two men found they had opinions in common and out of the almost daily exchange there soon developed a friendship. Aside from the services, which he conducted, with great liturgical earnestness, according to the Benedictine model, the priest turned out to be an educated man as well as one who laughed easily. Tall and with natural dignity, he had a face full of laughter lines.

  Wittenbrink came from the coal-mining town of Waldenburg in Silesia, and he was very attached to the Austrian world. His wide interests in Habsburg history, the visual arts, and music he saw as being an inheritance from his mother, born a princess of Pless, the offspring of an ancient Silesian noble family that could be traced back to the twelfth century. He owed his comic talent, on the other hand, to his father, a veterinarian. Whenever the opportunity arose, he acted out comic situations for us. I still remember his imitation of a speaker at Hyde Park Corner in London who had a speech impediment, so that every s or th came out as a sh. Or he mimicked a lady in the Café de Paris, who wanted to get rid of an annoying hair in her nose and at first sought cover behind the wine list, then made use of a silk scarf and finally the bigpetaled flower in her buttonhole. But before she was successful, some of the customers sitting around her, after first trying to suppress it, began to roar with laughter, which gave the narrator an opportunity to imitate the varied registers of hilarity that resounded throughout the establishment.

  A friendship arose first of all out of the bond of Catholicism, as of religion altogether, which was something my parents took for granted. They were both—by disposition and education—religious people. The family went to church every Sunday and, of course, I and Wolfgang and Winfried were altar boys. In 1936, when the new church was built, we had carried stones or building materials, and with other children tried to make ourselves useful in one way or another. For all that, my father was not blind to the disastrous political decisions made by the Catholic Church; for some time, however, he took them to be an expression of ecclesiastical unworldliness.6 At any rate, he never wavered in his conviction that a human being without faith was “incomplete.” Neither reason nor walking upright separated him from the apes; the difference between the two lay in the need for a Beyond.

  What began as casual conversation became firm friendship when my father and Wittenbrink began to exchange political views under the chestnuts by the garden fence. When they realized they were of one mind about Hitler as the “mask of the Anti-God,” trust grew and the range of subjects discussed broadened. Once, I came up to them as they were discussing whether resistance to a dictatorship was theologically justified or whether killing a tyrant was a sin, and for the first time I heard names like Althusius and concepts such as that of the two kingdoms.7 On another occasion they were discussing the question that came up again and again: how could the creator allow evil in the world? Another question was whether a confessant could be given absolution if, while acknowledging his fantasies of hatred against a neighbor or a political regime, he continued to hate as he sat in the confessional and had no intention of summoning up the repentance required for absolution. I followed these sometimes passionate debates from my seat at the garden table, where I did my homework in the summer. On the question of absolution Wittenbrink was not to be moved. “There can be no absolution for those who continue to hate!” he insisted, there was not the least theological doubt about that. My father’s objections to the strict interpretation were in a sense right, but the church could not allow him that right. My father was silent for a while, then tried to come up with further justifications, and muttered as he walked away, shaking his head, that God would show understanding; at any rate, he trusted Him more than any theologian.

  But nontheological issues were also discussed. For example, whether Protestantism—after the experiences of recent years, and given sermons like the one about the church as God’s SA troop—had a future. My father argued that the German language owed Protestantism a great deal, thanks to Luther, music owed much to Johann Sebastian Bach, and the culture as a whole from Lichtenberg to Nietzsche was indebted to the Protestant parsonage. Protestantism was not yet so dead that it
could be unhesitatingly written off. And the Confessing Church should not be forgotten either.8

  Leaning on the fence, their arms folded, the two men agreed, in the further course of their conversation, that the Catholic Church, too, had initially not stood the test of the Hitler years without reproach. Once or twice the conversation lost itself in speculation, as, for instance, the question of whether there was music in the Beyond. Certainly not the “utterly heathen” compositions of Richard Wagner, Wittenbrink objected, almost in fright, but definitely Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert, above all Schubert. My father found such reflections quite misguided. Then what about the suicidal Heinrich von Kleist, he objected, the Goethe of Elective Affinities, or the Marquis de Sade with his obsession with sin? He granted a chance of heaven to all musicians, poets, and artists, because the foolishness which they thought up would no longer be of any significance in the Beyond. He personally hoped to hear Paul Lincke or Emmerich Kálmán as well as Schubert over there, and if he had any say in the matter Claire Waldoff would be allowed to perform, too.9

  For all the shadows that lay over these conversations, they were tremendously varied and often playful, and years later my father still remembered them with affection. It had been one opportunity, he declared, of establishing a counterweight to the sequence of great impertinences which the Nazi regime had imposed on him. If, from the window of his study he saw the priest coming down the garden path next door, he often hurried straight downstairs to his “academy,” as he sometimes called it, and Wittenbrink, likewise, seemed only too pleased at the opportunity to interrupt his saying of the breviary. For me at the garden table it was a kind of graduate school or at least the antechamber to it. For the first time I became aware of the wealth of topics, the absurdities of the world, and beyond that of how many questions there were on which opposing opinions could be held. Furthermore, I discovered what pleasure there was in contradiction, as well as in the effort to develop grounds for one’s own arguments and to present them as convincingly as possible. The most important lesson I took from those conversations, however, was that a discussion conducted between friends had certain rules. Sometimes I thought that these “garden-fence conversations” had such an unforgettable effect because no sentence was directed didactically at me. Admittedly, now and then, when it came to political or erotic topics, one or another of the two men cast a worried glance over at me. But I was never told not to listen or to concern myself with the black currant bushes in a remote part of the garden.