6 These girls’ names are all titles of and central to popular soldiers’ marching songs known to all.
TEN
•
Not Home Yet
From Heilbronn I traveled to Freiburg. In my kitbag there was some underwear, my toilet things, the three books I had been left with in Unkel, and the leather-bound poems, which I had in part written down from memory, in part taken from books available to me in the camp. Leafing through the pages I once again read the verses of poets unfamiliar to me until recently, such as Blake and Keats, also Mallarmé and Baudelaire and one or two favorite poems like Auden’s “If I Could Tell You,” which begins “Time will say nothing,” and Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” I had copied them out on evenings at headquarters when I had nothing to do, and then given them as a loose-leaf collection to the bookbinder Franz Scheuer. He had bound the pages so magnificently in leather cut from baseball gloves and the best officers’ boots that even the fat sergeant at the release camp had been taken by the volume.
When I got off the train in Freiburg I was glad—after all the destroyed towns of the European landscape of ruins through which I had passed in the last three years—to see a city that was only a little damaged. The one heavy air raid had not had too serious an impact, apart from a trail of rubble between the cathedral and the main railway station. At any rate, one encountered nowhere here the dirty colors which dominated the devastated cities all the way to Berlin; the aquatint tones of the town, the gentle sandstone red and unobtrusive grays, behind them the green of the castle hill, seemed almost like home. In a letter to my parents, in which for the first time in years I could express myself more or less openly, and, above all, explain why I had not applied for release to Berlin, I wrote: All in all I was out of the world. Now I’m back. Not yet home. But in Freiburg at least, which has almost become in a small way my home. Who would have thought it!
The mother of my friend Helmut put me up in her house in Herdern. Her husband had died in the air raid on the town; her son was buried in France. But her attractive daughter was still there, as was my brother Winfried. After a few hours of exuberant conversation I went for a long walk with my brother—as we also did on the days that followed—across Sonnhalde Hill or up the Castle Hill. He told me about our parents and our two sisters, who, in 1944, after a third warning, had joined the BDM—the League of German Girls—but had concealed their membership from my father. Then he reported on the expulsion from Karlshorst,1 the small flat in the Berlin district of Neukölln that the family had been allocated, the fate of my grandparents, and my Gymnasium class in Freiburg. In the last days of the war, according to Winfried, almost half of my former classmates had been shot not far away on a hillside in Alsace by a unit of General Lattre de Tassigny’s forces that did not want to take prisoners.2
Winfried asked me how I had got through war and captivity, and I told him about the six days without food, the lieutenant from Heidelberg in Unkel, Captain Donaldson, and the escape attempt. During our walk I had the idea that instead of a book about the Italian Renaissance I would make the great cataclysms of history my subject in the coming years, because historical catastrophes were not only a matter of the epoch just passed but of life in general. Winfried merely laughed and said I should come down to earth again as soon as possible. First of all I had to earn my school-leaving certificate or Abitur and study something useful. “The plums are for the middle of life,” he added. “Besides which the topic is not at all as interesting to others as you assume.” People only wanted to hear about the misfortune they had suffered once they were over the worst; but they were a long way from that now. Not even he was there yet.
Our conversation was a clash of two temperaments. Winfried had a greater sense of reality then, and he had wit. On our second or third walk he answered my question about his experiences in his modest way: “Oh, nothing special.” When I then asked what was special that he wanted to conceal behind the “nothing special,” he said simply, “Well, a small escape.” I had to insist before he came out with the story and related how the war had ended for him. In the last days of March 1945, the French troops had reached the other side of the Rhine at Breisach. When Winfried then received his call-up papers, he decided to spend “the next few hours,” as he supposed, in a hiding place on the outskirts of Freiburg. Out of consideration for the Weidners, he let them believe he was obeying the conscription order. In fact, however, he had agreed with the baker Welle, who lived at the end of the street, that he would wait for the arrival of the French in the family’s allotment hut.3
But then the waiting went on and on. The French troops let days pass without making any preparations for a crossing of the Rhine. After Winfried had spent almost two weeks behind piles of coal, potatoes, and refuse, he went for a brief walk “to stretch his legs,” but after only a few steps ran into a Gestapo patrol. He was taken to the same police station in which I had been interrogated months before. Winfried took care not to mention where he had been staying or who had helped him. On the third day he was brought to the local barracks. He was put in a cell with eleven others who had either deserted or, like himself, not obeyed the call-up; no one could say for sure what was going to happen to them. Some thought they would all be shot; others objected that even now there were no executions without formal proceedings; a few claimed to have information that they would all be released within forty-eight hours. The Führer, after all, was “no monster.”
After another few days the twelve prisoners were led to the barracks yard. There a lieutenant with a small staff and four older, very worn-out-looking soldiers were waiting for them. A sergeant announced that they would now march to the nearby town of St. Peter, because the Wehrmacht command considered it too great a risk to have so many “unreliable elements” in the ranks for the forthcoming battle with the French; after all, it was a question of final victory. After some disciplinary instructions the order to march was given.
That afternoon, escorted by the sergeant and the four soldiers, they marched up the Dreisamtal Valley. Winfried assured me that he had never had the slightest doubt that in St. Peter they would be put in front of a firing squad. Halfway there, they took a forest path in order to avoid attracting attention, and after a mile or two stopped for a short rest. He decided, acting on the spur of the moment, to do something “extremely crazy,” as he later said. Without warning, he threw himself to the side and leaped down the slope at a point where there were only a few shrubs growing.
After a moment of astonished silence, he heard agitated commands and shouts behind him.
Shots were fired. But they struck the trees around him and ricocheted and whistled around his head. As he crouched in a hollow, he could hear the voices of two searchers about twenty yards behind him. Then they were ordered back by the sergeant, who, worried about further escape attempts, had remained up on the path with the prisoners. Winfried waited until the sounds of the group had faded away and then made his way back to Herdern. Close to Friedrich Gymnasium he spotted a military police patrol coming up the street, but was able to disappear, unseen, into a house entrance. “That would really have been the end,” he thought as he heard the two men come past the door talking loudly. At the baker’s house they were dismayed, but did not hesitate to let him use the hiding place again.
This time he was more cautious. He spent almost all of the following days underneath a woodpile; he left no trace of his presence when he went out for some fresh air for a quarter of an hour at night and on his return carefully arranged the wood above himself as a decorative chaos. A few times he heard voices very close by. After more than two weeks, the French at last moved into Freiburg on April 20. “I was not free,” Winfried concluded his report. “But I could at least move my limbs. That was quite a lot. It was days before I could walk normally again.” Later it was said that his fellow prisoners had all been shot in St. Peter, but he did not know whether the information was more than a rumor. It was probably true, but he had not checked it. He had ne
ver wanted to make a big thing of his escape.
A few days after my return, just before Christmas 1946, I called on the headmaster of my school. Dr. Breithaupt had been my homeroom teacher and thanks to the vicissitudes of the time had now become rector of the Friedrich Gymnasium. Already on entering his office I realized that he had remained the strict, stiff man who had introduced us to Greek and taught us to read the Odyssey. Since he had enlisted my help privately on a number of occasions, I expected a certain amount of understanding on his part. Instead, he remained surprisingly cool and listened condescendingly to the account of my experiences, which I summed up in a few sentences, before curtly responding to the not unimportant question of which class was to be recommended: “You can enter the top form (senior class), which will give you a bare six months until the examination. Or the class below—there you lose more than a year, seventeen and a half months to be precise. But then you have better prospects for obtaining your certificate. The choice is yours. As rector of the Friedrich Gymnasium it only remains for me to say: there will be no special considerations!” Dr. Breithaupt seemed somewhat taken aback when I merely muttered a disappointed “Thank you,” turned on my heel, and left. That same day I decided that, to lose no time and to get school over with as quickly as possible, I would enter the senior class.
At Christmas my mother came to Freiburg and was likewise put up at the Weidners. She had already been trying since late summer to get the necessary permit from the American occupation authorities, before she was finally allowed to make the journey to the French Zone. We were dismayed by the emaciated, scraggly picture that she presented, and how empty her eyes were. Now we heard for the first time details of the evacuation of Karlshorst in early May 1945, which it was better not to mention in correspondence, since letters were still monitored. Each person was allowed just one suitcase, into which, given the haste that was demanded, my mother had stuffed only what was most necessary: some underwear, bread, a suit and a jacket for my father, some laundry soap, and a few documents quickly snatched up. She had had to abandon her beloved “casket,” buried in the garden.
To list the numerous acts of violence—in particular against the female relatives on my father’s side—would take up an entire chapter. At the beginning, Uncle Berthold on the Walken Farm had borne the barbarities of the Russian conquerors with impotent anger, but when the brutalities against his wife and daughters had gone beyond all measure, he had begged one of the soldiers to show some human consideration. Instead of even listening to him, the soldier had drawn his revolver and shot my uncle in the head. Even more shattering was the fate of my “other” aunt, Franziska, who was crippled by polio: pulled out of her wheelchair and repeatedly raped, she was flung back into her chair and thrown down the cellar stairs, where she died after moaning for more than two hours. It was a long sequence of atrocities, which my mother revealed unwillingly and only after some persuasion.
In those days almost every story ended with acts of violence of some kind. As the Red Army approached, my sisters had left their Gymnasium in the Neumark, east of Berlin, and returned to Berlin; they now learned that their classmates—all aged between twelve and fifteen—had been raped, before being abducted and disappearing in the expanses of Russia. The war—so presumptuously begun and so often accompanied by whipped-up fantasies of final victory—had come back to Germany in the most terrible way.
It was not until some time after her arrival that my mother mentioned the death of her parents, and Winfried agreed with me that she really didn’t want to talk about it at all. She said, however, that my grandmother had died in spring 1945, around the time I was taken prisoner. After the destruction of her house in an air raid and the death of her crippled daughter, she had shown ever less interest in life. That had still been noticeably different on my 1944 visit to Riastrasse, and when I embraced her on taking my leave she had said with a shy smile, “Now you have to grow up! At your age a lad has better things to embrace! Not his grandmother!” Then she embraced me. Later, she had complained that for thirty years she had only been there for her family. But now? What could she do with a life that had no meaning? At the end she had spent many hours in the church and had visibly wasted away. One of the last things she said was that she had served God and her poor daughter “all her life with heart and hand.” That was why she was not worried about the end. The next day the doctors confirmed her death. The certificate noted an advanced immune deficiency. But one of the doctors said drily that she had simply died of life.
My grandfather followed her about a year later. The chaos of the evacuation meant that Karlshorst Hospital, which my grandfather had cofounded, had to be moved to a former hotel in the district of Friedrichshagen, which was where he was taken. Like my grandmother, he too asked every day into the emptiness what was the point of it all. He had always been surrounded by deference; now, after weeks of being moved from one place to another, he found himself in a hospital ward with sixty beds on which groaning patients awaited their end. Several times he asked my mother what else life still held in store for him and when she, at a loss, replied, “Well, no plans, no duties anymore! Just live!” he spoke of being the victim of a fraud. He had always believed that in almost eighty years he would get a couple of clues as to what one was really in this world for. But now he knew that life just made a fool of one.
When he had taken refuge in the hospital he had possessed nothing anymore. In the course of the evacuation, Russian soldiers had first taken his briefcase and his pocket watch, then his jacket and vest, so that he—always the chevalier à la mode—had appeared before the nuns in shirt and suspenders. And the few things of value left to him, including his wallet, had one day been stolen from under his pillow, and a little later, his remaining clothes had also been taken, so that he literally owned nothing anymore except the nightshirt on his back. When he was asked how he felt, he said that he was ashamed of his poverty; after that the nuns placed a screen around his bed, so that he had more privacy. “Yes, it’s better to be alone, when one’s dying!” he said. To the sisters’ admonition not to talk so blasphemously, he merely said that his words were utterly serious. For years everyone had said that his wife had followed him as submissively as a maid. Now he was following her. Without her he no longer knew why he was here. He was leaving life “as quickly as possible.”
Then he asked what the date was. When he heard it was the fourteenth of July, he said that he had nothing more to do, nothing more to say, and nothing at all to celebrate.4 Cause of death should be given as: no interest anymore. He thanked everyone, extended his folded hands toward the nuns standing around his bed, and commended himself to God. It was sinfully desired death, he admitted finally. But God would show understanding; He loved the sinners who stood by their sin. The doctors established typhus as cause of death. Two days later he was taken to the cemetery in a wooden box and put in the earth in a paper bag.
We heard further details about events in Berlin at the end of the war—about the courage of Hannih and Christa and the tragedies in the neighborhood—on our almost daily walks with Mother. She loved the benches on the Castle Hill, but often we also walked over the hills above Herdern to the Sonnenhalde, then on to the “professors’ huts” on Rötebuckweg, where Martin Heidegger lived.5 About our father she said that after his release from Russian captivity in autumn 1945 he had suddenly stood at the door like a shadow, and after a few stumbling steps, supporting himself against the wall with one hand, he had collapsed. Then, over many weeks, he had been “brought back to life” by a nurse. He had regained half of the more than one hundred pounds he had lost and so was now “halfway there” again. Hardly was he able to stand on his feet again when he was already going to political meetings and sitting at Christian Democratic Union committee tables in one of the two—far too big—suits that had been saved.6
From the summer of 1946 he spoke in public again, weak but composed. He talked about the subjects that had determined his life: the gradual collapse of t
he Weimar Republic, the Reichsbanner and the indecisiveness of the republican forces, the “debasement of the law” during the Nazi seizure of power, and the duty to take on political responsibility. Each of his speeches in mostly smoke-filled taverns ended with the sentences with which most of his letters to us also concluded: What had just happened to our country must not happen again. Once was shameful enough.
In early 1947 I found myself sitting behind a school desk again in Freiburg. The rooms were the same, the teachers were the same, the subjects and the names were the same as they had been before: Cicero and Homer and Lessing and Goethe. And although even the faces of my one-year-younger classmates appeared curiously familiar, I felt myself to be in an alien world. I was still crouching in a foxhole, as it were, of which the others hadn’t even heard. It was as if their problems, what they argued about or agreed on, and even their jokes came from very far away. I was not yet, as I had written in my first letter home, back in the world again.
In April Roger Reveille announced he would be coming to Freiburg.7 He had business in nearby Colmar in Alsace and was (as I remembered him from Berlin) loud, charming, and imaginative. He was embarrassed when, because of a chance remark, the subject of the behavior of the French occupiers arose; to the one example of the aggressive arrogance of his fellow countrymen that had been mentioned he could add a dozen more. At lunchtime he invited me to a mess that was reserved for high-ranking French officers before accompanying me back to my apartment for coffee. There I showed him the leather-bound volume with the handwritten poems that I had brought back from captivity. Roger remarked that he would like to have it, but I said that, understandably, there was only one copy. That didn’t bother him, replied Roger, but I demurred. “There’s nothing to be done! It’s my most important memento!”
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