Johannes Fest, in a passport-size photo taken about six months after his return from Russian captivity
As he was leaving he put the volume in his pocket as if it were a matter of course. “Hey! Hey, Roger!” I exclaimed. “You can’t do that!” We had just been talking about civilized forms of behavior. He shouldn’t act like an officer in the occupation forces. I could not give away the book, because my heart and my memories were attached to it. But he acted as if he didn’t hear me and went out to his car. “Roger!” I repeated loudly. “Please, leave me the book! It’s also a trophy! I can explain it to you!” But Roger was now someone with business to do. “I’m sorry!” he said at the car door and patted his pocket with the palm of his hand. “I wanted to have it from the start! And still do! Don’t let it bother you! A small reparation!” I angrily went back into the house even before he had started the engine. Soon after, Roger wrote me a letter of thanks for my welcome, the friendliness of which he would not forget. I never replied to it—nor to a further letter which followed a couple of weeks later.
Soon I found time again for the things I liked and which I had long done without. In the first concert for which I obtained a ticket, Wilhelm Backhaus played Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, and I got into conversation with another member of the audience, who found the composer’s pathos profoundly French. I replied that Beethoven’s metaphysics, on the other hand, were incorrigibly German. My neighbor said one didn’t talk in such “national” terms anymore; that would be impossible for a generation or more. After that a longer discussion developed in which my acquaintance revealed himself to be a lecturer from Tübingen. The exchange ended with my question: Was it still acceptable to say that Beethoven was German? He said the statement was indisputable, but it was better to refrain from making it. “Our country,” he concluded, “is not à la mode at the moment.” He wondered if I had noticed this fact.
A longer-lasting friendship developed with Fritz Werner, the manager of the University Bookshop am Augustinermuseum. His quiet, bespectacled appearance did not at all betray his passionate love of literature. He looked like a character from Thomas Mann’s gallery of eccentrics, even if another friend later remarked he was more like a figure from the paintings of Carl Spitzweg.8 He was slight and he carefully combed streaks of hair across his bald head, which was framed by a circle of unruly curls. His great love was the poet Gottfried Benn, and already by my third or fourth visit he invited me into his office at the back of the shop, where between tall stacks of books he introduced me to poems such as “Negerbraut” and “Jena,” and attuned me to the unmistakably “Berlin tone” of the poet. Gottfried Benn introduced me to a swagger in verse form such as I had never encountered before. From him I also learned phrases like “jostling blood,” “burning gorse,” “honied lands,” and “waves of white violets.” It was a completely new lyrical realm that opened up before me, and once he realized how much I was affected by Benn, Werner even cleared a corner of the shop for me to read the problematic essays of the poet, in which he is all too often carried away by his own brilliance. But Werner did not lend me anything too valuable, he informed me; for him Benn belonged on the top shelf, because anywhere else he risked losing him.
Instead he offered me some titles from his “secret chest.” I should be familiar with Werner Bergengruen’s A Matter of Conscience, as with everything by Stefan Andres, he said.9 He also fished out something by Knut Hamsun, who only four years before was being celebrated, as he noted with a scornful laugh, but was now forbidden. But he would think of me, he added, and of Ernst Rowohlt’s first cheap paperbacks; I got Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and, as a special favor, Tucholsky’s Castle Gripsholm.10 “No one gets more than one paperback,” he said. I was the exception. Nevertheless, as he reproached me years later, after that I was constantly pestering him for some large, cloth-bound American or French volume. Sighing, Werner took note but first introduced me to a circle of young poets founded by Claus Bremer and Rainer Maria Gerhardt that met once a month at the department store on the Cathedral Square. Once I even read two poems I had written to the few people who gathered for the department-store evenings. I lost them afterward.
At about the same time I received my school-leaving certificate and—thanks to my old Berlin school where things were drummed into one—I had good marks in Latin and Greek, as well as German and history, so that I easily achieved the grade average required at that time for university admission.11 Ten days later, provided with an American special permit for those persecuted by the Nazis for their political views, which also covered close family members, Winfried and I set out for Berlin.12
I interrupted the journey in Mannheim to see my fellow escapee Wolfgang Münkel again, while Winfried went on to Frankfurt. It was long after midnight in the ruined city and we were still exchanging memories when we suddenly heard someone throwing pebbles at the window and shouting something. It was a woman’s voice, speaking German with a guttural accent: “Open up! It’s me!” Then came an unintelligible name. Puzzled, Wolfgang looked at me. “Should we open up?” he wondered. “At night?” I said there were two of us and we had hardly anything to fear. He went cautiously down the stairs; I followed at a distance. Then I heard a scream, followed by silence. When I—not without some anxiety—went farther downstairs, there was a couple passionately kissing at the door. A little later Wolfgang introduced me to Archivolde, the young Dutch woman about whom he had talked incessantly in our escape box. It was the first time they had seen each other after almost two years, and, Wolfgang said, he interpreted as a good sign the coincidence that the day on which we had met again had also reunited him with his great love. Now all obstacles would be overcome.
In Frankfurt I met up again with Winfried. We boarded a transport plane in which some seats had been installed and for the first time the picture of which I had taken in only scattered elements in captivity took on firmer contours. A new world of unblemished appearances presented itself to us. The stewards who accompanied us to the plane displayed the perfectly creased elegance of American soldiers, and the immaculately made-up stewardesses who showed us to our seats and served drinks provided evidence that it was not just courtesy that could be acquired, but that every detail from permed blond hair to the most winning smile was a matter of skill.
A royal reception awaited us at Tempelhof Airport. The whole family had turned up and the greetings were exuberant, with many “Hallos!,” embraces, and tears. There were about ten friends standing beside my parents and sisters: Hausdorf and the Ernst family, Wigbert Gans and his mother, Paul Mielitz, and some of Winfried’s friends as well, but also Aunt Dolly wearing clothes of a somewhat faded splendor. I proposed going to an Aschinger’s establishment nearby. I would, I said, so much like to eat a welcome sausage, if there were enough meat ration coupons to go around. Two in the reception party had come by car; Wigbert Gans, his mother, and Winfried’s friends had come by bike. Even years later, whenever I remembered the cheerful bustle in Aschinger’s, I had to think of the story that Fritz Kortner told at Walther Hirsch’s house.13 How a taxi driver at Tempelhof had recognized him on his first visit to Berlin after the war, and had greeted him by name and tugged the peak of his cap. Asked how things had been in the years that had passed, the driver had replied, gesturing at the expanse of ruins all around, “You know, Mr. Kortner, you actually didn’t miss much!” Kortner added that this one sentence, imaginable only in Berlin, had for a moment allowed him to forget the revolting Nazi period and made return easier for him.
Berlin took your breath away. I had passed through Frankfurt, Cologne, Düsseldorf, and several cities in the Ruhr, but none was like Berlin.14 Even as the plane banked over the city toward Tempelhof there was nothing to be seen but a gray-brown desert of ruins, stretching to the horizon. The central east–west axis with the Tiergarten park, which I could make out, was an extended wasteland. I recognized the district around Nollendorfplatz and the quarters of the city center, but everywhere rubble was heape
d up behind eerily empty facades. Later, I saw a district that I had once recognized by its churches, shops, or public buildings; it was identified now only by a few surviving street signs. Often one strayed for minutes at a time before hills of rubble as tall as a house and asked oneself how people could be living in these ruins. Yet there was a bustle of activity, people were all going somewhere on urgent business, most of them with their clothes hanging loosely on their bodies, and, curiously, these passersby gaunt with hunger often seemed to me to be smeared with soot, their faces to display a kind of dirty, ghostly pallor.
Aunt Dolly with the author in the 1950s
Among the curiosities of my first impressions was also the unfamiliar music which could be heard in so many places: boogie-woogie, Glenn Miller, drawn-out howling clarinet notes in between. On Hasenheide, on Schlossstrasse near Innsbrucker Platz, and in numerous other places there were dance bars from which the music of popular American bands boomed out onto the street. “Don’t Fence Me In,” “Sentimental Journey,” and “I’m Beginning to See the Light”: these were tunes I soon could not get out of my head. The American Forces Network and the German radio stations also broadcast this ever more popular music, which was constantly being whistled on buses and trams.15 Every pub had jukeboxes, Coca-Cola, Nescafé, and Hershey chocolate bars. It was the impact of a very young, casual, engaging world, a culture of baby faces and crew cuts. A greater contrast to Freiburg was hardly conceivable; sometimes in this Berlin, which was still my home, I felt as if I were on another planet.
Once our friends had taken their leave we went up to the apartment on the third floor of a tenement house in Neukölln. My mother was proud of how far the rooms had already been furnished. However, I was shocked. Because what stood there was a faded settee, a badly damaged sideboard, a table, and six different chairs acquired on the black market. In addition there was a double bed. The kitchen was shabby, but my mother had halfway restored its sparkle, and in the next room I saw two iron bedsteads for my sisters. “Old Katlewski had better furniture,” I said, and my father replied, “In workers’ homes everything is always neat and tidy. But look at Berlin Southeast or Lichtenberg today. Nothing but a pile of rubble.”
Then everybody was talking at once. We were finally free of the need to be careful about what was said, which for years had weighed on everyone. My sisters talked about the capture of Karlshorst, the girls’ hiding place in the church tower and their subsequent expulsion; Hannih related how her younger sister Christa, then only thirteen, had not for a moment hesitated, even if with tears in her eyes, to butcher the two surviving chickens and her pampered favorite pet rabbit, “Pious hips,” before the approaching Russians arrived.
Probably to distract attention from herself, Christa reported the spiteful details of the expulsion, but also added that in the one and a half years of my father’s absence our sensitive mother had proved to be a robust person and had completely shed her Liebenthal gentility. Without much ceremony she had taken charge of the building, issued instructions to the occupants, conducted tough negotiations on the black market, and had traveled into the countryside on the roofs of the suburban trains to get hold of a handful of potatoes, a cabbage, or a paper bag of wrinkled winter apples. Christa once called her “the strong woman from the Bible,” but my mother indignantly rejected that; the description did not suit her. “Above all, please, not in my presence,” she said, adding a little later, “I would still rather—awkward as I now am at my age—sit down in front of the piano.”
Shortly afterward, when, unavoidably, the name of my elder brother was mentioned, her mouth began to twitch. While we were still trying to hit on an innocuous subject, after moving restlessly back and forth on her chair, she left the room without saying a word. Later she returned with the casual question whether, after having gone to Aschinger’s, we wanted to indulge in a second meal.
My father’s condition was much more worrisome. He was hardly recognizable: a man abruptly grown smaller, slighter, gray-haired. Most of the time he simply sat there, his eyes sunken, where previously he had always set the tone. After repeated questions, he talked—as if he had to dredge his memory—of the shellfire that had poured down onto Königsberg in the final days before its surrender; of the flamethrowers; of the terrible stench of corpses in the ruins, which continued to spoil his sense of smell. On April 8 or 9, 1945, shortly before the fighting in the city ended, his small group of defenders was approached by some civilians with white flags and bits of weaponry they had gathered. The civilians tried to persuade them to give up. But joining those wanting to capitulate was as risky as continuing the battle with the Russians. After some urging, the people with the white flags recognized this and finally they crawled into a hiding place. “Well, and then came captivity,” my father concluded and fell back into his silence.
When the evening had drawn to an end and my father had retired, we asked ourselves whether the conclusions which he had once been able to draw so convincingly had really been so feeble tonight or whether it had only been the strangely expressionless voice—which, as if displaced, seemed to come from behind the backrest of the chair—that gave the impression of an empty recital. Once, during the course of the evening, he had lamented the loss of his library: the Goethe edition, above all, which he had bought with his first earnings, the Shakespeare and some other volumes, such as those by the historian Hintze, the Kugler with its unforgettable drawings by Menzel, the massive edition of Görres’s works. These losses, he said, preoccupied him more than the home they had been forced to give up, along with everything in it, the garden and the old friends scattered here and there. But even this lament was uttered in a detached voice. My mother explained that my father still had a third of his weight and his strength to get back; we had to be patient.
In the next few days a number of things came up which had been forgotten in the lively conversation of the reunion. Now and then my father even displayed something of his former temperament and sometimes also his caustic wit. “They’ve taken away our Karlshorst home,” he said at one point, “although we had no skeletons in the closet.” After a short pause he added, “They’re now being manufactured by the Russians and put on our bill.” Changing the subject, he said that suddenly the country was full of people who had always been “against them.” He didn’t want any part of it. With a wife and five children, courage didn’t go very far. At any rate, apart from helping out in a small way a few times, he hadn’t been able to do anything; his main concern had been to keep the totalitarian infection from affecting his family and one or two friends. It was not so different from certain illnesses, he continued, by which one is destroyed if one gives way to them. When it came to the Nazis, as he had often observed, even the passing thought of giving in had been enough and a person was already lost.
On another occasion he spoke of the main error that he and his friends had fallen victim to, because they had believed all too unreservedly in reason, in Goethe, Kant, Mozart, and the whole tradition which came from that.16 Until 1932 he had always trusted that this tradition was proof enough, that a primitive gangster like Hitler could never achieve power in Germany. But he hadn’t had a clue. One of the most shocking things for him had been to realize that it was completely unpredictable how a neighbor, colleague, or even a friend might behave when it came to moral decisions. To this day he still had no explanation for that.
He was also a member of a denazification court, from whose proceedings he returned in low spirits every time.17 Soon he was dismissing the work of the court as mere “phrase-mongering”; the “tribunalization” of the Hitler years appeared to him to be extremely dubious, no matter that he regarded the Nürnberg war crimes trials as justified a thousand times over. And the first, still somewhat flat jokes we heard from him were about the 131 questions on the American questionnaire for those requesting clearance from a denazification court. Consequently, he didn’t feel that he had the right—as one of the cases of recent days demanded—to pass sentence on
a father of three, who at the end of the thirties had been appointed head of a local Nazi Party branch, as “incriminated.”18 “Horrible!” he said. When Winfried objected that my father hadn’t compromised, even though he had five children, he retorted, “Still horrible!” Of the lengthy discussion, the details of which I have forgotten, only the sentence that life has reasons which no court in the world can understand has stayed in my mind.19
I urged my father to write down some episodes of his experiences, but he rejected the suggestion with almost indignant firmness. He didn’t belong on the pedestal on which the authors of memoirs displayed themselves. But what he had to report deserved to be heard, I insisted; even his family had been told only fragments at best, and most people were keeping their mouths shut; no doubt they had their reasons. “If you don’t speak,” Winfried supported me, “too much will remain in the dark.”
After my father had thought for a while, he finally said, “We all remain silent. Out of shame, fear, and apprehensiveness. I remain silent, too. It’s indecent to talk!” When he heard others talking about the times and what they had experienced, he often thought that the Nazis had got rid of any sense of shame along with everything else. “Perhaps it will take time to grasp that,” he added. At any rate, in the elevated position in which he would inevitably be placed by writing an account of his life, he would feel out of place. “I don’t belong there. You can say what you like!”
And so on, always in the same vein. Haltingly, with pauses, but without the least doubt. Toward the end of my stay, after several futile attempts, I asked him about his terrible outburst of rage when my schoolmates from Freiburg were visiting; at around that time, on a walk through the Wuhlheide Park, he had hinted at atrocities, knowledge of which would have put me at unnecessary risk. I asked him when he had learned for the first time of the mass crimes in the east, of which, earlier, he would not have thought even Hitler and his accomplices capable. I didn’t say that I had learned about them from Wittenbrink and others in spring 1944. My father stared silently into space for a while. “Not for the first time!” he said then. “There were rumors, and a BBC broadcast. Alarmed by these hints I spent almost three months at the beginning of 1943 looking for irrefutable evidence. Then I was sure: they were murdering as if possessed!” And then, after another pause, “I did not want to talk about it then and I don’t want to talk about it now! It reminds me that there was absolutely nothing I could do with my knowledge. Not even talk about it! You understand that.” And finally, “In the house of whole battalions of hangmen it is better to remain silent! One doesn’t talk in front of mass graves!”
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