Not I

by Joachim C. Fest

  At the end of my weeks in Berlin, when I had already packed my suitcases, Walter Kühne turned up from his seclusion near Lüneburg. He had prevented court-martial proceedings against me thanks to a fairly transparent dodge and wanted to meet my parents, from whom he had received a report about my brother Wolfgang’s death, which he had passed on to me. Now he brought me Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice and remarked, glancing at my father and appealing for understanding, “You’ve probably got over and forgiven Thomas Mann by this time!” My father replied with a somewhat forced smile, “Got over, yes; forgiven, no.” For all its limits, the book opened up for me further doors to the literature of the first half of the century. In the years that followed, I found my way to Gide, Rudolf Borchardt, Henry James, and even Oswald Spengler.24 The latter’s tone irritated me, however; always a little too much enamored of doom and seeming to address the reader from the parapets of the universe. As in those infinitely remote prewar days, we then went out to Potsdam, encountered further restricted areas, talked, drank watery lemonade (more for the sake of memory than anything else), and walked back past Kleist’s grave to Wannsee Station. That was the first time that life seemed to be gradually returning to its familiar pattern.

  Arriving at the station in Freiburg, I came upon Dr. Kiefer, who had taught me when I was stationed with the antiaircraft battery in Friedrichshafen, consulting the departures board. He was still corpulent, engaging, and exuberant. Every Wednesday, he said, he had a jour fixe for particular friends in his apartment in Jacobistrasse, and since I had been one of his favorite pupils he would be very pleased to invite me. I could get all the details from Willibald Knecht, the publisher’s son, who had also been invited. “Willibald Knecht was killed in action,” I interrupted Dr. Kiefer, but there was no stopping him, and he talked about the professors, journalists, and writers who would be there, even some artists. “Well, you get the idea! So, till Wednesday!” Furthermore, he shouted over from the station doors in a voice loud enough to be heard by everyone, he had recently invited the great actor Martin Held, who would shortly be appearing in Freiburg in a lead role. The Devil’s General. Had I heard of it?25

  So I was again drawn into contact with Dr. Kiefer, who had indeed assembled a notable circle. We talked with unusually objective and personal frankness: about the largely undiminished reputation of Freiburg University; the musical life of the city; the affectations of the French occupation authorities; and whatever was happening at the time. But the unmatched attraction of the evenings was Dr. Kiefer’s daughter Juliane, whom the junior academics and even more so the older professors crowded around. She looked as if she had just stepped out of a painting by Raphael and I have forgotten neither the envious nor the reproving glances when the beautiful Juliane, as happened from time to time, invited me to sit beside her.

  These evenings, too, confirmed the impression of normality. Basically, I had spent the past twenty years outside the sphere of normal life: whether under the pressure that had constantly borne down on my parents, or at school, or the boarding school, or in the army, or as a prisoner of war. We children never complained about the difficulties the Hitler years had imposed on us; in fact, protected by our parents, we experienced them, rather, as a happy and never-threatening adventure. But was that life?

  I was inclined to study law, possibly to balance my amateur’s preference for the Renaissance. At least, so it sometimes seemed to me, the Berlin visit and the conversations with my father had brought me closer to reality. “The Weimar Republic foundered not least because of dreamers who were running away from the world,” he once said. “Stick to Italy! That way you’ll learn to understand the present. But don’t forget Berlin.” And later on: “The closer you get to political reality, the more you have to leave behind. Unfortunately, you also will lose what Wolfgang once called—I’ve never forgotten it—your romantic quirk. Reality will never make you entirely happy! But there’s no choice if we want to avoid another shipwreck.”

  When I asked why the two could not be combined, the Renaissance with the political here and now, he said carefully that he did not believe I had a vocation for politics in the narrower sense; he would set aside the self-evident responsibilities of all citizens. I was intellectually too curious and too interested in new things. Democracy, on the other hand, if one approached it responsibly, was rather boring. The great designs had already been formulated; there was no opportunity for anyone to be original anymore. One had to be destined for it. Or one should rather let it be. Then, he concluded, “You can leave a door open for yourself. That would mean that you don’t study medieval history but law. If you study that, then everything remains possible.”

  So—on my father’s advice and halfway seeing sense—I began to study law. Friends encouraged me in this decision. During the many intervals between law classes I attended lectures by Gerhard Ritter on modern history, by Gerd Tellenbach on medieval history, by Hugo Friedrich on Montaigne, and the Germanist Walther Rehm’s quite unique lectures on images of modern European man from Don Quixote by way of Hamlet and Faust to Don Giovanni. He was indisputably the most admirable university teacher I encountered.26 Overall, the university was something of an Arcadia. In addition, there were new contacts, visits to the theater and to concerts, as well as dates with Marcienne, an enchanting exchange student from Paris, and bicycle tours in the Black Forest.

  All of these things were facets of a longed-for normality. But the longer the new experience went on, the more it felt like a shock. I found normal life infinitely lacking in excitement and looked for distractions, but did not gain any particular satisfaction from them. Not until one evening toward the end of my studies in Freiburg, on hearing the encoded quotation of the Eroica motif in Richard Strauss’s Metamorphoses at a concert, did I feel myself understood and could I understand the elderly, disheveled man sitting next to me. His eyes wet, he abruptly turned to me and said that from today he would never attend another concert. Not for the rest of his life! He didn’t need to go to the concert hall to weep! He could do that at home. At his age, anyway. And he couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. It had started with an adagio, he explained, but now any musical perfection made him lose his composure. He asked me to excuse him. With increasing age, I would become familiar with these tears.

  The next day I called on Fritz Werner at his bookstore. He came toward me, beaming behind the thick lenses of his glasses. “At last!” he exclaimed. “Good news for you! Two books at once. First the titles: one is Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel; the other, Hemingway’s early novel The Sun Also Rises. Both cloth-bound. And now, put on a happy face!”

  I thanked him and went down Salzstrasse to the former Adolf Hitler Strasse, which was now called Kaiser Joseph Strasse once more. When I reached the intersection I was struck by the thought that now things are as they should be. For the first time in your life, you are free. You go to the bookseller and without making an application or getting a special permit simply buy—for about twenty marks, which is all they cost—two works of American literature. But then the next thought is already there: Are you really free? All I did was buy books. Perhaps normality is harder than freedom. It begins now. Would I be able to cope with it? And, if so, how?

  1 A large part of the district of Karlshorst—relatively undamaged in air raids and fighting—was taken over for use by the Soviet military authorities and until German reunification remained an area to which German civilians had only limited access.—Trans.

  2 General (posthumously Marshal) Jean de Lattre de Tassigny (1889–1952), an early adherent of Charles de Gaulle, commanded the French troops occupying Germany in 1945; in 1950–52 he commanded the French Expeditionary Forces in Indochina (Vietnam).

  3 Many German cities are still ringed by small allotment gardens called Schrebergärten (Schreber gardens), named after Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber (1808–61), who wanted the industrial worker to retain some connection to the soil. Many of these gardens contain a small building.

/>   4 July 14 is, of course, Bastille Day, when good German democrats celebrated the ideals and ideas of the French Revolution—before it descended into the Terror.

  5 Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, whose reach extended far beyond academic philosophy; while banned from his university post after 1945 because of perceived connections to National Socialism, he would still occasionally descend from the mountain to give extremely popular lectures.

  6 In the West, German democratic parties, outlawed and persecuted under Hitler, had to be either re- or newly established, like the two major parties of the left and the right, the SPD and the newly formed CDU, based on the former Zentrum membership but now expanded to include Protestants as well. The Free Democratic Party (FDP) initially represented the old Liberals of the German Southwest and would join coalition governments with either the CDU or the SPD. A number of other parties, one representing the millions of refugees, would eventually dissolve, leaving mainly the three parties described here. In the East, the old SPD and the Communist Party (KPD) were merged into the ruling Sozialistische Einheits Partei Deutschlands (SED).

  7 Freiburg im Breisgau belonged to the French Zone of occupation, like most of the Black Forest area at the time. French plans to annex these parts of Germany were foiled by the other Allies.

  8 To Germans, Carl Spitzweg (1808–85) was a beloved painter of humorous portraits and scenes from the everyday life of his time—comparable for Americans to Norman Rockwell and his paintings.

  9 Werner Bergengruen (1892–1964) converted to Catholicism and was a friend of Reinhold Schneider’s; he is best known for his novels and novellas. Stefan Andres (1906–70) attempted to wed the traditions of classical antiquity with modern Christianity in his novels and stories.

  10 Ernst Rowohlt (1887–1960) and his publishing ventures are synonymous in Germany with literary paperbacks; he made both world literature and modern German literature available to a very wide audience.

  11 At the end of the Abitur, or qualifying exam for university admission, the grades attained in the various subjects were averaged out to a composite grade, which had to be at a specific level for entry into university and thus graduate studies.

  12 Despite the author’s protestations that his family did not want any special considerations for their antifascism, it is clear that they were granted special privileges by the occupying authorities, as indicated by the special permit for travel issued to them, which apparently entitled them to fly into Berlin on an American cargo plane. Back then nobody but armed forces and highly privileged individuals flew in airplanes of any sort. And they are met in Berlin by people arriving in cars; in the 1940s very few civilian cars were on the road and none without special connections and permits.

  13 Fritz Kortner (1892–1970), German stage and film actor and director, emigrated to Hollywood in 1933 and returned in 1949 to a triumphant career in postwar Germany.

  14 In fact, statistically speaking, the scale of damage was rather less in Berlin than in the cities Fest mentions; but he was shocked on returning to Berlin after a long absence and it was his hometown.—Trans.

  15 AFN broadcasts, especially the musical programs, became the primary source for up-to-date information and then contemporary music, including jazz and swing and big band, for all those who identified with the new order; it also led to a rapid spread and acceptance of American English at the expense of previously dominant British English. The young, above all, listened to and identified with this radio network.

  16 This is a commonplace of all literature on German and Jewish reactions to Hitler and the Nazis: their belief in the power of German high culture—represented by names like Goethe, Kant, Mozart, et al.—and the strength of Enlightenment traditions led them to assume—erroneously, as it turned out—that vulgarians and obviously unenlightened primitives like the Nazis could never succeed in the long run in that cradle of modern European civilization which Germany was to them.

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the basis of much of modern philosophy, was regarded as the quintessential embodiment of all that is good in Prussian and German thought and behavior.

  17 These courts were set up to weed out old Nazis from the administrative and other services of the emerging postwar German states, an undertaking that was so complex that British and French authorities never really pursued it, while the American efforts petered out more slowly. Only the Soviets carried out a ruthless campaign of eliminating all known or suspected Nazis from positions of public power. Poor information, denunciations, and the settling of unrelated old scores made this undertaking highly problematic.

  18 An Ortsgruppenleiter would, for example, have an office, but was unpaid. Being classified as “incriminated” would at this time limit employment possibilities.—Trans.

  19 Precisely this conflict between legal and moral responsibility for one’s action is central to the novel by Bernhard Schlink, The Reader (New York: Vintage, 1997).

  20 Andreas Baader (1943–77), a student, and Ulrike Meinhof (1934–76), a journalist, were the leaders of a radical leftist group, the Baader-Meinhof Group or the Red Army Fraction (RAF). They were imprisoned in Stammheim Prison, a political prison since the eighteenth century, for carrying out terrorist acts against the Bonn Republic in an attempt to overturn the neocapitalist system, which Bonn represented to them; they are alleged to have committed suicide, but many observers doubt that official version of their end.

  21 Wilton Park was an estate in England that was used as a POW camp. In 1946 it became one of the postwar conference locations where the democratic renewal of Germany was discussed.

  22 “Going to the East” after 1945, and even more after 1949, when the two new German states were founded, meant going to the Soviet-occupied zone or the German Democratic Republic. Many German leftist intellectuals chose this state as the better chance for a truly new Germany, free from fascism and capitalism. Among the most prominent were Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Heym, Wolf Biermann, and many others. Western media preferred to report only defections from the East to the West.

  23 Otto Zarek (1898–1958) was a Jewish homosexual writer and thus had two strikes against him in Nazi Germany, which he left in time to go to Hungary and England, only returning to Berlin after the war. An early Expressionist, he wrote novels and was active in the theater and as a journalist.

  24 André Gide (1869–1951), prolific French writer of prose and dramatic works, was influential also as a founder and editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française. Rudolf Borchardt (1877–1945) was a German-Jewish writer who survived the war in Italy; nationalist and conservative in his essays, he is best known for his translations of Pindar and Dante.

  25 This play by the dramatist Carl Zuckmayer (1896–1977), first produced in 1946, was one of the few works of literature at that time dealing with the immediate past. The author had emigrated to Vermont in 1938 and returned to Switzerland after the war. He was well established through his popular comedies before the war, best known for their earthy characters and blunt language.

  26 This is a partial listing of the star professors at Freiburg in the 1950s; students from all fields would flock to their lectures in what was called studium generale only for their own edification, not for credit.

  ELEVEN

  •

  Retrospect and a Brief Look Ahead

  Long after my return from the war and captivity, I continued to struggle with normalcy. I even had problems with the idea itself. The whole world was talking about how we had to get back to normal conditions, but as soon as I asked what these were, the old commonplaces were brought up. Yet there had been a dictatorship and an unparalleled collapse that had left behind a people and a land in ruins. No one could really say to what extent the former rules and conditions were still valid or why they should be reestablished. For anyone with eyes to see, the preceding years had swept away almost everything. To what should we cling?

  Furthermore, these doubts as to the p
rinciples of existence coincided with the long-overdue process of detaching myself from my parents. Of course, my siblings and I had the greatest respect for what my mother and father had achieved in their lives, and in our occasional discussions we reminded each other not to forget their moral integrity during the Nazi years. This knowledge set certain limits to any conflicts of opinion we might have. But something else (as Winfried also admitted) caused us much greater problems. Unlike the overwhelming majority of Germans, we were not part of some mass conversion. Whenever talk came around to the 1930s and 1940s, many of our contemporaries felt some kind of remorse, but we were excluded from this psychodrama. We had the dubious advantage of remaining exactly who we had always been, and so of once again being the odd ones out.

  On top of all this, the chaos of the times had thrown up another problem: I had two fathers. One was the man of the 1930s, a product of the Hitler years, inclined to rage and a black wit; the other was the figure who returned from Russian captivity, physically worn out, his intellect and spirit contracted. His wit, which gave us pleasure in our younger years and, in part, also a kind of apprenticeship, only gradually reemerged, and then only for moments at a time. My father had always loved sayings with the brevity of aphorisms. I remember the phrase with which, during Hitler’s Reich, he had often commented on some arbitrary decision by insignificant people who had suddenly acquired power. It was “Endure the clowns!” and it soon became a motto with a proverbial force in our family. At any rate, given his propensity for formulas as signposts, Father recommended the phrase to us as a guiding principle for the coming years, perhaps for the rest of our lives. I once heard him draw to a close a discussion of an episode which had occurred during the Nazi years with the maxim “One sometimes has to keep one’s head down, but try not to look shorter as a result!”