Not I

by Joachim C. Fest

  On my father’s side the family circumstances were considerably more remote and complex. As far back as the facts can be traced (that is, to the seventeenth century) his ancestors came from the small market town of Liebenau (Lubrza in Polish) in the Neumark of the province of Brandenburg. The parish registers, begun again in 1654 after the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, first mention their names in the 1670s. Most of them had made a living as craftsmen or tradespeople, and in one branch of the family also as brewery owners. Over the generations many of them had held office as “able councillors,” churchwardens, or “village mayors.” The first names common in the family also point to higher pretensions. In each generation there was a Rosina; many of the female ancestors were called Cäcilia or Justina; and my grandfather bore the first names (Latinized in the Baroque style) Robertus Tiburtius. He was an exuberant man full of the joys of life, who, it was once said, “set every dance floor in a state of excitement.” Newly married and driven by the ambition (typical of the time) to settle new land, he had moved to the province of Posen, today called Poznan, and acquired a large farm there. Less than a year after his arrival, although only in his mid-twenties, he had become mayor and was respected by both Germans and Poles. His wife, however, did not get along with Polish conditions, and so, in 1895, the family, by now with seven children in tow, moved back to Liebenau. There my grandfather bought a flour mill close to the village.

  He died in the early 1930s, before we got to know him well at all, and so any memories of him remain a tangled mixture of what one was told and what one remembers. Whenever we caught sight of him, he was walking like a shadow through the rooms, leaning silently and ghostlike on his walking stick, commenting in passing on our squabbling with a “Well, well!” He could only be induced to speak at length if my father asked him to recite word for word one of the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, which he had learned as a child, or, on Sunday evening, to say the lesson from the morning Mass. Then he briefly shut his eyes before beginning: “And Jesus, when he came out, saw many people, and was moved with compassion toward them …” When we arrived in Liebenau for the funeral he was laid out in the yard of his house, a very old, unfamiliar, and seemingly fragile man, who in death had shriveled up.

  The coffin had been opened again for the last blessing, and in a final dutiful gesture my grandmother, bent low and leaning on a stick, busied herself with some overhanging corners and ends of cloth. Of the dead man—who sank, his mouth slightly open, between the lace-trimmed shrouds—we children saw only the upper bony section of the face. After the solemn throat-clearing of those present, which always precedes such rituals, the priest spoke the funeral prayers and sprinkled the mourners with holy water, while disinterested farmers’ lads closed the coffin and carried it through the yard gate and out into the road to the waiting horse-drawn carriage. Almost fifty years later my younger brother Winfried remembered that it was not so much his quietly weeping grandmother or the psalm-singing relatives gathered in a semicircle around the coffin and the mountains of flowers that captured his attention but a fly which rushed back and forth over the waxen face of the dead man and several times disappeared into the dark cavity of the mouth. For me, too, the sight was something I never forgot.

  My grandfather had been a down-to-earth man, tested by life. He was much respected (as I was later told) by his peers, and at council meetings the final word was often expected and indeed came from him. My father loved to tell a story from his youth that illustrated my grandfather’s no-nonsense sense of reality. Five or six of what would in the end be eleven children had been sitting around the kitchen table with my grandfather, when one of the brothers asked what each of them would do if a huge sum of money were to fall into their laps, whether through God, the power of the angels, or by chance. “The jackpot!” he exclaimed. “It’s being given to us! It’ll be raining money! Remember my words!” Right away, twelve-year-old Franz revealed to the speechless company what he would do with the money. He would go into town and in Kurt Linke’s inn, surrounded by beautiful women, order the best wines and liqueurs; the elder brother August confessed he would buy the most expensive dress for merry Maria Zietsch from the next village, and then hopefully dare speak to her for the first time; Cäcilie thought she would buy a dressmaker’s shop with modern machines and employ at least five seamstresses. And so on, one after the other, until the slight Roni, who always looked a little starved, spoke up. “And I,” he explained, swallowing frequently, “will buy myself Schlackwurst sausages with all the money—seventy or even a hundred—for as long as the money lasts. All day long, for a month—no, for a whole year—I will stuff myself with Schlackwurst. One after the other.”

  That was like a watchword. Everyone jumped up and agreed enthusiastically: Schlackwurst—yes! That’s great! Schlaraffenland3 forever! they yelled. Until my grandfather, who had said nothing throughout, went over to the tiled stove, took his stick, which was hanging from the side, and silenced the hubbub with a mighty blow on the table. Taking no notice of the daughters present, he shouted at the boisterous gang: “You damned rascals must eat bread with your sausage! You don’t eat sausage without bread!”

  My father drew the meaning of this story from his own experience. One could have dreams, build castles in the air—it was all allowed! But one had to keep one’s feet on the ground! As a gifted schoolboy of fifteen he had wanted to study “something to do with religion or mathematics.” After that he had for a long time been uncertain as to whether he should follow his love of nature and become a fisherman or a forester. When, finally, at his father’s urging, he decided on the profession of teacher, the somewhat older son of our neighbor said it was a real shame that a lad with his practical talents should choose a typical “idler’s job.” Because of his ability my father was exempted from the first two classes when he started secondary school and later, on taking his school-leaving certificate, from the oral examinations. After several teaching posts he suffered a moderately serious wound at the beginning of the First World War, in France, returned to teaching, and immediately found himself back in Berlin. Politically committed from an early age, by 1919 he had established several local branches of the Catholic Zentrum party in southern districts of the capital and had occupied leading positions in the party, as he did later in the Reichsbanner, the paramilitary organization composed of members of the Zentrum party, the Social Democratic Party, and the trade unions set up to defend the Weimar Republic.4

  He was a tall man with strong features; the “telegenic face” (as Wolfgang and I called it) which he displays in most pictures reveals only sternness and determination, without giving any clue to the cheerful character and even happiness that comes when a person is in harmony with himself. One of his friends once said that my father was a rare combination of energy, self-confidence, and mirth. His sharp wit could even turn into high spirits. Friends of my own youth whom I asked for the impression they had of him when they looked back, often said that as children there was hardly another adult whom they so enjoyed being with, because he was able to tell such crazy stories and sing such silly songs. Almost all spoke in these or similar terms of his ability to entertain and his enjoyment of practical jokes. Admittedly, he sometimes suffered from a short temper; that may have been because his good humor did not come from an inner balance alone, but also had something to do with the certainty of being able to deal with all the trials of fate.

  It should also be said that my father did not have the least touch of social snobbery and could chat as easily to the girl behind the counter at the baker’s as discuss serious affairs of state with a senior civil servant. He was as relaxed with a university teacher as with the children at our birthdays. He enjoyed singing and he had countless songs in his head from “Prinz Eugen” to the forgotten “Ich hab mich ergeben …” (I have devoted myself …), which survives only as a melody in Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture. To end a round of songs he liked to perform boulevard or music-hall chansons, which, as I re
member, sometimes included the unforgettable assertion that “my parrot don’t eat hard-boiled eggs” or posed the question “What, for heaven’s sake, was Mayer doing in the Himalayas?” or, then again, praised a girlfriend called Titaisin, whose lover boldly claimed (for the sake of the rhyme if nothing else) that in his cake of life she was nothing less than the raisin. He liked to laugh and could entertain a company at table all evening with witty anecdotes or—if it was required—more down-to-earth ones.

  His origin, life, and strong convictions conferred on my father four qualities, none of which seemed to go with the others and each of which developed an impatience with the other three. He was a republican, a Prussian, a Catholic, and a Bildungsbürger. In his case, however, all contradictions were held together by strength of personality and each one of these strands contributed to his intransigence in the face of the Nazi regime. The inadequacies of the foundation of the Weimar Republic were perfectly clear to him, but he remained a committed republican. The problems of the moment must never place the principle in doubt, we heard him say repeatedly; and each one of us, his children, was a witness later on to his outrage when, after the end of the Hitler dictatorship, it was often argued that in 1932–33 there had been a choice only between the Nazi Party and the Communists, and that in Hitler people had chosen the lesser of two evils. Would it not have been more intelligent and, above all, more responsible to choose the republic, he objected, whether in the shape of the Social Democrats, the Zentrum, or the Liberals? In reality, all those who said later that there had been no alternative to Hitler had at the time lacked judgment and loyalty to the state, to say nothing of determination. My father had always been a militant republican; he wanted to resist the storm troopers of the Nazi SA (Brownshirts) not only with words, but with his fists. Consequently, following the election gains of the Nazi Party on September 14, 1930, he discussed with his friend Hubertus zu Löwenstein5 the formation of a republican youth movement, which led shortly afterward to the establishment of the Vortrupp Schwarz-Rot-Gold.6

  At the same time he was a dyed-in-the-wool Prussian, even if he didn’t make an issue of it. The numerous “Old Prussians” who were to be found, in the old provinces of the Prussian crown at least, were overwhelmingly royalist and did not approve of the republic. “But I’m no unthinking Prussian,” my father mocked, “and not sentimental enough to mourn the ‘fugitive’ Wilhelm the Second.” His idea of what was Prussian, he said occasionally, was fairly out of step with the times. In addition to the familiar catalogue of duties, it included the voluntary self-limitation of demands, the avoidance of self-pity, and the ability to cope with life with a “pinch” of irony. “Just don’t forget irony!” he frequently admonished us. “It’s the entry ticket to humanity. Outwardly one displays a seriousness the situation demands, but inwardly one snaps one’s fingers at the frustrations.”

  Certainly, he was critical enough to realize that Prussia and its much-praised ethos stood for nothing but itself—that it had no idea to give the world. Often he amused himself at the various efforts to lend Prussia a “soul” or even a “mission.” As civilizing powers he accepted only ancient Greece and Rome. What had Spain, England, or France given the world, he once asked at table, apart from the swagger stick, five o’clock tea, Inca gold, and a few fine phrases? Ultimately, each of these world powers had been about exploitation with a little added humane decoration. He preferred the unadorned will to survive, which embodies Prussia’s idea of state. Like all the others, it had robbed, but at least it had not lied about it afterward. “A curtsey for Prussia,” he concluded on occasion and with a smile; on the whole, Prussia didn’t cut such a bad figure in the world.

  Years later, when I asked him once again about his taste for irony, he responded that irony made almost everything in life more bearable, including the basically “chilly state air” of Prussia. A scene (unforgotten by us children) occurred on the annual trip to our relatives in the Neumark. As the train passed a small village almost swallowed up by the horizon, my father called us to the compartment window. “What you see over there,” he observed, “is the silhouette of Kunersdorf, where Frederick the Great suffered the most terrible defeat of the whole Seven Years’ War.7 The Prussians,” he continued, “among whom in this respect I do not count myself, always maintain that after every Kunersdorf there follows a Leuthen with triumph, fanfares, and the chorus ‘Now Thank We All Our God!’ That sounds elevating and fills the unthinking Prussian heart with pride. Unfortunately,” added my father after a well-considered pause, “this fine story isn’t true. Because the Battle of Leuthen took place in 1757, while Frederick did not meet with the defeat of Kunersdorf (whose disastrous consequences were only avoided by a change of rulers in Russia) until two years later. But,” he concluded, “there has to be a little bit of cheating, if the Prussians are going to add another miracle of the House of Brandenburg to the first.”

  If Prussia and republicanism were not easily reconciled, then the contradiction was further sharpened by my father’s strict Catholicism. He was a pious man, who accounted to the “Lord God” (as he usually put it in this context) for each of his private or political decisions. Not least because of his numerous offices, he maintained close relations with the senior diocesan figures and frequently met the papal nuncio Cardinal Pacelli.8 He gave credit to Heinrich Brüning, the Zentrum party chancellor from 1930 to 1932, for pursuing, in principle and politically, the reconciliation of Prussianism and Catholicism; if he had succeeded, my father said, in retrospect, much would have turned out differently.9 He was a friend of Bernhard Lichtenberg, the dean of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin.10 In earlier years the latter had lived in Karlshorst as a curate; in 1941 he was sentenced for protesting against Nazi euthanasia and for publicly praying for the Jews, and he died in 1943 while being transported to Dachau concentration camp, in circumstances that remain unclear. My father lost his usual calm when advocating Catholic interests; at times it even seemed as if he had been gripped by the siege mentality of diaspora Catholicism. Although he tolerated almost all human weaknesses, tellingly, he never got over the disgraceful part which the leading figures of his party—Franz von Papen and Prelate Ludwig Kaas—allowed themselves to be talked into playing, out of ambition and opportunism, during the course of the Nazi seizure of power.11

  And finally, he was an avowed Bildungsbürger; the pages that follow will provide some evidence of that.12 While at that time the term was not as discredited as it is now, it already suggested old-fashioned values. After the Nazi years the educated middle classes (Bildungsbürgertum) were seen as one of the principal social forces responsible for the rise of Hitler; when one looks more closely, however, this accusation merely reflects the resentment of spoiled children intent on being morally superior to their parents, and on defaming all Bildung (humanist education) as pointless effort. Social science has, meanwhile, discovered that fewer than 1 percent of the population could be said to have belonged to the Bildungsbürgertum. Yet in the last halfway-free elections of March 5, 1933, Hitler’s party received the votes of well over 40 percent of the electorate.

  My father loved books. His pride was the chronological Goethe edition from the Propyläen publishing house, which he had bought with his first salary earnings, as well as a smaller edition of ten or twelve volumes with commentaries. Next to them in the bookcases, which covered three walls of his far from spacious study, stood works from Lessing to Heine, Shakespeare, of course, and much else up to Fontane, whom he admired.13 “He’s one of the family,” he liked to say, when conversation turned to Fontane, and, pointing to the easy chair on the balcony, he would add, “He has a seat there every now and then.” In the scholarly section there were two or three shelves of theological literature. My father was interested in arguments about the proof of God’s existence and the stimulus Luther had given to the development of the German language; in the next bookcase was Prussian history, especially the period of the reformers during and after the Napoleonic Wars, also works on
the Christian image of man and the spread of the faith to the remotest regions of the earth.

  The bookshelves stretching up to the ceiling clearly reflected my father’s interests. Only above the desk was there a gap, in which—next to some family photographs and the silhouette of Goethe raising his finger in front of the young Fritz von Stein—hung an engraving after Raphael’s School of Athens, with Pythagoras and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, one pointing at heaven, the other at earth, as our father (to our amusement) explained to almost every visitor, and at the right-hand edge of the picture Raphael had portrayed himself, as was repeated to us at least as regularly. Standing in front of the portrait of the Catholic scholar and reformer Görres on the opposite wall (above which there was a bronze bust of Dante on a pedestal), my father was in the habit of assuring listeners that all of his life he had wanted to be like Görres: rebellious in his early years, moving things forward in the middle of life, and from the age of forty preserving what was good.14 But the times have to lend a hand. In his they too often got in the way.