Not I

by Joachim C. Fest

  My father often talked about the period after the First World War, in which he had been wounded early on and spent time in hospital. He had no problem adjusting to circumstances then. He had been full of hope and, in his view, despite the painful defeat, there had been a strong attachment to the republic. He attributed this to three main causes, which, with the laconic brevity characteristic of his new hometown, Berlin, he summed up as: the war was over, the kaiser was gone, and the nonsense of the soldiers’ councils was at an end. Furthermore, a constitution had been debated and all of this combined had produced a widespread sense of a new beginning, which took hold of and united the middle classes and the workers.

  “But even before the constitution was adopted, the heavens darkened,” he said. The first blow came with the Versailles peace treaty, but it was not its draconian exactions that weighed most heavily. It was the “humiliations” imposed on the German delegation that produced greater outrage, from the servants’ entrance by which its members had to enter the building in which the negotiations were held to the wounded men with serious facial injuries, who, in an act of calculated offense, were posted at the entrance to the conference room. These and similar theatrical flourishes, he said, were intended to legitimate Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty, which was formulated with the “unpleasant arrogance of the poor winner”: the assertion that Germany bore sole responsibility for the war. In truth, the victorious powers only proved thereby that “they didn’t measure up to their victory.” It was soon being said that the republic had returned from Versailles “wearing a fool’s cap,” and the phrase was repeated with contempt and bitterness.

  My father talked a great deal about these setbacks. The weaknesses already became evident, he said, in summer 1919. Furthermore, the republic had not been inaugurated with any great act of foundation that stayed in the memory, but instead (as a growing number soon thought) with a shameful defeat which was the result of treachery. Many allowed themselves to be persuaded all too readily that they were the good-natured victims of deceit and vindictiveness. In the early days of the new state, my father related, as he was going to the local branches night after night, he had repeatedly pointed out in countering the agitation of the right that the emergent republic had been dealt two stabs in the back: first by the “Hindenburg swindle”15 and second by the victorious powers, France in particular, for whom he made no allowances. As a result Hitler was allowed to present himself as the advocate of so-called German honor.

  “There was one other great moment,” he continued, when talk came around to the subject. That had been when the Kapp Putsch was launched in March 1920, and the young republic had even been granted a victory.16 The coup d’état of the old “mustaches” had been thwarted not only by the workers’ general strike but also by the more or less united resistance of the broad majority. There the republic had its long-awaited founding act after all, as my father had declared repeatedly in his speeches, and the listeners had sometimes even risen to their feet and applauded. But the republic had not known what to do with this gift. Nevertheless, he and his friends had celebrated the victory in the assembly rooms and larger pubs of Neukölln, Kreuzberg, and Charlottenburg. At last, so they had all believed, their cause was safe. The republic appeared to have stood the test.

  It was around then that he thought for the first time—after a life which had for so long been filled with meetings and endless evening appointments—that he could devote himself to his private advancement. At the end of 1921 he moved from the lower-class district of Neukölln to Karlshorst and bought an apartment house in Hentigstrasse, in which, already with an eye to a future family, he occupied a whole floor. At that time he felt he had made a success of the first part of his life. Professionally as well as politically everyone predicted a promising future for him. In addition, he had made the acquaintance of an attractive, well-brought-up young woman from a comfortable background and for the first time thought of marriage.

  He approached everything with great seriousness. After he had satisfied himself about this young woman, her family, and its circumstances, he began one day to acquire, without the least stammer, a fluency in French conversation and for a while preferred popular literature in that language with extended passages of dialogue. In this way, my father later jokingly maintained, he had prepared himself for the traditional suspicions of future parents-in-law. Because it did not seem impossible to him that the strict Straeters might embarrass him by suddenly, as if unintentionally, switching to French and only after talking for some time apologize for the small discourtesy. He had not wanted to expose himself to that, he added with a laugh.

  And, laughing, he also said that until that point his education had been all too greatly focused on the weighty themes; he therefore began to drape “garlands” on the “grand scaffolding,” as he called it, adding the handsome accessories which, even if only socially, were part of an education. Then he made the rounds of all the specialist shops in order to achieve sureness of taste, because he came from the country and (as one said in the big city of Berlin) from “modest circumstances.” He had already discovered fine-looking furniture and very pleasing craft work in the homes of friends and of political party acquaintances and formed an idea of how he wanted to live. When he believed himself reasonably well prepared he also went to the antique shops in the Hansaviertel district to form judgments with respect to furnishings, paintings, carpets, and whatever else belonged to setting up a home and corresponded to his financial possibilities. He even bought some pieces, mainly in old Berlin style. Meanwhile, from time to time, he sent a token of his intentions to the young miss in Riastrasse.

  These were the eloquent love letters that my mother kept in a casket together with other mementos and buried in the garden in 1945 a few days before the Russians marched in. The evacuation order issued at short notice by the Russians prevented the little box from being recovered; to the lifelong sorrow of my mother it remained lost. There are even supposed to have been some love poems in it.

  One day my father unexpectedly announced himself at the Straeters’. To his surprise the drawing room furniture was light in color. Decorated with flower vases and bright porcelain figures of courting couples, harlequins, and shepherdesses, the grace of the decor hardly seemed to match the stern image of my maternal grandfather. Certainly this visit (so my father thought) was full of possibilities for embarrassment; nevertheless, it passed more easily than feared. The future parents-in-law possessed French courtesy, and since they had worked out why the young man was calling on them, they first of all offered him a light liqueur and helped him in every possible way to cope with the situation. When, suddenly and without warning, he became formal and attempted to rise from his chair, they asked him to remain seated. The guest nevertheless responded that he was better able to say what he wanted to say standing, whereas for the sake of their well-being it would be better if they remained seated. After that the mood became more relaxed, so that my father was able to shed any stiffness and ask, without further ceremony, for the hand of their daughter Elisabeth.

  A few weeks later the date of the wedding was set for the middle of 1923. When my father looked back he was able to feel a degree of satisfaction. He had been more successful than he could ever have expected; hints had been made recently that he had prospects of an appointment in the Prussian Ministry of Culture, Education, and Religious Affairs. And then things would continue. What could possibly get in the way?

  1 Philemon and Baucis are an aged couple in Greek mythology, a classical example of enduring marital loyalty and love, used by Goethe in Faust and thus familiar to any educated German.

  2 These are major German poets of the nineteenth century to whom Fest will refer repeatedly: Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857) and Eduard Mörike (1804–75) are regarded as prime exemplars of German Romanticism, while Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) is often seen as the more critical and caustic.

  3 Schlaraffenland is the German equivalent of the Land of Cockaigne, a
n imaginary place of ease and luxury.—Trans.

  4 The Zentrum party, established in 1870 and dissolved in 1933, was the political, conservative representation of German Catholicism in an essentially Prussian and therefore Protestant-dominated German Reich; it opposed the Nazis ideologically. After the Second World War the surviving members of the Zentrum founded and dominated the conservative Christian Democratic Union, including Protestants as well as Catholics. The first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Konrad Adenauer, was the candidate of the CDU.

  5 Hubertus Prince of Löwenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg (1906–84), historian, journalist, and prolific author of books and articles on German and ancient history, was an early and outspoken antifascist who had to flee Nazi Germany. In England and the United States he became an active anti-Nazi spokesman. He returned to Germany and German politics after 1946; he was active in both the FDP (Free German Party) and the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) and attempted to help bridge the gap between the Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches.

  6 Advance Guard Black-Red-Gold: black, red, and gold being the colors of the republican German flag, as opposed to the black, red, and white of the imperial and Nazi flags.—Trans.

  7 Frederick II, king of Prussia (1712–86), called the Great, is an icon of Prussian conservatives and advocates of German national greatness in the early twentieth century. In the Seven Years’ War, which he started, he fought all major European powers and established the kingdom of Prussia as a key player among them.

  8 Eugenio Pacelli (1876–1958), later Pope Pius XII, was the Vatican’s diplomatic representative in Munich and Berlin from 1917 through the 1930s, when he gained the most coveted prize in Vatican diplomacy, a concordat with the German Reich. He later knew of but did nothing to mitigate the persecution and extermination of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis.

  9 Heinrich Brüning (1885–1970) was the last democratic chancellor of the Weimar Republic; he died in exile in Vermont.

  10 Bernhard Lichtenberg (1875–1943).

  11 Franz von Papen (1879–1969) was a monarchist member of the Zentrum whose political machinations in 1932–33 significantly aided Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship and power in Germany. Ludwig Kaas (1881–1952) was the head of the Zentrum party from 1928 through 1933 and a major contributor to the Vatican’s concordat with Germany, Hitler’s first diplomatic success.

  12 A Bildungsbürger is a member of that part of the German upper-middle class which comes from and aspires to middle- and upper-range positions in German society’s politically and economically dominant classes; she or he is highly educated and will typically hold an Abitur certificate and a university or graduate degree or its equivalent. She or he will also be widely read and traveled and show both knowledge and appreciation of European high culture and be conversant in several languages, including classical Greek and/or Latin. This class dominates German politics and society to this day and represents only a small portion of the total population. It is educated to be and thinks of itself as an elite.

  13 Theodor Fontane (1819–98) is the quintessential Prussian novelist of the nineteenth century. His novels provide a critical image of Prussian society’s dominant classes; their realism is tempered by Fontaine’s famous reticent irony and obvious affection for the people and landscape of the Mark Brandenburg.

  14 Johann Joseph von Görres (1776–1848), a politically active writer and early adherent of the ideas of the French Revolution. He suffered political persecution throughout his life and eventually became an activist Catholic who advocated a liberal constitution and a federalist Germany—precisely the odd mixture of revolutionary and conservative Fest favors.

  15 Fest senior was presumably referring to the wartime financial policy of the Reich, which in the expectation of victory increased the money supply, so initiating the inflation which reached a climax in 1923, or possibly to the myth of the undefeated German army, summed up in the phrase “the stab in the back.”—Trans.

  16 Wolfgang Kapp (1858–1922), conservative Prussian politician and administrator, attempted an armed takeover of power (March 13–17, 1920) which failed because of a general strike by the trade unions and a lack of support from both the bureaucracy and the army.

  TWO

  •

  The World Falls Apart

  Karlshorst was a self-contained suburb on the eastern side of the capital, overwhelmingly inhabited by the middling middle class. Its origins as a planned community were still obvious from its orderly street plan, and one of my parents’ friends, who liked to exaggerate, maintained that the architect’s office had taken the place of the whims of princes.1 It was part of the distinctiveness of Berlin that the Prussian rulers had built it arbitrarily but determinedly in the face of the waste of the Mark Brandenburg. Consequently, at its edges the city had not only a charming village quality, but attractively melancholy surroundings, interspersed with waterways and marshes. On some weekdays one could travel by public transport to Gransee Lake or to Nauen without meeting anyone other than a dozen market women. There were the showpiece boulevards like Unter den Linden and not far away the village streets of Potsdam and Köpenick.

  In my memory Berlin is still an open, green city, unlike London or imperial, stony Paris. It has to be said that aside from the most beautiful surrounding countryside it had scant charm, but it had an attractive modesty. On the other hand it was alert and intelligent with a quick wit. It compensated for its lack of elegance with urbane irony. Keeping up with the times was always more important here than formality. Berlin was not a town one took to one’s heart, but one very quickly felt at home in it. And Karlshorst was a kind of small town variant of the great metropolis.

  The house in Hentigstrasse, which my father had bought years before, was not in one of the villa quarters of the place, but in the middle of an area of tenement blocks. The residents were skilled workers, civil servants, technicians, and a few widows. At the sides and the rear of each house there was some green space, usually with an herb garden under a couple of fruit trees. Nearly always there was a toolshed next to the carpet rail. Distinctive features of our garden were a horizontal gym bar under the chestnut trees and a small, stepped swimming pool, in which we bathed in summer and in winter skipped down the iced-over steps in our hobnailed shoes.

  Above all we loved the overgrown corners and edges of the plot of land. We crept around under the fruit bushes, a cardboard tomahawk or a knife in our mouths, as noble Sioux Indians against the Comanches, and played other such war games. With my elder brother Wolfgang and one friend or another we stuck together against all the neighbors’ children. We sent Hansi Streblow to the fat baker’s wife with six pfennigs to buy “puke cakes,” as we called her baked dough corners; we stretched a string across the house doorway opposite, where the eternally sour teacher, Müllenberg, was a tenant, and he promptly stumbled over it; or we climbed over the fence to the garden of the parsonage next door and placed a worn, sweat-stained bra from who knows where on the garden path. Hidden in the bushes, stifling our laughter, we watched old Father Surma discover the item as he was saying the breviary and, after a brief hesitation pick it up, shaking his head, then finally, though not before looking around anxiously, hide it under his soutane. I was then five years old and just beginning to develop a sense, if only a vague one, of the impropriety of our idea.

  We were five children, all born at intervals of two years: Wolfgang, born in 1924, was our authority figure. My younger brother Winfried, who was at once bright, witty, and inward-looking, was followed by the affectionate Hannih, loved by all, and then Christa, who was often lively to the point of folly.

  Wolfgang, like most elder brothers, was my undisputed model, and on his behalf I often got into fights with other boys because of some unjustified slander or other. He was brave, quick-witted, and casual to a degree that sometimes appeared almost arrogant. At school, he not only had the better marks but the more inventive excuses. I also heard him praised by the mothers of friends for qualitie
s the meaning of which I did not understand. “Clever rascal,” can “express himself very well,” and “knows how to behave himself” I understood very well, but “has charm” or “knows how to flatter the mothers of his friends” were rather mysterious. Unlike me, he was never reproached for having a “cheeky mouth.”

  In the garden at Hentigstrasse on my first day of school in April 1933

  Wolfgang won my complete admiration in spring 1932. It was then that the DoX—a flying boat as big as a steamer with twelve propellers and able to accommodate more than 160 passengers on three levels—returned from New York after an Atlantic crossing and set down on the Müggelsee Lake, only a couple of stations from Karlshorst on the S-Bahn. Some weeks before, Wolfgang had asked my parents to take him to Friedrichshagen to see the plane land. His plea was repeatedly turned down. So on the afternoon of May 24 he set off unnoticed with just twenty pfennigs.

  When he didn’t appear for the evening meal at six o’clock my parents began to feel anxious. After checking in vain with neighbors they started making telephone calls and at eight my father informed the police, while my mother said silent but fervent prayers. Shortly after nine she left the house, extremely worried, to search the neighborhood, only to meet Wolfgang coming toward her in Dorotheenstrasse with outstretched arms, full of the joys of life. Immediately he began telling her what he had seen at the Müggelsee and how already, on the way there, at Karlshorst Station, he had met a married couple and had chatted with them “like an adult,” and had got a good place at the lake and then watched as the DoX landed with a splash. The couple had even bought him two ice cream wafers and paid for the return ticket, so that he still had money left over. In the end they had come with him as far as Birkholz’s milk shop.

  My mother was tearful and relieved, but at the same time very upset; after she had brought Wolfgang to my father, who was looking very stern, they both gave him a serious talking-to. Wolfgang once again started on about his great day with the couple, the flying boat, and ice cream wafers, but my mother hardly let him get a word out. Finally, in the heat of the moment, she even threatened to lock him in the coal cellar should anything similar happen again. “That doesn’t bother me at all,” responded the seven-year-old with admirable calm, “because behind the partition are the water and light switches. I can easily get at them and turn them all off.” My mother later admitted that she had been speechless at the impudence of this statement, but also a little proud. Increasingly proud, even. I, however, who had followed the scene through the half-open door, was only proud.