Not I

by Joachim C. Fest

  It was an adventure, as I often, in the weeks that followed, happily persuaded myself before falling asleep. Who had the opportunity of entering upon such an enterprise with his father? I was determined not to disappoint him. Possibly my happiness also had to do with the fact that the dominant childhood feeling of being defenseless against one’s parents returned now and then; but there wasn’t only powerlessness; on the whole, I was imbued with a sense of privilege. And trust in others—that, too, was one of the lessons of that afternoon—was not a present that one doled out casually, but a rare remuneration, which had to be earned.

  Only when I was older did I understand the horror of the situation, in which constant watchfulness was required as a kind of law for parents as for children, mistrust was a rule of survival, and isolation a necessity—where the mere clumsiness of a child could lead literally to death and ruin. Fifteen years later, when I asked my father about the dark side of his afternoon talk, his expression again immediately revealed just how worried he had been then. He recovered himself and replied that at the time he had been very conscious of the risk to which he exposed himself and his family. Perhaps he had gone too far. But he had hoped to God it would turn out well. And, indeed, the gamble had paid off. At any rate, neither we nor Winfried, who had been allowed to join the second sitting of the evening meal later on, had ever caused him any embarrassment. And, just as he had wished, none of us had ever forgotten the maxim which, he remembered, he had bequeathed us. Indeed, the fine Latin maxim “Even if all others do—I do not!” belonged to every truly free life.

  Otherwise, everything remained as before. The petty quarrels between us children, the great reconciliations. In spring the lilac bushes bloomed, and when it rained the white and violet flowers bowed almost to the ground. Soon after the berries, the plum tree in front of the Deeckes’ window bore juicy black fruit, and once every three months my mother dressed up and went in her dark blue dress with the pale collar and the pearl necklace, which my father had given her on their wedding, to the Liebenthal Club, “dress informal,” where, as we joked, she heard the latest “market gossip” of the upper ranks, about the worries of bringing up children, about daughters’ romances that had come to nothing, and once even, amidst whispered agitation, about a premarital pregnancy.

  In the early summer of 1936 my father and I had erected a pigeon loft on the roof of our little summerhouse. When we were finished, he said that in appreciation he was freeing me from the strawberry fields and instead entrusting me with a bigger, more instructive responsibility, of caring for the pigeons: feeding, watering, keeping the loft clean. Typically, he handed me a pale blue booklet with the title Everything about the Pigeon for Beginners and the More Advanced, and within a few days I was able to distinguish the different kinds: the vain pouters with their mechanical nodding; the tumblers, who during vertical flight abruptly let themselves drop and, as if at a word of command, came to a standstill; the puffed-up fantail pigeons; and the carrier pigeons, which I soon took to friends and, bearing tiny messages, sent back to Hentigstrasse, address “Kitchen Window.” Then there were the evenings, when the greedy scrapping of the sparrows had come to an end and the talking in our room had stopped, while from outside, from the bottom of the garden only the sleepy sounds of the chickens could be heard, and farther away the clacking of the passing S-Bahn trains. Gradually, the day faded into darkness, only occasionally was there a shout or, when we were already drowsy, the bell of a cyclist.

  The pleasant regularity of the days ended in autumn 1936. That was the point at which more and more neighbors and acquaintances began to go along with the rulers, not only formally but with increasing conviction. At any rate, that was the case in Karlshorst, where the big defection to the Nazis did not begin until then. At second dinner my father said this turn of events could probably be explained by the many benefits which the regime offered to people. Herr Patzek reported, delightedly, that for the first time he could hear Willi Domgraf-Fassbender and Elly Ney for an affordable price, and see Faust in the theater, and, of course, Ibsen’s Nora, or an opera production conducted by Arthur Rother.2 When it was said that Hitler’s rise was the history of how he was underestimated, my father would add that one should rather talk of Hitler’s history of “popular appeasement.” This had then evolved into the dramatically staged history of his acclamation.

  Hitler was not only acclaimed in Germany, but (and this was possibly much more disastrous) also abroad. How all those bowing and scraping delegations of French war veterans, of journalists and sports officials, who virtually laid Europe at the dictator’s feet, had made my father despair. Not to mention the trade unionists who had commented so appreciatively on Hitler’s social policies. A further impetus had been provided by the Olympic Games in 1936, staged as a festival of reconciliation. And one had to add all the pseudo-romantic embellishments of the modern world, which in its National Socialist guise was no longer defined by jazz bands, box architecture, and Cubism, but by folklore, braided hair, and the art of the Old Masters. Anyone who wasn’t impressed by all of that had persuaded himself he was going along with it “to prevent anything worse.” In truth, none of those who talked like that had prevented anything worse; instead they enhanced the regime’s prestige and provided it with expertise, and so actually promoted the worst.

  The gains that the regime was making were also evident in everyday life. The previously friendly sales assistant in the grocer’s fell silent now as soon as my father came through the door; acquaintances of many years disappeared into doorways or quickly crossed the road when he approached. At second dinner they were henceforth called “the other-side-of-the-street walkers.” Herr Henschel, whose garden adjoined ours, now appeared on his balcony wearing the black uniform of the SS instead of the brown one of the SA. His fists on the solid fat of his hips, he would shout over in a commanding voice, scolding the “girl brats” for making such a row; when the elder of my two sisters organized a Chinese lantern procession on her birthday, he called the police to come and put an end to the “mischief.” He was not only disturbed by the “fidgeting” with naked flames, but by the risk of fire. Others again informed the Blockwart (block warden) when we put itching powder under their children’s shirts or perhaps had talked them into handing over their gobstopper candies so that we could fire them at sparrows or streetlights with our catapults.3 Herr Fest—said nice Frau Köhler, who lived a couple of houses down, to my mother—was the father of “little criminals”; she didn’t mean any offense by it. But she would report the recent theft to “higher authorities,” even if it had only been a matter of a couple of fallen apples. Anyhow, said Frau Köhler, the party had immediately seen the sort of person it was dealing with, and had rightly shown my father the door.

  Malicious talk of this kind was new and it showed that something alien had entered the quiet world of the suburb, in which there had been, at most, personal or family differences. It was frightening to see how, after a brief pause, the stable social structure of Karlshorst fell apart. Suddenly, enmities appeared which were given an ideological justification, but in reality gave free rein to nothing but envy, malice, and sheer spite.

  The parental home in Karlshorst, Berlin, with the eight-year-old author in the foreground

  My father observed these changes with dismay. When I later asked him what had affected him most, he said it had been the “empty space” which had opened up, raising a “wall of silence and looking the other way” around him. That had hit him harder than expected. Because there had been nothing unexpected about the misdeeds of those who suddenly wore a uniform and had power; he had foreseen that and had been more surprised that many behaved more decently than he would have thought. But in the end base instincts had come to the surface, as with Frau Köhler, who had been nice for so long. He would gladly have dispensed with the satisfaction of having been proved right in his skepticism about human beings. Once, in the course of an outburst of anger, he let slip that he felt “like puking” all the tim
e. But all too few people puked with him.

  He found a degree of compensation in his circle of acquaintances and friends, which drew visibly closer. Its eleven members met every four weeks in out-of-the-way taverns or pubs; each of them had belonged to the Reichsbanner. Paul Mielitz, the former mayor of the borough of Friedrichshain in Berlin, was one of the group, as were Max Fechner, who in the late 1940s—after the forced unification of the Communist and Social Democratic parties in the Soviet Zone—became minister of justice of the new German Democratic Republic; some school inspectors and headmasters, most of them unemployed; and Franz Künstler, a former MP and chairman of the Berlin SPD, who had spent the first twenty months of Nazi rule in Oranienburg concentration camp (later known as Sachsenhausen) and was then at liberty for several years.4 He never, however, spoke about his experiences. He was not allowed to, he told those who asked; he had signed an undertaking to remain silent, and their meetings already made him suspect. “We even cover up the concentration camps with our silence,” complained my father. At the outbreak of war Künstler was conscripted to do forced labor; he was badly treated and died as a result. My father used to say that the funeral in autumn 1942, which almost two thousand people attended, had been the last mass demonstration against the Hitler dictatorship. Arthur Neidhardt, a senior officer of the Reichsbanner when it was dissolved, took part in the early meetings, occasionally also Heinrich Krone, later a Christian Democrat minister in West Germany, and a number of other friends of former days.

  Every time, my father brought back stories of troubles from the meetings, of arrests or family tragedies, and some things he kept so secret that he didn’t even relate them at second dinner. Consequently, Wolfgang and I soon started taking up our eavesdropping position after these gatherings. From time to time, so we heard, the circle was able to help some of the persecuted, providing documents or some money. Beyond that my father managed by circuitous ways to discover the latest figures for political prisoners. At the outbreak of war, they numbered, if I remember correctly, well over 200,000.5 In the early months of the Hitler period the friends also exchanged information about the torture chambers of the SA, which were taken over by the SS in 1934. There was much discussion of how Himmler’s men proceeded much more coldly and bureaucratically than the SA had done. The SS, we heard our father say several times, had invented “administrative death” in place of “bloody arbitrary killing,” a phrase which made a considerable impression on us, although even Wolfgang couldn’t say what it actually meant. Then again, my father talked about a renowned legal expert who called the constitutional state an invention of Jews and Communists.6 The judgment on the contemptible role played by Papen was unanimous, because out of a craving for prestige he had gone down on his knees before the dictator dozens of times. He had repeatedly talked about taming Hitler. Riesebrodt now called him “the lion tamer who lies down on his stomach in front of the lion.”

  Besides this it was mostly everyday matters that were discussed at second dinner. Perhaps, I later thought, my mother had after all managed to persuade my father to be more discreet. There was talk of an argument with Rudi Hardegen; of the measured, impressively dignified appearances of the new priest; and, unquestionably the most amusing point of discussion, of giving names to the newly hatched chickens. Wolfgang and I got endless pleasure from inventing mad, made-up names: a particularly vain young cockerel was called Chicken Coop Dandy; his shy brother Wallflower; a splashing young hen Dribbler; another (to my mother’s dismay, because it constantly let itself be covered by every male in the coop) Old Faithful. Sometimes the two of us interposed dinner-table topics to avoid questions about the previous week’s school essay or the apology to Frau Weyen because of the racket we had made recently. To conclude, my father delivered brief, witty sayings from a seemingly inexhaustible stock: “tempi passati past,” for example, or someone with modest intellectual gifts was “sure not to have invented the soup plate.”

  These were the times of the most cheerful harmony, which, however, could change abruptly. For a long time I was considered to be hard to control, and every couple of days my parents had to hear the complaints of friends or neighbors. My bad behavior was held against me for years. According to one story, when my father had problems with an antiquated camera, I, in a recalcitrant mood, had smashed the thing; according to another, as a six-year-old I had put a young rabbit high up in a bird box so that it would see the world; and so on. My younger sister Christa, who was three during my wild days, repeated into old age how she had to cling to my father’s trouser leg to prevent him from punishing me. She could not, however, save me from dozens of clips around the ear. On the other hand, if any rebuke failed to come, I was equally dissatisfied; only a thrashing or at least a scolding set the world to rights again.

  The most serious trouble ensued when I, as often happened, insisted on having the last word even against my parents. One time, at table, I muttered that Frau Vaupel, one of my parents’ closest friends, was a “silly goat.” When my father angrily protested that he did not want to hear anything like that from me even one more time, I repeated without the slightest hesitation that Frau Vaupel was “a silly goat, a silly goat.” When my father chided me, pointing out that he had just forbidden this effrontery, I replied that he had said “one more time”; as I had said it twice, I had merely obeyed his wishes. My father changed the topic, shaking his head, but I saw that my mother, who briefly left the room, suppressed a chuckle.

  Sometimes my father also talked about political topics, or more precisely, ones that were almost historical, for which the second dinner had really been set aside. After an admonishing glance, he would tell us about the difficult emergence of the republic or about its long dying; of bitterly unjust judicial decisions; of the SA torture chambers in Columbia Haus, a former military prison, and many other places. Once, as I’ve never forgotten, I heard him describe Papen and Kaas as traitors and the SPD leadership as a bunch of cowards. “When we set up our organization Black-Red-Gold,7 our slogan was Deutsche Republik, wir alle schwören: Letzten Tropfen Bluts soll dir gehören! (German Republic, we all swear: our last drop of blood shall be yours!). But what did we do? We handed over our arms stores to the Nazis.”

  On another occasion he mentioned an argument with Dr. Goldschmidt, a lawyer he had known for years. In 1935, after the promulgation of the Nürnberg race laws, my father had begged him to leave the country as soon as possible. But Dr. Goldschmidt, who, as a German patriot, had always felt it his duty to drink only German red wine instead of the far superior French and to buy only German clothes, shoes, and groceries, had paid no heed. Germany, said Dr. Goldschmidt, was a state of law; it was in people’s bones, so to speak. In the eighteenth century, under King Frederick William, his family had been received almost without prejudice, first near Teltow and then in Berlin, and his was now the sixth generation to live in Germany. Of course, there had been moments of hostility, but his ancestors had survived it all. One should not get into a panic.

  There were constant discussions. But neither Dr. Goldschmidt nor other Jewish acquaintances like David Jallowitz and Dr. Meyer were convinced. Most of them I only saw on occasional visits. The dominant type had an ascetic face, was intellectual, and had that unexpected wit that my father loved so much. Remembering some of these Jewish friends, my father said to me after the war that in their self-discipline, their quiet civility and unsentimental brilliance, they had really been the last Prussians; in any case, he had more often encountered his idea of Prussianism among the long-established, often highly educated Berlin Jews than anywhere else.

  They had, he once went on, only one failing, which became their undoing: being overwhelmingly governed by their heads, they had, in tolerant Prussia, lost their instinct for danger, which had preserved them through the ages. Like Dr. Goldschmidt, Jews came up with the most diverse reasons for remaining in Germany. Almost all of them protested that their families had always been “nationally minded”; they talked of family sacrifices o
r of decorations awarded during the First World War for service at Verdun and Chemin des Dames, at Ypres and on the Marne front.8 They did not want—as many of them put it—to be infected by the general hysteria; and a businessman from the Spittelmarkt,9 whom my father had known since Weimar days, assured him that one of his great-uncles had donated considerable sums to the Empress Auguste Viktoria for her “church quirk.”10 The most paradoxical argument was the one my father heard from Harry Hirschberg, a legal secretary, who claimed that driving the Jewish inhabitants out of the country was precisely what the Nazis wanted, so the Jews should not be urged to flee. My father was involuntarily aiding and abetting criminals. And, Hirschberg added with an admonitory glance, anyone who knew anything at all about the law knew that, too, was punishable.