On one of those days, in spring 1940, just as I was going back up to our apartment from my place at the garden table, the telephone rang. At the other end of the line was a caller who was evidently speaking from a public phone box, and in a somewhat breathless and plainly disguised voice said, “You’re going to have visitors!” The caller gave no name, did not use any form of address, and did not say goodbye. He simply hung up. From the window I called my father upstairs. “Give me ten minutes!” he replied, but I must have responded with considerable emphasis, “No, immediately! Important!” With a surprised look he threw the spade aside with which he was just digging a vegetable patch and came up. When he asked what was so important, I told him what had happened and wanted to ask what it meant, but my father was already at the wireless in the living room and turning the dial from Swiss Radio Beromünster to the German Broadcasting Station, before rushing to his study to put the first volume of Winston Churchill’s Marlborough, which he had picked up somewhere, back in the bookcase, and then going through each room to check if there was anything “suspicious.”10
Before he was even finished hurrying through the rooms, the doorbell rang. Two men, who despite their civilian clothes gave the impression of wearing uniforms, entered the apartment without a word of introduction, loudly giving the Hitler salute. Together with my father they went to the study, and from the living room across the hall I heard calm voices which only rarely rose to a fiercer exchange. After about half an hour the visitors departed unceremoniously, without inspecting the radio. My mother, who had been sitting on the bed in the bedroom, covering her eyes with her hands, rushed to my father. But he was fairly vague. They had nothing in particular against him. There was no need for her to worry. Perhaps that was true. Perhaps he only said it to reassure her. In any case, in the years that followed, we received something like another fifteen warnings of this kind. The announced visit did not always take place. Who the mysterious informant was only came to light after the war, by chance.
The first air-raid warning came at about the same time. Hardly was the wail of the sirens over when my father went up onto the roof of the house with my brothers and me to watch the attack. After an uneventful hour, in which we searched the sky for the signs of the zodiac, we could hear the initially distant hum of engines coming closer, without being able to make out anything in the beams of the apparently randomly scanning searchlights. Only where the fingers of light feeling their way across the sky came together did we see, at their point of intersection, individual silvery aircraft, and shortly after that fiery flashes. But the raid was taking place some way off, over Kreuzberg, Britz, and down as far as Rudow. When the all clear had already been sounded and we were still sitting on the roof duckboards, countless small black particles floated down, and Wolfgang said these were the shrapnel clouds that formed every time a gun was fired. The next morning lessons did not start until ten. And so it went on every few days.
At school the air raids became the dominant subject of conversation. Some spoke of houses close to theirs that had been hit, and everyone began to collect shell splinters. If there had been no air-raid warning for several days in a row, then Gerd Donner got increasingly annoyed. You couldn’t rely on the “old Tommies” anymore, either, he moaned. He loved the air-raid warnings and went down to the cellar as he would to the cinema. Not only because for every hour on alert after 10 p.m. school began an hour later than normal in the morning, but because in his cellar he had made himself a “make-out corner” behind a stack of laundry detergent cartons, where no one else went, and where for two weeks he had been “having a bit of fun with beautiful Inge from five houses down.” Beautiful Inge was just thirteen and a half, “but with everything in the right place,” he emphasized, drawing curves in the air with his hands. A few days ago he had already got to the third button of her blouse, and just then the all clear had sounded. “But yesterday when I got to my little corner, beautiful Inge was already there, waiting for me, with her blouse already open down to the third button, inviting me, so to speak. ‘Now you can just carry on,’ she said. And what could I say to that? I carried on. Scouts’ honor!” Another boy in the class wanted to show off, and told us that when his father withdrew to the bedroom he always locked the door. “Well, I ask, why does he do that?” he said with false innocence. Gerd Donner interrupted him: “Just stop boring us. I wasn’t talking about my old man, but about beautiful Inge and me.”
That winter my father brought back from his monthly meetings the news that the group of friends could no longer procure money or forged documents for those seeking help. They had destroyed the few pieces of paper with cover names, addresses, and the code. Only in cases of the greatest danger could they still provide help. The inspections were clearly becoming more stringent, the sentences more severe, and recently almost everyone in the group had reported cases of merciless persecution. Listening to “enemy radio stations” was now being punished with prison, and soon, no doubt, with the death sentence; likewise, the mere passing on of political jokes. Concluding his account with a serious warning to us, my father added that during the lengthy discussions it had been evident how despairing everyone was. In times like these the only thing left was the knowledge that there were a couple of friends nearby. Later, he also reported that—in order to make the law more “flexible” and more suited to “national needs”—leading legal experts were working on a new criminal offense of “conduct of life,” which meant that merely keeping one’s distance from the national community could be made a matter of criminal investigation.
It was about this time that I made a second twenty-five-pfennig deal with Wolfgang. He offered me ten nude photos of French origin, which he had bought from a street trader near the Admiralspalast music hall. As far as I remember, the pictures showed mostly plump ladies in calf-length laced boots, who, one foot resting on a stool, leaned out toward the viewer with lascivious smiles and sometimes also invitingly with outstretched arms. For every week I borrowed them Wolfgang demanded twenty-five pfennigs, so that I had to learn poems again in order to scrape together that amount. I did not find the naked women at all “wicked,” but instead pretty “silly.” Apparently, however, they were part of growing up, according to Wolfgang and all the other friends around me, from Rudi Hardegen to Helmut Sternekieker. Before we came to an agreement, however, I asked him whether with our deal we were not in danger of committing a “conduct of life” offense. He responded that we were enemies of the Hitler people and shouldn’t let ourselves be intimidated by their laws.
The third year of Leibniz Gymnasium, with homeroom teacher Dr. Appelt. (1) Gerd Donner, (2) Wigbert Gans, (3) Clemens Korner, (4) the author.
Ever since Father Wittenbrink had heard that I was going to see Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro with Aunt Dolly, he called me to the fence with increasing frequency when I was sitting at the garden table doing homework. From a number of conversations I knew that he loved art, especially music. He asked me what I knew about Mozart, which operas I had already heard, whether I knew the term “child prodigy,” and then related the well-known episodes of the composer’s early violin playing and tours through half of Europe with his father and sister. He could not get over the fact that Mozart had, as a child, composed a symphony, and, at only a little more than ten years old, an opera, and that he not only possessed the technical skills to do so, but appeared to know everything about life, and even, so Father Wittenbrink sometimes thought, something about death as well.
Wittenbrink returned to Figaro, which he talked about at greater length. He said that in the opera Mozart presents—in the incomparable manner of which only he was master—a merry amorous confusion. Yet at the end a deadly seriousness breaks through. In the “Italian” operas, at least, such as Don Giovanni, the plot of which he related in outline, a stone guest11 always appears at some point and announces to the frightened characters, “The game is over!” In Figaro, he continued, that moment comes when the Countess pulls the veil from her face and t
he Count sinks remorsefully to his knees: it is the most moving scene in the whole history of opera. Before the performance, he advised me, I absolutely must read the libretto, otherwise the whole bustling plot, which only appears to be amusing, would be incomprehensible to me. And I should never forget that while the melodies of the Mozart operas, which thanks to their combination of grace and attractiveness have been whistled at every street corner, end in conciliation, every knowledgeable listener knows that happiness, even as it is being extolled in song, is already secretly announcing a hidden unhappiness.
The next day Wittenbrink invited me to his apartment. I remember that on the walls of the large room, as it was called, there were two Ruisdaels with their characteristic trademark of a tree trunk running at an angle across the picture background, also a Jacques d’Arthois, and one or two paintings of the second Italian and first European rank, as he added in explanation. Then we moved over to his record collection, which filled several cabinets and shelves. After lengthy explanations he played me the conclusion of Figaro and, because he could never stop when the subject was Mozart, that of Così fan tutte as well. Of the supposedly bright finale, he said it is the darkest ending of any opera; only Mozart had the genius to make the C major of these bars sound like cries for help. Could I hear that? he asked. I said no, but that one probably had to have listened to Mozart and much else all one’s life; instead, I always encountered only Herr Tinz and his thundering forte prestissimo.
In the midst of these days spent in the garden—and just as we were finishing Xenophon’s Anabasis and going on to Homer’s Odyssey at school, and in the history class were hearing about the Turks at the gates of Vienna—burst the already almost forgotten war: at dawn on May 10, 1940, the offensive against France began, which for half a year had repeatedly been postponed.12 Unlike the First World War, the confrontation was decided within a few weeks, and once again my father felt himself torn by the same conflict as in the years before. At second supper, which now also included Winfried, he remarked that he was glad from the bottom of his heart at the French defeat, but could never be so at Hitler’s triumph. Soon after, when he said at the garden fence that he had rarely felt himself so abandoned by the reason of the world as now, Wittenbrink responded that a “reason of the world” didn’t exist. What we described as such was nothing more than what we retrospectively projected onto pure chance; it was obvious to anyone that for every ten examples of the action of world reason in history there were some tens of thousands of examples of the working of worldly unreason. I could tell from my father’s face how true and depressing he found this statement.
This conversation was perhaps still on his mind when, shortly afterward, Dr. Gans, the father of my schoolmate, came to visit. Since the sky was overcast with dark gray clouds, the two first of all withdrew to the study. My father offered his guest a Boenicke cigar, while my mother made the coffee. I was asked to remain and learned that—with respect to the war against France, which had ended a few days before—Dr. Gans thought that as Hitler now controlled half of Europe, it was necessary for him to consolidate his power. Surely Hitler understood that; in any case, at some point even the greediest person is sated or at least needs time to digest. Hence at the moment there was no threat of a new campaign, Dr. Gans could predict that with some certainty. But the longer Dr. Gans talked and justified his reflections, the more skeptically my father listened. Meanwhile the weather had cleared up, and so the two of them went downstairs after coffee and sat at the table under the chestnuts.
What he was saying, my father began, resuming the conversation, sounded all very reasonable, but that was precisely why he was mistaken. One should never leave Hitler’s unreason out of the calculation. He had always avoided the obvious. Consequently, there was only one quotation which adequately described the situation. It was from Goethe: “All comfort is vile, / and despair the only duty.” That reflected our situation exactly. After some thought, Dr. Gans’s features brightened and one could virtually see him changing his mind. “Quite right!” he then blurted out, if with some effort. “It may be that I didn’t take sufficient account of the fact that this state is led by a madman.” And after a short pause: “The quote, by the way, comes from the Paralipomena to Faust II. I know it, too.” Then, shaking his head, Dr. Gans listened as my father said that he knew the source only as the “Fragments”; at once a kind of philological dispute was under way. Each insisted on his view, and since we were sitting at the garden table, it was too much of an effort to bring the volumes downstairs to look up the quote. They would, they agreed, talk on the phone. When I came home from school the next day it turned out that both my father and Dr. Gans had the same text in mind, even if they had noted it under different titles. The scene has always stayed in my mind as the quintessence of a difference of opinion among members of the educated classes.
That summer my father wrote to Roger Reveille (as the latter told me after the war) that he was glad France had been defeated; the country had richly deserved it. But the Frenchman should not grieve over it. Borrowing from a German poet, only with a different emphasis, he wanted him to know, “We are on a ship of the dead.”13 When I asked my father at the time whether it had not been altogether thoughtless to send such a letter to France, he replied that he had given neither a sender’s name nor a signature, and had posted it miles away in Lichterfelde. Roger had let him know through a third party that he had received the letter. And what, I asked again, if in a difficult situation—that is, under threat of torture—Roger had, after all, revealed the sender’s identity to the Gestapo? At that my father said one would not get anywhere without taking risks, adding, with a smile, that danger had its charms, too.
Perhaps I had taken this and other similar remarks all too literally. At any rate it was about this time that I established a new record in “platform jumping.” Gathering all one’s courage, one jumped from the train as it was coming into the station and allowed oneself to be carried by the momentum the thirty steps past the little stationmaster’s office and as close as possible to the stairs leading down to street level. But I soon got around to more reckless—in fact, foolish—ventures. At some point in autumn 1940 I began to scribble Hitler caricatures on fences, lampposts, and front doors. They consisted of an elongated circle, a line sloping a little to the right, and a hatched smudge: it was always Hitler’s face. As far as I was aware only Wigbert Gans, who even joined me a few times, knew about it; later I heard that other schoolmates had also engaged in such foolhardy activities, some even with a sketch of a hammer and sickle dripping blood. It helped that recently classes lasted until dusk and were conducted in the morning or the afternoon on alternate weeks.
Our homeroom teacher, Dr. Appelt, was a ponderous man with a flat-featured face, who was permanently sweaty seldom entered the classroom without the party badge. The dark shadows under his eyes testified to the toil of the night hours in which he pored over the syllabus, without ever quite getting on top of it. At any rate, Wigbert Gans several times pointed out mistakes in his calculations in the application of the laws of physics, at which the class jeered and stamped their feet, while he ran to his lectern and handed out black marks and detentions by the half dozen. For reasons which I never understood but may have had to do with my father, he entertained an unconcealed dislike of me, to which I responded with all the impudence of my thirteen years. Usually, it was no more than the obstreperousness of an adolescent talking back—accompanied by the laughter of my classmates—that got me a black mark in the register. More serious, however, was the following piece of recklessness. One morning, quite by chance, I was in school a quarter of an hour before lessons began. Sitting around in the classroom and staring out at the dingy winter morning, I took out my pocketknife and without thinking carved the same Hitler caricature, which for some time I had been scribbling on walls and fences, on my desk.
Luckily, Gerd Donner was the first to come into the classroom after me. Taking one glance at the desk he hissed quietly, an
d with the instinct for survival of a boy from the back alleys of the East End of Berlin, “Get rid of that immediately!” Without waiting for my reaction, he took out his own pocketknife and began to remove small splinters of varnish from the surface of the desk. Meanwhile, the rest of the class arrived, the room filled up; some came up to the desk and in what was left could just about discern the outlines of the familiar caricature. In the commotion that arose, Gerd Donner threatened that anyone who reported anything would be in big trouble.
Dr. Appelt had barely entered the classroom when, to everyone’s astonishment, one of the pupils rose to his feet and reported me “as duty required” and as he had learned as a leader in the Hitler Youth. When he had finished, the teacher came over to me, shaking his head in disgust, bent over to inspect the desk, was aghast at what he saw, shook his head once more, and finally told me to follow him to the rector after the lesson. There I was subjected to a brief interrogation and the next day questioned by a policeman called to the school for that specific purpose.
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