Not I

by Joachim C. Fest

  It was indeed, as my parents reproached me that evening, an unbelievably foolish thing to have done, and they rightly asked if I had not thought about the consequences the incident could have for our family. Some classmates also conspicuously withdrew from me. For the first time I had an inkling of what it meant to be excluded. Dr. Appelt clearly agreed with the disrepute into which I had fallen, and from then on he seemed to regard every moment of inattention and every disruption for which I was to blame as the action of a good-for-nothing, who was politically and humanly a bad egg. Soon I had an unbeatable lead over everyone else in my class when it came to black marks in the register and detentions, and when this unhappy course of events showed no sign of coming to an end, my “unfortunate father,” as Dr. Weinhold put it to me, was summoned to the headmaster’s office. Once again there was a stern-looking gentleman present, who evidently represented the school authority and immediately turned the proceedings into a kind of interrogation. I denied any kind of political motive, but admitted the damage to property and asked to be shown leniency, as I had been advised from various sides. After lengthy discussion—in the course of which I got to know my father’s negotiating skills—it was agreed to refrain from the consilium abeundi (expulsion) that had originally been decided. But the condition was that I should voluntarily leave the school at the next possible date, Easter 1941; that is, in about three months. “It would be best if you took your other two sons away at the same time!” the gentleman from the education authority advised my father.

  After the conference, which had taken place during the last school period of the day, my father embraced me, which was unusual for him, in front of all those present and left the room, tight-lipped, to go back to Karlshorst, while I returned to my class. Among the friends who stood by me were, of course, Wigbert Gans, Clemens Körner, and Gerd Donner. At the end of lessons, Gerd Donner was waiting for me outside in the corridor and, although I would not be part of the class for much longer, he now frequently accompanied me on the half-hour walk to the station in what was an extremely cold winter. On the first day he had me tell him what happened in the headmaster’s room, and concluded, “So, nevertheless, expelled!” and after a few more steps, “But lucky, too. You should be pleased!” From that time on I counted my relation with him as one of those belated friendships, which turn up in everyone’s life now and then. Whatever we talked about we found those points of agreement that every friendship needs, and the differences that enliven and keep it going, whether the subject was football or film stars, books or radio detectors, friends or many a “beautiful Inge.”

  Inevitably, I’ve forgotten the content of almost all of our conversations. But one from just before Christmas 1941 has stuck in my mind, because in the course of it we interrupted our walk and, despite the cold, stopped on the dark bridge over the Spree. Snow was falling heavy and sticky from the wet cold sky, collecting on the railings and melting on the ground. The pedestrians who hurried past, muffled up and often carrying a Christmas tree under their arm, seemed shrunken. We shifted from one foot to the other. A couple of times one of the carts that had recently been pressed into service again came by, the horses slipping and kicking out with billowing clouds of breath.

  What kept us there was a conversation about the ultimate questions of life and death. Gerd Donner said that—as an intelligent person—I surely couldn’t believe everything that was said in church. He had nothing against Father Lauen, our “snappy” religious education teacher, but the fairy tale about the Dear Lord with the curly beard, together with the Resurrection and the “immaculate conception”—he could only laugh at it. And he knew for sure that secretly I was laughing, too. Ice floes drifted past under the railings of the bridge as we talked with steaming breath. Finally, I replied that I even liked to believe what he described as a fairy tale. Perhaps it was all invented. But that just dressed things up for unsophisticated minds, and I was a little surprised to discover that he was among them. What faith, in essence, gave me, was the feeling of having a kind of second, dependable home and of being a match for everything. He would be wise to wait and see! Gerd Donner made a dismissive gesture with his hand and replied that some people needed something like that; he had not suspected I was one of them. At any rate he did all right without the “old beardy up there.” And when, frozen through, we finally set off again, he said, “The people from my street, which you’ve never even seen, don’t need the Dear Lord of the Catholics.” They got the conviction to cope with the world not from the Dear Lord, but from their mother’s milk; or else they were lost. When we parted at Silesian Station we had not moved one inch closer.

  One Sunday at the beginning of February 1941, shortly after we had come back from church, two senior Hitler Youth officials entered the building, banging the street door and demanding to speak to my father. They had just found out—one of them shouted from the bottom of the stairs—that none of his three sons had joined either the junior Jungvolk or the Hitler Youth. There had to be an end to it. “Malingering!” barked the other. “Impertinence! How dare you!” Everybody had duties. “You, too!” the first one joined in again.

  My father had, meanwhile, gone down to the pair. “Whoever you are,” he responded, frowning in annoyance, “I have no intention of allowing you to come here, on a Sunday at that, with a lie. Because we have several times been pestered, likewise on a Sunday morning, by your lads. So you haven’t just found out something.” And getting ever louder, he finally roared at them, “You accuse me of malingering and are yourself cowards!” And after a few more rebukes he shouted from the second step over their army-style cropped heads, “And now, will you leave my house? Get out! This minute!” The pair seemed speechless at the tone my father dared to use, but before they could reply he drove them back, so to speak, through the entrance lobby and out the door. The commotion had initially startled the whole building, and several tenants had appeared on the stairs. At the sight of the uniforms, however, they quietly closed the doors to their apartments.

  Hardly had the street door closed behind the two Hitler Youth leaders when my father raced up the stairs to calm my mother. She was standing in the door as if paralyzed and only said, “This time you’ve gone too far!” My father put his arm around her and admitted he had forgotten himself for a moment. But first the Nazis had stolen his profession and his income, now they were attacking his sons and Sunday itself. One had to show these people that there was a limit. “They know none,” said my mother in an expressionless voice. It was all the more important, objected my father, to point it out to them. It wasn’t he who had gone too far, but the Hitler rascals. It was virtually the definition of a Nazi that he was someone who always went too far.

  To everyone’s astonishment this incident had no consequences. Except that two days later Fengler, the block warden, called and warned my father in front of the whole family—we were just sitting at table—“Behave yourself! You’re not alone in the world! Will you finally realize that? And, after all, membership in the Hitler Youth is the law!” My mother told my father to remain seated, and accompanied the hated block warden to the door. “My husband isn’t usually like that,” she said, making an effort to be friendly. “But on Sunday we go to church. We won’t let anyone stop us doing that!”

  At the supper table Fengler’s visit brought us back to the incident again. My father was at once angry and amused: “National community—my goodness! I feel disgust, nothing else!” After the unbelievable things that had been imposed by law—the exclusion of all Jews from the liberal professions, even doctors and pharmacists, the termination of all telephone connections, and the “yellow star”—now, he said, the man in the street was taking a hand and thinking up ever new forms of harassment for the authorities.14 Jews were no longer allowed to sit on park benches or to “pollute the good air of German forests by walking in them.” They were no longer allowed to subscribe to newspapers and magazines, and Dr. Meyer, who had until recently ridden a Wanderer bicycle, had had to hand i
t in, along with his typewriter; Jews were also not allowed to keep pets such as dogs, cats, canaries, or hamsters. When a Jewish friend of Hans Hausdorf wanted to buy flowers for the grave of his wife, who had died recently, the sales assistant snapped at him that flowers were a decoration of a German character. Jews had no claim to them. He should get out. And Germans themselves had to answer the question of the marriage registrar, whether they were ready to pledge themselves for life, not, as had been usual for generations, with a simple “Yes,” but with a “Yes, Heil Hitler!” What on earth had become of the country?

  At the end of March my brothers and I began our farewell calls. With the help of a friend of my parents it had been possible to place us in a Catholic boarding school in Freiburg, whose pupils also took classes at one of the city’s two municipal Gymnasiums. I called on the Gans family by Treptow Park and walked once with Gerd Donner through his quarter behind Görlitz Station: shabby, dark streets, where big cakes of plaster had fallen from the facades of the houses. Around us there were yelling brats; handcarts with potatoes, chopped wood, and other small goods were being hauled along; bawling children leaned against the walls of some houses as if they had been dumped there, and in one entry-way boys were trying to drag a stubborn billy goat out onto the pavement. I took my leave of the parents of my Karlshorst classmates and from Father Wittenbrink, who made me promise to write regularly. I called on Dr. Körner, the senior physician of Karlshorst Hospital, who was one of my parents’ close friends and whose son had for a long time shared a desk with me, and also on Gerd Schülke and Ursel Hanschmann. Wolfgang thought it all very overdone and remarked, “What’s the point of it all? We’re not going to a penal colony! Or are we going into exile?” “In part, yes!” I replied. On the day before our departure I went to see Dr. Meyer.

  When he opened the door of the apartment, he stood in front of me wearing, as always, the light suit with a brightly colored neckerchief, and this time he had a circular summer hat on as well. From the hallway came a smell of cabbage soup, poverty, and old age. As he greeted me a smile passed over his features, which could often appear frozen. He said no more than “Come in!” and went ahead of me into the library. There was already tea on the side table. Dr. Meyer had even got biscuits from somewhere. He asked how my parents were, my siblings and friends, then asked me to avoid political topics, and suggested I read him some of his favorite poems. While I was reading one he was already choosing the next: I still remember that I began with Goethe’s “Welcome and Farewell,” then his “I Think of You” and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” followed by Schiller’s “Nenia,” and after that I read some verses by Heine, Lenau, and Chamisso. When I wanted to go on with Stefan George, Dr. Meyer abruptly asked me to stop; he was not in the right mood.15 After a few sips of tea, he said it had probably not been a good idea for me to drop by. He was distracted and was asking himself countless things to which he had no answer.

  I made a remark about the future, to which no one has an answer, but Dr. Meyer went on talking without paying attention to what I had said. The worst thing was that the great poets, from whom I had read something just now, bore some of the blame for his misfortune: Goethe and Schiller and all the rest … How often had he—when his wife was alive—considered emigrating and been close to making the decision to leave? But then trust in the culture of the Germans had always won out … A nation, they said, that had produced Goethe and Schiller and Lessing, Bach, Mozart, and so many others, would simply be incapable of barbarism. Griping at the Jews, prejudice, there had always been that, they thought. But not violent persecution. They wouldn’t do anything to us … “Well!” he interrupted himself. “You know how mistaken we were …”

  Then came one of many pauses. His wife—Dr. Meyer resumed his train of thought—had been cleverer than him. Unlike her, he had adopted the admired Germans’ credulity and political naïveté. Men were just blockheads. But now it was too late to moan. We should stop lamenting! So, he said, with an audible change of register in his voice: he envied me. For example, because I could travel to any place I wanted; because the opera houses were open to me; and, above all, because reading Buddenbrooks was still before me. I should know that hardly anything in life was comparable to the pleasure of reading a book like that for the first time. We sipped awkwardly at our teacups. After a few minutes Dr. Meyer stood up determinedly and put his arm around my shoulders: “It’s better you go now!” When we had come to the apartment door, I tried to think what I could say to him, but felt paralyzed and involuntarily remembered my father’s words that at times like these one should avoid all pathos.

  Back in Karlshorst I could already hear at the entrance from the street Frau Bicking singing in her wailing tremolo that she was going to dance into heaven with someone, where she (as she went on singing with hardly a break) would do like the swallows and build a nest with her dearest. But in a moment she was back to her favorite song, according to which everything happened long, long ago.16 Frau Dölle, who so much liked to play the stool pigeon, asked me whether “Old Bicking’s yowling could still be considered singing or whether it was a nuisance already.” Since she didn’t expect an answer from me, she said she would let the crazy old woman go on warbling just one more time, adding, while pointing at the ceiling several times with her broom: “But everything has to stop sometime!” And finally: “Soon, soon is the time!,” imitating old Bicking’s yowling.

  My parents were shocked by my report about the visit to Dr. Meyer, and my mother interrupted me to ask what could be done to help. When she insisted on the support of my father’s group of friends, he shook his head vigorously: he had urged emigration after the boycott of Jewish shops and businesses in April 1933, then after the Nürnberg Laws of 1935, and again and again up to Kristallnacht, when the halfway favorable point had already passed.17 But no one had wanted to listen to him. Everyone had mentioned countless reasons for staying, and he had even been accused of wanting, just like the Nazis, to make Germany Judenfrei—free of Jews. After he had calmed down, he nevertheless promised to do whatever was possible to help his friend.

  The following morning Albert Tinz dropped by. He said a few words to my mother, then went into the living room where the piano was, sat on the stool, and, after a mighty sequence of chords, led in to an improvised andantino, which charmingly blended some melodies from my mother’s favorite Schubert songs, from “Night and Dreams” to “The Carrier Pigeon.” Then he played one of the early Beethoven sonatas, which was also one of my mother’s favorite pieces, and after he had waited, eyes closed, for the last note to fade away, he said, “Once again, what I always say is don’t drag things out, even when they are sentimental! Otherwise you just end up blowing at cinders. Without passion there’s nothing! Not even a pianissimo! No music at all!” The small man with the artfully twirled-up hair rose and said that he had really had no great success here, except for me. Perhaps someday we would understand where all music began and ended. That would make him happy, and he wasn’t giving up hope. After these words he shook his mane of hair and, as always, hurried out.

  The last person to whom, together with my brothers, I said goodbye was old Katlewski. We came upon him beside the herb garden and, when he asked whether we were really leaving tonight, we answered as if with one voice, “Yes, at twelve past eight!” Since we were saying goodbye, he was, for once, going to be generous, he said, and tell a joke just like that, without the usual urging. “But as always, not a word to anyone … Well, how does it start? So there’s one of these guys from People’s Welfare18 collecting money and he’s shouting, ‘Come on, people! Everybody gives a dime! Everybody’s got that much, national comrades! Don’t be shy! It can even be a nickel! Come on! Do it now!’ And as he’s taking in the money there’s a man standing there with both hands in his pockets who says calmly, ‘Not givin’ nothin!’ And when the guy from People’s Welfare replies, ‘What d’you mean? Giving nothing! Come on!’ the other says, ‘Because I’m not a national comrade!’ Says the on
e collecting money, ‘That’s crazy! Not a national comrade? Have you ever heard the like of that?—And why, if I may ask?’ The one questioned grins and says, ‘Why? Because I’m a Jew!’ For a moment the guy from People’s Welfare is quite dumbfounded. Then he says, ‘A Jew are you? A Jew—anyone can say that!’ ”

  We laughed out loud, but Old Kat put his finger to his lips and warned us once again: “Don’t repeat it! You remember! As always!” And at the very end he wanted to tell us another “bommot,” which was really fresh, just from yesterday. “Hitler,” an old Socialist friend had confided in him, “is such a brazen liar that even the opposite of what he says is untrue.” Then he took his leave with “Take care, lads! It was really good with you! With each of you!” He turned on his heel and left.

  At school the only teacher to whom I did not say goodbye with some degree of courtesy was Dr. Appelt. At the end of his last class, which he concluded with a relieved reference to my departure, I walked about three yards toward him and bowed very slightly, which was supposed to be ironic, but ended up only as somewhat stiff. At any rate, I did not give him my hand.

  In the evening the family accompanied us to Anhalt Station. The train was already there. When our luggage had been stowed away and we were exchanging farewells on the platform, none of us had the feeling that a period of his life was over. My father called each of his sons in turn and walked with him along the platform to the end of the glass roof. He was a proper teacher, after all, said Winfried, and couldn’t help it. We would get a few encouraging—or at worst admonishing—words. No schoolmaster misses such an opportunity. In fact, we were each sent on our way with a kind of rule of life. To me my father said that he often divided people into those who asked questions and those who answered them. The Nazis, for example, were the kind of people who always had the answer to every question. I should take care always to remain someone who asks questions.