Not I

by Joachim C. Fest

  A little later, with bursts of steam, and to the accompaniment of shouts and the waving of handkerchiefs, the train started to move off. The times—given the plunge in 1933, the uncertainties and countless worries—had made things difficult for my father, as for my mother. For us, however, they had been happy years, on the one hand because our parents had let us feel their fears as little as possible; on the other, I told myself later, probably because such fears, if they have anything like a happy ending, not only detract from life, but also make it more dense and complete.

  1 The Breslau Eleven was the German national soccer team, which defeated Denmark at Breslau in Silesia (today: Wroclaw in Poland); Fest recites the names of the players on that team.

  2 This is an early indication of a barter economy which began to replace the official money economy. Farmers needed feed for their pigs, such as potato peels, while city dwellers needed fuel for their stoves, such as wood—in addition to the traditional coal at the time.

  3 An anti-English song composed in 1939 to verses written in 1914 by the popular German writer Hermann Löns.—Trans.

  4 Both the so-called England song and the one extolling the charms of a flower and girl named Erika were soldiers’ songs much played on the radio stations during the war and sung by young and old. Heinz Rühmann was a universally beloved German comic actor of stage and screen who turned in some memorable performances in character roles after the war.

  5 Aschinger’s eateries were a famous attraction to students and artists because of their cheap and relatively plentiful fare, especially the pea soup with rolls or Brötchen.

  6 Many of those disastrous decisions were based on the erroneous assumption that compared to the threat of socialism or Communism, Nazism offered the better alternative. Thus the pope handed Hitler his first diplomatic success by concluding the concordat with him, while Zentrum leaders like Von Papen and others were coresponsible for the legal takeover of power by the Nazis, which provided them political cover. In short, conservative, Catholic politics were much closer to and forgiving of Hitler’s policies than of anything that might have aided the godless atheism of the political left.

  7 The references here are to Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and Johannes Althusius (1563–1638), whose theories of what constitutes legitimate earthly power, and thus whether there is a right of resistance to unjust power, are part of a Western tradition of political thought. The German resistance turned to such theorists in its search for an answer to a most important question: How could one justify, morally and philosophically, opposition to and possibly the violent removal of an unjust regime like that of Hitler?

  8 The Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche) was the name taken by those Protestant ministers and congregations who resisted Nazi state interference in church affairs.—Trans.

  9 Paul Lincke was a Berlin composer of operettas and popular songs. Emmerich Kálmán was a Hungarian composer of operettas, usually associated with the Viennese stage. Claire Waldoff was a famous Berlin cabaret and music-hall singer; she made no secret of her lesbianism and fell out of favor after 1933.—Trans.

  10 Listening to foreign, or enemy, radio stations was illegal and punished by the authorities, sometimes by death; it was also best not to have books by foreign authors or those proscribed by the Nazi authorities.

  11 An allusion to the statue of the Commendatore in Mozart’s opera, which finally drags the unrepentant Don Giovanni down to hell.—Trans.

  12 The references to Homer and Xenophon indicate that the school is a traditional Gymnasium where the classics are read in the original languages.

  In 1683 a pan-European army lifted the siege of Vienna by the Turks, ending—once and for all—Ottoman expansion into Central Europe and beginning the southeast expansion of Habsburg influence over the next two centuries.

  13 Spoken by Hagen in Hebbel’s dramatization of the Nibelungenlied.—Trans.

  14 The author here refers to the restrictive legal measures introduced by the Nazis against Germany’s Jewish citizens, including the order for all Jews to wear a visible yellow star on their clothing, marking them as social outsiders. After 1945 Germans were made to wear white armbands, for the same reason, in the Sudetenland, before deportation from Czechoslovakia.

  15 Born in Hungary, Nikolaus Lenau (1802–50) is best known for many lyrical poems that have been set to music; he tried to live in the United States (1832–33) but returned to Europe and an unhappy love relationship. He also wrote many political poems.

  Born in France, Adelbert von Chamisso (1781–1838) circumnavigated the globe (1815–18); some of his poems were put to music by Robert Schumann. The best known of his stories is “Peter Schlemihl’s Miraculous Tale.”

  Stefan George (1868–1933) tried to create a new idiom for German poetry in order to renew Germany spiritually; his uncompromisingly formalistic poetry and his powerful personality made him the center of an influential circle, the George Kreis, of intellectuals who would become prominent in a variety of fields later. Always peripatetic, George left Germany in 1933.

  16 These are all allusions to well-known lyrics of popular songs called Schlager (hits).

  17 Fest here refers to a series of laws, promulgated since 1933, aimed at systematically excluding Jews from public life in Germany. Some of the provisions could and were actually also used against non-Jewish Germans regarded as politically unreliable, i.e., anti-Nazi, such as Fest’s father.

  18 The People’s Welfare was one of many organizations created by the National Socialists to distribute social and economic benefits as broadly as possible. Ironically, this makes them, after Bismarck’s introduction of social welfare programs, major progenitors of the universal welfare network now enjoyed by the German population.

  SIX

  •

  Alien Worlds

  When dawn broke we could make out the shadow line of the Black Forest through the compartment window, and later, as villages appeared and Freiburg came closer, Kaiserstuhl, caught by the early light.1 While we tried to find out the names of the towns, valleys, and stretches of land that rushed past, Wolfgang, half of whose mind was still in Berlin, said he regretted that he would now never be able to take part in one of the “secret society meetings,” as my father had recently promised. So he would just have to make do with the “noble and irresponsible Raskolnikov,” whom he had almost finished reading about.

  Such ideas were very remote to me and I had only heard of Dostoevsky from my father, and recently from Wolfgang. In contrast to my brother I spent the largest part of the journey reading the plays of Friedrich Schiller, which, after the ballads and poems, were for me the great discovery of that spring. At the station in Freiburg my parents’ friend was waiting, the one who had undertaken to pay the costs of our stay. In two taxis, for which we had to wait an endless length of time, we drove with cases and boxes to the boarding school in Adolf Hitler Strasse.

  The front of the long building, several stories high, faced the street; I ascended the broad central staircase with mixed feelings. In an instant I grasped the strange world which opened up behind the heavy double doors. The nun who sat in the porter’s room at the top of the flight of stairs, and gently and devotedly nodded three times at our arrival, already seemed to me to be pulled by strings, but when I whispered a remark about it to Wolfgang, he hissed back indignantly, “No silly jokes! It’s only a bit provincial!” There was a strong smell of floor cleaner and polish in the quiet corridor leading to the rector’s office. The rector, Dr. Hugo Hermann, at whose door we knocked, was an impressive figure: a clergyman with a sharply defined priest’s face, tall, thin, and with a winning manner. Behind the lenses of his rimless spectacles one looked into narrow, somewhat slanting eye slits.

  When we entered the room he was reading a book, but, hardly looking up, he continued reading. “I’m the boss here, that’s what that means,” I whispered to Winfried this time, who laughed out loud, causing Dr. Hermann to acknowledge us at least. He came over and talked to
the person who had accompanied us, the conversation also touching on our parents, their political difficulties, and our characters. Only then did Dr. Hermann turn to us. From me he wanted to know—probably alluding to my near-expulsion from Leibniz Gymnasium—why I had such trouble with discipline, and I replied with the quick wit that was my Berlin inheritance, that it always depended on the person who was demanding it of me: my father had never complained. Smiling ironically, Dr. Hermann shook his head; it was evident that he regarded my response as uncustomary, even impertinent. Already at this first meeting it became clear that he was clever, sensitive, and, in a natural way, more than a match for me. But at the same time there was a noticeable tendency to inflexibility, which, with his clerical haughtiness and his ascetic energy, and despite all the attractive aspects, combined to form a rather disconcerting character.

  Very evident—as we discovered soon after the introductory interview—was his keen if limited knowledge of human nature. In later years I was convinced that Dr. Hermann knew immediately what a disruptive effect we North Germans from the big city, which by his lights was profoundly heathen, must have on the calm course of his establishment.2 Apart from that he grasped how altogether subversive we appeared in his clerically saturated Black Forest world. “The Berliners,” he soon called us, showing a lack of insight and setting us apart. “And no politics!” he warned us at the end of this initial encounter. “That can lead to difficulties for the whole institution!”

  On the evening of the first day, which I largely spent with Wolfgang and Winfried looking at the charming little city from cathedral to St. Martin’s Gate, Dr. Hermann called me over to him and the group of star pupils talking under one of the big leafy trees in the school playground. Not least, it was probably his intention to make amends in public for the morning. I was not the only person for whom understanding had to be shown—he, too, he said, had that right. He smiled in an effort to appear gentle, but the effect was artificial. Only a few weeks before, he had been in Berlin for the third time in his life, and again just for two days. He had felt very strange there, he went on in a spuriously lighthearted tone, evidently because he already found his half-apologetic introduction excessive. At any rate, in this monster of Berlin he had felt himself to be as far east as Brest-Litovsk or Minsk, where he, however, thank God, had never been. And the people there! An alien race that he found quite frightening! Then, as those present laughed, he adjusted his soutane with a hint of amused smugness in anticipation of my response. Without waiting for the obsequious laughter to stop, I cut in, saying that now I understood why Freiburg is the way it is! So close to Africa! Because wherever one walks or stands in the town, as we had done this afternoon, one’s constantly “running into blacks.”3

  At a stroke Dr. Hermann’s expression froze, and even today I relish the utter shock this remark caused among those standing there. The rector abruptly turned his back to me and, shaking his head, disappeared into the building through the nearest swing doors. “You can’t talk to the rector like that,” one of the pupils snapped at me. “Have you no manners?” I certainly did, I retorted, but only where there was mutual respect. And what did he have to say, I would like to know, about the rector’s remark? Had that been acceptable? As I looked around the group, one after another walked off, and soon I was standing there alone, leaning against the brick wall. Wolfgang and Winfried came up. I explained the incident to them, and Wolfgang concluded: “So the start is a complete mess! It’ll be hard for you to make it up. But don’t worry. We’ll stand by you, no matter how dumb or how right your behavior has been.”

  Despite all the criticism then and later of my “Berlin mouth,” I never tried to distance myself from it. I was no doubt too indifferent to figures of authority and possibly influenced by my father’s example. Apart from that, even just a few years later, I suspected that at that first meeting there had been an intention to hurt or offend in Dr. Hermann’s rebukes. Only later did I hear from someone who knew him better that the rector had for some time reproached himself for his clumsiness, yet any other response had been impossible for him. Because, despite a “family history that demanded respect,” he thought he recognized in us “Berliners” an aspect of that spirit of the times which he saw embodied above all in the Hitlerites he hated.

  Even given greater understanding, I would not have been able to come to terms with the lifestyle of the boarding school. I missed the freedom of Berlin every single day. The division of the hours, with a bell rung for waking, praying, eating, silence, and so on throughout the day until it was time to sleep, the jostling in the refectory (as the dining room, following the monastic model, was called) and in the classrooms in front of the twenty or so desks with their tip-up seats, as in the bare, whitewashed dormitories: I had a deep dislike of all the lining up and falling in, as if it were a cadet school. I have left Berlin, which everyone likes to insult, I wrote in one of my first letters home, making an effort to be ironic, and yet it’s here that I have for the first time really got to know Prussian drill. I used to love it, now I hate it. My father wrote back, as we later recalled, that I shouldn’t sound off like that.

  Nor did I find anything in common with my roommates. They were mostly sons of peasants or farmers from the Black Forest or the Upper Rhine, for whom the establishment was an opportunity to go to a Gymnasium. The majority were talented, ambitious, and astonishingly hardworking, but from a narrow village life incompatible with the Berlin world. Aloof and always a little irritated, as Wolfgang accused me of being, I listened to their conversations in an idiom which was hard to understand and radiated so much obtrusive sentimentality.4 I longed for Berlin, for the area around Silesian Station, the platform jumping, and even the splendid disreputableness of Friedrichstrasse. Apart from that, it was the conversations at the garden table which I increasingly missed. And playing the piano. The places with the three or four piano teachers at our boarding school were taken long ago, and I achieved no more than to have my name put on one of the waiting lists. I could work out that there was a small chance for me in 1944, I was informed, when the sixth formers of that year left the boarding school; in the meantime there was only one place available with each of the elderly ladies who gave instruction in recorder and lute. After a few lessons with the lute teacher, who (as far as I remember) was called Fräulein von Neuenburg, or something like that, I decided, with great regret, to give up playing music.

  I made contact with others and soon acquired new friends at the Gymnasium I attended. Even Dr. Brühler, the director—to whom we had to introduce ourselves before the beginning of the first school day—made a cosmopolitan impression, and one involuntarily asked oneself what circumstances could have brought him to this place. In his light gray, double-breasted suit, often with a flower in his buttonhole, he appeared almost exaggeratedly elegant. Although only in his mid-fifties, he had white hair brushed severely back, which curled a little at the neck, and with it an apoplectically red face, which went with an old-school gentleman of his sort. In a high voice, demonstrating a charming self-confidence, he explained to us that it was his ambition as headmaster of the Friedrich Gymnasium to make it the best in Germany, and he very much stood by this aim, despite all the difficulties of the present time. He expected high standards and discipline to be taken for granted. But it was just as important that his pupils understood something of the humanist spirit, without which all learning degenerated into meaningless drill. And—as if he wanted to indicate that he had heard something at least about the reasons for our change of schools—he added that everything else was a matter of complete indifference to him. No doubt we had some catching up to do, as was inevitable because of the air raids on Berlin and the frequent cancellation of lessons. After one year he would decide whether the school wanted to keep us.

  Yet catching up with the pupils of the various classes was not very hard for us. Other differences were more evident. Above all, in contrast to the obsession with getting through the curriculum at the Berlin school the
re was something scholarly about the Friedrich Gymnasium. In almost every field the knowledge we acquired served simultaneously as material to make connections visible and to test the attraction and difficulty of intelligent questioning—that is, to get to know methods, the rudiments of which I had learned during the garden-fence conversations. An example of that was provided by our Greek teacher Dr. Breithaupt, a tall, hook-nosed man who practiced his profession with enthusiastic earnestness. He had known old Dörpfeld, who had excavated Troy, Pergamon, and other sites of ancient Greek culture.5 On occasion, he brought into class a letter from the scholar, which he held up with his fingertips like a relic of the age of the Apostles, while with glowing eyes he basked in the admiration he read from the faces in front of him. Then he quoted some of the issues raised in the letter, which concerned Dörpfeld at the time, and asked to hear our responses. He also knew Karl Reinhardt and other great names in the scholarship of antiquity,6 names which he pronounced with whispered awe, as soon as he acquainted us with the various scholarly opinions of Minoan or Spartan culture, the route of the wanderings of Odysseus, or the dispute about the applicability of Plato’s ideas of the state.

  A further difference was that the political views of the teachers were expressed much more frankly than in Berlin. That was not only due to traditional Baden liberalism, but also to the self-confident Catholicism of the region. Our natural history teacher openly made fun of “Aryan physics.” In the English class, Dr. Brühler (who would later become a member of the Deutsche Partei in the Bundestag) imitated the actor Otto Gebühr in the Fridericus films about Frederick the Great, and, by simply transposing individual sentences into English, exposed the hollow pathos of these performances. After viewing one of the great king’s military defeats he would sigh in English, rolling his eyes, “I am so lonely,” or, blowing up his cheeks, he would say, “But now I am going to victory! Who would hinder me? Me the one and only Frederick—oh no, Otto Gebühr!” In religious instruction, following Bishop von Galen’s pastoral letter, the “euthanasia murders” were discussed in plain terms.7 These were things which were thought of by many of our teachers in Berlin, but hardly spoken out loud.