Not I

by Joachim C. Fest

  Only the gym teacher, a man with exaggerated muscles and a low hairline, and even more Dr. Malthan, who taught German and history, were considered supporters of the regime. Yet whereas the former did so in a pigheaded, pompous way which transformed every chin-up and every improvement in the high jump into a contribution to the national physical training program, the other embodied the type of intellectual who had absorbed all the measures of the state into a system of cynical justifications exemplifying the idea of power. Tall, with thinning hair and a slight squint, he held forth on Lessing’s Philotas, on the German emperors and Prussia’s Frederick, Kleist and Napoleon, Görres and Metternich, and so on to the greater German struggle for freedom—heroism and sacrifice included. He liked to describe the pupils who didn’t measure up to his standards as “poor souls,” before entering a five in his notebook and jeering, “Don’t make such a miserable face!”8 On the red-letter days of the National Socialist calendar one sometimes saw him in the light brown uniform of a political officer. He walked along the corridors with small, fast steps and, because he held his arms stiffly by his side, looked strangely wooden as he did so.

  However, Dr. Malthan was very far from a comic figure. He was feared by all because of his scholarly and ideological demands; both our religious instruction teacher and older schoolmates repeatedly warned us about him. One day, as if I had to put his dangerousness to the test, while he was talking about the meaning of the Russian campaign as taking possession of a living space promised to the Germans since ancient times, I asked him a skeptical question. But instead of the anticipated thunderous outburst with which he usually silenced anyone and everyone—often with the despairing but practiced-sounding exclamation “What is that supposed to mean? What on earth?”—Dr. Malthan was merely dismissive in a friendly way, and gave me as an assignment an essay on “The Economic Importance of the Donets Basin for the Reich.” “When you know that,” he added, “you will understand once and for all how necessary living space in the east is for us.”

  Perhaps it was simply the thoughtless folly that had already got me into trouble in Berlin, perhaps also an attempt to make the subject a little more interesting for me: at any rate, I wrote the essay, which carefully noted all productive raw material deposits and the industrial capacity as well as the agricultural acreage of the huge area in a single, tightly structured sentence of about four pages. I was called upon by Dr. Malthan to read out my essay, so I tried to make the text clear and put in a period or a semicolon, where on the page there was only another comma. When I had finished he eyed the class suspiciously. When nobody stirred, he said tersely, “Fine!” and even managed some plain praise: “You are well able to give a talk! Perhaps at some point in future you will be called on to speak publicly in school.” In any case, he would inform the rector’s office about me.

  My refuge from the irksome features of the boarding school remained Friedrich Schiller.9 I had taken the volume with the early plays with me to Freiburg, and during the journey had read The Robbers, and then the beginning of Intrigue and Love. But the absence of peace and quiet in the compartment—the constant succession of passengers and the conversation starting up anew each time about the little turns of events in their lives thanks to the intervention of a greater fate—hindered my reading. As a result, I started from the beginning again after my arrival in Freiburg, most often in the evening under the blankets in the dormitory, when everything was silent.

  It was the elevated tone and the beautiful exaltation that gripped me from the very first line, as it had during the journey. Against all the dark formulations which Schiller often granted his base and vicious characters, at the end bright light or at least its first rays irresistibly forced its way onto the stage. Even today I recall some passages with a feeling of emotion—of happiness and enchantment—such as otherwise only music is capable of arousing. It’s not the almost proverbial lines—with which in those days practically everyone was still familiar—that produce this effect. But the words with which Thekla—who (to her mother’s dismay) has fallen in love with Max Piccolomini (in the drama Wallenstein)—explains to a friend why she is late, I find unforgettable, because they sum up the hopeless conflict of emotions in only two lines: “My mother wept so again, I see her suffer / and cannot alter my own feeling of happiness.” Or the outburst of old Miller (in Intrigue and Love), with his constantly repeated court toady’s phrase of mocking subservience, “At your service!” And, of course, Wallenstein’s monologue and those passages which stay in the mind because of Schiller’s laconic brevity—most famously perhaps the conclusion of The Robbers. Or Lady Milford’s unaffected but all the more overwhelming retort to Ferdinand’s disparaging torrent of words (again in Intrigue and Love): “I did not deserve that, Major!” And so very much more.

  And then the pictures of the writer in which (as I thought at the time) he appeared both noble and at ease; and his idea of freedom or his psychological astuteness, which we—as Wolfgang (always one step ahead in his education) explained to me—involuntarily translated into political terms. Who, he said, does not think of the “fat fraud Göring” when he hears the line about the “apes of God”? Or of a gangster figure like Goebbels when the talk is of the “lodgings by the gallows”? And, finally, of the lot of them when the poet talks of the spectacle of strength, which is only despair? Where had Wolfgang read that? I exclaimed, half in annoyance that he already knew that, too. How did he find the quotations with which he was always ahead of me?

  At any rate there is a skepticism of human nature in Schiller that also runs through almost all of his plays. The Germans tend to think of him as a somewhat naive and pathos-ridden advocate of freedom; they think of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the embrace of the world in the final choral movement. They think about the limits to the power of tyrants, against whom mankind will reach up into the sky to pull down man’s “eternal rights,” which “are affixed up there as are the stars themselves.” Yet I soon recognized that Schiller was politically much less naive than the nation as a whole. Certainly, he could praise the dear Lord above the starry canopy, and write the village idyll of the “The Song of the Bell”—but also an essay like the one “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” which has hardly an equal in German for its acute perception.

  I sensed at least that on the whole, in the more general texts—that is, the poems—Schiller held on firmly to his optimism about mankind. In the plays, on the other hand, which are closer to reality—in Intrigue and Love, in Fiesco, or even in The Maid of Orleans—the dark hostile powers retain the upper hand. Wallenstein is a broadly conceived train of base intrigues and, as I read many years later, Hegel discovered an “abyss of nihilism” in his fellow Swabian: a vast world of treachery, deceit, and broken oaths, of dirty tricks, spite, and cynicism. Schiller has Franz Moor (in The Robbers) exclaim that man emerged from the mire, waded through the mire for a while, and created a mire, before fermenting in the mire again: as an image of man it could hardly be more pessimistic.

  I read these works throughout the autumn and into the early winter of the Russian campaign, so that for me the name “Freiburg” is always associated with Schiller in an absurdly contrasting fashion to the ice storms and blizzards outside Moscow. In between I read whatever came to hand. As a mark of respect to my father I borrowed Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy from his library; it greatly impressed me and stimulated further reading about the Borgias, the Sforzas, and the Malatestas, about Federico da Montefeltro, Michelangelo, and countless others.10 It was an escape. At the same time, in a muddled alternation I read Rilke, who for a while supplanted everything else; at the time I could recite by heart the wondrous language of The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke.

  At school it continued to be the Odyssey that took the place of this “leisure reading,” as my brothers mocked, but also Virgil and Horace. Even the unloved mathematical exercises were for a while coveted material, but once or twice a week I spent the
afternoons with the class in Dreisam Stadium just outside the city. As before in Berlin, Winfried excelled at the short distances and several times ran the four hundred meters in under a minute, which I never managed. And to my own astonishment I discovered a talent for the high jump, at which I got to 1.67 meters, whereas Wolfgang, averse to physical education, as it was called, frequently dodged it and showed an admirable degree of imagination in inventing ever new excuses. Our feeling of solidarity proved itself against our “penal colony,” even if it was no longer “us against the world.” From time to time we went on our “small town walks,” climbed to the top of the cathedral spire—from which on clear days one could see as far as Alsace and the Vosges—and made off for longer than permitted to the Castle Hill or to Günterstal on the southern outskirts of the town, in order to spend a couple of hours by ourselves or with a slowly growing circle of friends.

  In late autumn I read Schiller’s History of the Thirty Years’ War, as well as, in one go, his History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands. Unlike Goethe, Schiller was a kind of “cultural hero” of the Germans, and Christian Daniel Rauch’s statue portrayed him as an idealized youth in whom the nation liked to recognize itself. After the first attempts at rapprochement between the two, which ended in ill-humor, Schiller concluded that Goethe “generously declares his own existence, but only like a god, without giving of himself.” Mankind should not allow someone like him to emerge among them, he added, in a sentence which was a mixture of awe, admiration, and, admittedly, jealousy.

  But then suddenly Schiller wrote (as I discovered somewhere in the small print) the admiring letter to Goethe with—as I judged in my own preference for the former—an utterly mistaken sentence: “You have a kingdom to rule, I have only a rather numerous family of concepts.” I was then completely convinced that rather the opposite was true: Schiller was the regent of the poetic kingdom, while Goethe stood at the head of a large family, but because of countless half-finished life projects, one that included a considerable number of bastards. And to me Schiller possessed a tone, like that of Heinrich von Kleist in Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, which Goethe maybe only came close to in the early poems with their warm natural sound and wholeness: the harmony of an ever-greater idea with impulsive emotion and incomparable beauty of expression. Initially, when the Schiller fever broke out in me again after a few weeks, I had a bad conscience, because I found the Cornet and also some of the Rilke poems merely elegant. They were no doubt more than that and even today I am grateful for the various circumstances that blessed me, if even for quite a short time, with a “Rilke fever,” which I never quite got over.

  At the beginning of the long holidays we traveled to Berlin. Our stay began with a kind of horror story. Late in the evening, two days after our arrival, there was a sudden shout of “Fire!” from several quarters. Fire engines shot up the streets with screeching tires and all around sirens began to wail, even though there had been no air-raid warning. A fire had broken out in Junker Jörg Strasse, a few houses away, and within a short time the flames had taken hold of the whole building. When we came to the scene, having jumped out of bed as fast as we could, the roof truss was just crashing through the four stories of the house, and the crowd of onlookers standing there, open-mouthed, let out a gurgling groan. At that moment, as if from nowhere, an elderly couple appeared at a window, looking for something to hold on to, but finding nothing; after agitated shouting from the crowd, they jumped, hand in hand, into a safety sheet held out below. Weeping, their feet shuffling, they were led away by first-aid men. Wolfgang, never short of an ironic remark, called out at the circle of onlookers illuminated by the flames: “Why doesn’t anybody shout ‘Lights out!’? And where’s the air-raid warden, dammit?!” A passerby beside me said, “Brat! He shouldn’t be allowed to say that!”

  We remained until, despite every effort, the building had burned down almost to the foundations, and we left only after several summonses from my father. “Come on home!” he said. “You’ll have plenty of opportunities to see something like it.” When Winfried asked what that was supposed to mean, he replied, “That was just a prelude.” A little later, back in our apartment, he took us boys aside and said, “That wasn’t an air raid. So far we’ve been spared that. But at some point they’ll come to Karlshorst, too. That was a portent. Perhaps a guardian spirit wants to tell us, we should get used to it.” When my mother heard that, she stood up and left the room. At the door she said, more to herself, “If only there weren’t these dreadful politics! They simply destroy everything!” And when Wolfgang followed her, she remarked to him that father was only capable of thinking in apocalyptic terms now. “Please tell him, he should at least keep it to himself.”

  In order to leave time for some visits, we did not travel to Walken Farm until three days later. As usual, Uncle Berthold was waiting at the railway station with the horse and carriage, but this time we interrupted the ride in Schwiebus to see relatives. Among them was the “other Franziska” (as we called her in memory of our maid) Aunt Cilli, and other relations on my father’s side. After that we drove, as usual, over bumpy village streets and deep sandy tracks to the farm at Packlitzsee. This time I regretted from the day we arrived that my parents left us behind, as always, after a brief stay. Because in Freiburg I had discovered that, more than anything else, I missed someone who was sympathetically prepared to explain, reply, and contradict. For a broadminded response to even naive or apparently far-fetched questions there was no substitute for my father, and only now did I become aware of the lack. Wolfgang, annoyingly smart as ever, remarked, “You can’t always have clever people around you.” He also added, unnecessarily, as I thought, “You’ve left father’s apron strings behind—or, if you prefer, second supper. Get used to it!”

  Back in Freiburg there was an unpleasant surprise in store for us. On the Wednesday—the first so-called Heimabend, or home evening, as it was called, after the beginning of the semester—the deputy rector of the boarding school discovered us in the lectern corner of one of the study rooms, where up to then we had passed the Hitler Youth sessions talking quietly or reading.11 With every sign of dismay he established that we were not complying with a “legal obligation,” and he appeared even more astonished when he heard that we were not even—nor had we ever been—members of the Hitler Youth. He accused us of “irresponsible behavior” and so of endangering “the existence of the whole institution.” That same evening “the Berliners” were summoned to Dr. Hermann, and at the end of the week a youth leader of about the same age as me turned up and handed us our membership books for the Compulsory Hitler Youth, with the words that no “decent German lad” could be expected to do service in a unit with us.12 “So no need to worry!” he exclaimed. “You’ll be with people like yourselves! But wrap up warm,” he tried to joke. “We make the dandies go barefoot through hell!”

  Like Wolfgang and Winfried I wasn’t unhappy in the Compulsory Hitler Youth. While the “decent lads” in the basement of the Friedrich Gymnasium were singing “From gray city walls …” or “The bells rang out from Bernward’s tower …”—and in between listened reverently to the beating of a drum, a so-called Landsknechtstrommel which punctuated not only the addresses given and the songs, but also the heroic passages of the war stories that were read out—we had to march around in a circle in the school playground in wind and rain, crawl on our stomachs, or hop over the terrain in a squatting position holding a spade or a branch in our outstretched hand.13

  In our group there were, without exception, likable, rebellious boys who undauntedly stood by each other, wore their hair long on top, and described the “swing sessions” that they organized in parents’ homes as “house music evenings,” in order (as they joked) to carry the Führer’s claim to cultural standards into the world in their own way. Himmler had recently threatened to put the “Swing Youth”14 into concentration camps, but he just didn’t know what “German” meant, one explained to me. After two hours of “messing around,�
� as we called the mindless exercises in the dirt of the schoolyard, we waited for the Hitler Youth leaders, and ostentatiously demonstrated that we were in the best of moods; each time two of our boys were told to have a joke ready, to which the rest of us standing around had to respond with a roar of laughter. In contrast to the boarding school or the school class, no one here took exception to the usually silly adolescent jokes from Berlin, which Wolfgang and I contributed. But no matter how feeble the punch lines, when the Hitler Youth leaders approached we laughed uproariously, and enjoyed their surprised annoyance as they walked past.

  At Christmas we were home in Berlin again. After the initial exchange of family news there were long evenings under the tasseled chandelier with endless stories from the neighborhood. Separate suppers had meanwhile been done away with and my two sisters were allowed to be present until their bedtime. We heard the latest gossip about Hausdorf, about the Goderskis, about old Katlewski, who seemed to have faded away since we left, as well as about the Schönborns; and my father complained that despite repeated invitations Dr. Meyer didn’t come to see them anymore. Via friends the Rosenthals had passed on news that they had reached England poor but more or less safely—alive, at least—and they intended to move on to the United States. “As far away as possible from this terrible Europe!” Herr Rosenthal had said.