Not I

by Joachim C. Fest

  5 Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1853–1940) was famous as a pioneer of archaeological method and for his excavations.—Trans.

  6 Karl Reinhardt (1886–1958) was an influential scholar of ancient Greek philosophy and literature.—Trans.

  7 Cardinal Clemens August, Count von Galen (1878–1946), publicly opposed the Nazis’ racial policies, especially their attempts to euthanize severely disabled children and adults. His protest and that of others helped stop these extermination programs.

  8 The German grading system at that time went from one (the highest grade) to five (the lowest). A five still equals a failing grade in the American system today.

  9 Not only was Schiller at the center of German culture for educated Germans at that time, his youthful enthusiasm for rebellion in his early plays and his heroic grandeur of language and sentiment have endeared him to generations of schoolboys dreaming to be heroes. Moreover, he also looks the part himself in all his portraits and busts.

  10 Fest here lists some of the major political and artistic figures of the Italian Renaissance, a period to which he was always drawn; this subject and Italy will continue to exert a major pull throughout his life.

  11 Heimabend (home evening) was the Nazi term, borrowed from the Youth Movement of the 1920s, for compulsory gatherings of the Hitler Youth for a combination of indoctrination, sports, and singing.

  12 Membership in the Hitler Youth proper was by application and selection; the so-called Compulsory Hitler Youth was for those not taken or who had not applied. But every German boy was expected to be exposed to the organization at some point, just as the Reichsarbeitsdienst (Reich Labor Service) and military service were expected of all males over eighteen.

  13 The drums were replicas of the large drums used by the mercenaries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the Hitler Youth fostered something of a cult of the Landsknecht, German mercenaries who fought all over Europe and sacked Rome in 1527.

  14 This term refers to those rebellious youth groups and individuals who preferred jazz and other modern music to the marching and hiking songs of the Hitler Youth.

  15 In other words, Dr. Goldschmidt was confined in a “Jews’ house” with other Jews, effectively as a prelude to deportation, hence the desire to bury valuables. Fest doesn’t say so, but at this time, under Nazi decrees, both Dr. Goldschmidt and Fest senior were risking punishment, the former for spending the night away from the house, the latter for putting up a Jew for the night.—Trans.

  16 Ernst Jünger (1895–1998), German novelist, memoirist, and highly decorated soldier in World War I. His early novels celebrated a so-called heroic nihilism, while his later work turned more toward the creation of a new man and an individualistic humanism. On the Marble Cliffs (1939) was read by some as a covert critique of the Nazi regime, while many other critics thought he helped prepare the intellectual ground for militarism and fascism in Germany.

  17 Private scholar or Privatgelehrter was the term for scholars, normally financially independent, who devoted themselves to the study of some topic in the humanities, less often the natural sciences. Their contributions ranged from the amateurishly negligible to the academically highly significant, as the example of Heinrich Schliemann (1822–90) shows. His excavation of “Troy” essentially founded modern archaeology.

  18 In Beethoven’s opera, the trumpet signal in question heralds the arrival of the Prime Minister who will free the prisoners, including Fidelio, and punish the evil governor of the prison, Pizarro. Fest and his friends read this as an analogy to their situation, with Hitler in the role of the jailer. It is not clear who the outside force is supposed to be that will rescue Germany from Hitler, or who will sound the clarion call. Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Fidelio are seen as symbolic exaltations of freedom.

  SEVEN

  •

  Friends and Foes

  On the return journey to Freiburg I read Gobineau’s Renaissance Studies, which the Schönborns had lent me. But this time I was disturbed by a woman who got on at Kassel and didn’t stop talking. She was afflicted by marriage problems because of the war, by her sons “Plisch” and “Up-to-No-Good,” who were about ten, by annoying neighbors, and by more besides. Recently in Berlin, in Pariser Strasse, her attention had been caught by a passerby with worn-down heels; after a short pause for breath, she said that had reminded her of a remark by her father that it was a characteristic of Jews to tread down their heels. Crossing Güntzelstrasse she had pushed close to the man and seen that he wasn’t wearing the Jewish Star. “But he was one of them,” she continued. She had followed him a couple of streets farther to a house into which he disappeared and had reported the address to the nearest police station, without a name, unfortunately, but she had a “good nose” for everything Jewish. Lowering her voice, she added, after glancing around the compartment: it was said that the Jews hid gold and jewelry in their heels; someone who kept a lookout for it could get “a tidy sum.”

  Neither of the other two passengers in the compartment said a word. Winfried was asleep. Wolfgang muttered something about “Stretch my legs,” and told me, “Come on! It does you no good to sit there all the time!” Hardly were we in the corridor when he exclaimed in an incautiously loud voice, “Revolting! National comrade!”1 I asked him to speak more quietly, but he snapped at me, “Shut up! Father really is right: I don’t want to belong to something like that. National community makes me sick!” At Mannheim Station, the next stop, the older of the two men in the compartment left without saying goodbye. At Offenburg I saw him standing in the corridor in the next carriage. He looked through me, although until Kassel, where the garrulous woman had joined us, we had several times talked animatedly and he obviously recognized me.

  When I called my parents to say we had arrived safe and sound I hinted at our experience and then asked after Dr. Meyer, because during our stay in Berlin I had several times tried to visit him without success. “Probably doesn’t answer the door anymore,” remarked my father, and incautiously added, “to give the most favorable explanation.” In the background I heard my mother cry out her “Heaven have mercy on us!” My father promised that in the next few days he would once again go to Halle Gate and not take his finger off the bell.

  At the boarding school it was “monastic rules” again, as we put it. At Gymnasium it was still the Odyssey and Virgil, while in the German class Schiller turned up for the first time with Intrigue and Love, and my prior knowledge was shown to advantage. A few weeks after that the class received a kind of call-up to basic military training in air-defense gunnery or flak.2 The camp to which we had to report was around a former Nazi Party building in one of Freiburg’s southern suburbs.

  It was the same institutional world as the boarding school and yet I felt liberated. Later, I often asked myself why I found the much less flexible regulations of the military so much more bearable than the house rules of Dr. Hermann. What was probably important was that now I was no longer living exclusively among Black Forest peasant lads, who, for all their industriousness, remained alien to me, and who in the afternoon in the study room took their side of Speck out of a can and with their mouths full asked about some problem of Latin tenses. Because among those mobilized were not only the classes of Friedrich Gymnasium, but also the fourth and fifth years of Berthold Gymnasium and the class of the same age from nearby Emmendingen. This much more diverse composition opened doors, expanded the horizon, and made conversations more free. And of course everyone was so deeply caught up in the reflexes of the time that the barked orders of an NCO were accepted more unquestioningly than the admonitions of an anxiously nodding Monsignor.

  The duty at Haslach Camp was as mindless as all military training drill. We had to march up and down the wide pebble paths between the sheds, throw ourselves onto the ground at a command, do rifle drill, put on footcloths, and, time after time, perform the salutes as prescribed in army regulations “with a straight back.” Furthermore, we were instructed in g
unnery and ballistics, cleaning latrines, putting locker contents “in order,” and fetching coffee—which was brought from the kitchen in heavy pails and handed over to a distributor in front of the canteen. I can no longer remember whose idea it was that I shouted “Password!” whenever coffee arrived. My partner Franz Franken, at any rate, responded by singing a line from an aria. Over time, on the cry “Password,” our opera texts became ever more crude parodies.

  After about four weeks the basic training was over, but I was in Berlin for Christmas later than my brothers because at Wittenbrink’s invitation I made a detour by way of Vienna. I stayed in Weyringer Gasse with a family who were friends of his, and every morning when Wittenbrink and I walked into town past the Belvedere Palace, I saw Vienna spread out before me as if etched in silver. His friends said that unlike Paris, Berlin, or Washington, the city didn’t swagger with imperial majesty; even Heldenplatz—Heroes’ Square—had, for those who really looked, an attractive domesticity. Austrian charm admitted architectural irregularities and eccentricities right into the government districts, and the combination of the two created a metropolis which was both grand and human in scale. These reflections, discussed over breakfast, made such a strong impression on me because despite the obvious self-praise I found them new and convincing.

  The more powerful experience, however, was the musical rencontre with the friends of the house who came around on one of the three evenings of my stay and tried to convince me that Vienna was the undisputed world capital of music, and that no one but Schubert was its supreme ruler, even before Mozart and Beethoven.3 Until then I had known Schubert almost exclusively as a composer of lieder; now I heard, with growing astonishment, that his chamber music was of far greater stature, from the late quartets to the incomparable octet. Its inspiration almost amounted to an intoxication with death, exclaimed the youngest enthusiast among the guests, whom all addressed as Herr Privy Councillor, probably to avoid his almost unpronounceable Czech name. Even the frequently mocking scherzos seemed to be written solely to ridicule the very death conjured up only a few bars before, and yet at the same time displayed with every note how enslaved they were by it. A corpulent gentleman repeatedly ran on tiptoe to the piano to play a passage that had been mentioned, turned light-footedly around to add a motif from one of the songs, and begged us in each case to pay attention to “the panic-stricken ground note” which Schubert concealed behind all his musical charm. Everything he composed was “pure funereal music,” someone else interjected, rushing to the grand piano to prove his assertion with the Winterreise, and underscoring it with sequences of notes from songs about “poor Peter” or “the fickle trout.”

  That is more or less how I remember the evening; of course, I’ve only mentioned two or three from a large number of themes and ideas. On the journey back to Berlin I went over everything again with Wittenbrink, and also posed the question whether the elevation of Schubert had something to do with the fact that he, unlike Mozart, never mind Beethoven, had been born in the city. Wittenbrink thought it possible. The Viennese were just very proud of their city and cultivated a certain Vienna vanity. But that was in no way to deny Schubert’s uniqueness.

  So the images expanded for me, became more complete, also more contradictory, like everything that I describe in these pages, which is the step-by-step appropriation of the world that my memory has preserved. Between Christmas and New Years—after hours of queuing from seven in the evening until the box office opened at nine in the morning—Wolfgang and I went to the Deutsches Theater. Embassy Councillor Aprea had, meanwhile, unfortunately been transferred to a more remote corner of the globe. Also I can no longer say whether this time we queued for Faust with Gustaf Gründgens and Paul Hartmann, for Don Carlos with Horst Caspar, or a treatment of the Turandot story, all of which we saw, without me being able to remember the order. With Aunt Dolly there was The Magic Flute, because she remembered that on the first occasion I had immediately wanted to see the performance again the following day.

  In 1942 the usual Christmas spirit was absent. I, nevertheless, almost got it going when I expressed my thanks for the successful course of the day, but couldn’t suppress the remark that the only thing I had missed was my father’s usual outburst of anger—and thereby got it immediately. He accused me of taking an improper pleasure in discord, but I retorted that one bit of discord was always part of the Christmas holiday, in our home at least. As my smirking siblings evidently agreed with me, he angrily left the room. But he returned a little later and said, as he tucked the napkin he had thrown down back in the neck of his vest, “Forgotten! It’s not worth getting upset about impertinences!”

  The next day was clear, sunny, and cold. My father asked Wolfgang and me to walk to the Seepark with him. He talked about some political impressions of the recent past and then got around to Dr. Meyer, whom he had tried to call on in vain. He would go to the street behind Hallesches Tor again this week; if he failed to see Dr. Meyer this time, too, one would have to fear the worst. And “the worst” in this case literally meant the worst.4

  After a few steps we left the park, because the paths were too icy. On the way back my father went on to say that he still had something to tell us which, to his horror, he had recently heard in a BBC broadcast and which he did not wish to repeat in the presence of our mother.5 One of the commentators had reported at length on a House of Commons debate in which it had been asserted that the Jews removed from Germany were not, as was whispered furtively here and there, dumped in open country, which would have been bad enough, but were murdered by the tens of thousands. It was true that he believed Hitler and his accomplices capable of anything. But in this case he still believed it was one of those horror stories such as the unscrupulous English propaganda had already invented during the First World War. Consequently, he was looking for new, more precisely documented references. So far none of his friends had found them and the subject had not been mentioned again in any BBC broadcast, no matter how many hours he had spent in front of the radio.

  He seemed very disquieted and we tried to talk him out of his fears. He prayed that what he had heard was not true, he said. The Nazis would not go that far, he concluded, as we turned into Hentigstrasse. Perhaps one should say more accurately: not for the time being. Because their backs weren’t up against the wall. At that point it would be impossible to be sure of anything. Then the last fuses would blow. I thought of Dr. Meyer and Sally Jallowitz. Later, when I saw my father go to his study, I followed him and asked if he didn’t, after all, know more. He replied that for all his inquiries he hadn’t been able to find out anything certain. Perhaps everyone was afraid to reveal their knowledge. At the end of our conversation I made him promise to tell me when he did discover something.

  A few days after our return to the boarding school, I, like the rest of the class, received my call-up papers. Our destination was Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance, which was surrounded by an extensive ring of antiaircraft batteries, not only because aircraft parts were produced there, but above all because of its cogwheel factory. “No war can be fought without cogwheels,” Sergeant Grummel held forth before we moved off, to underline the importance of our deployment. He was a good-natured North German dockworker with an oddly crushed face, and he was responsible both for our appearance in public and for infantry training. As he explained his duties to us, he suddenly shouted “Into the field!” and “Take cover!” Then he led us to the uniform store, where we received the blue Luftwaffe uniform, fatigues, and the rest of our kit from service cap to boots. Steel helmet and mess tin as well, of course. We had hardly become acquainted with our lockers before we were summoned for roll call by Sergeant Major Knuppe, whom by the next day we were already calling “Knüppel” (club).

  After that we were assigned to various functions. The greater part of the three classes that now found themselves together again had to carry out their duty on the 8.8 cm cannon, which were mounted in six-foot-high earth emplacements covered in planking.
A smaller group was assigned to the U-Equipment, as it was called, which was housed in subterranean bunkers. The apparatus was used to determine the position of the aerial targets and the information was passed on to the gun crews. I was assigned to the U-Equipment.

  The battery was situated amidst blossoming apple trees on a hill above the town of Friedrichshafen. Lake Constance glittered below, and over on the other side, in the middle of a jagged range of mountains, rose snow-covered Säntis. At twilight we saw the band of lights of the towns on the Swiss side and their flickering reflection in the water, while on our side, as far as Konstanz and Lindau, everything lay in silent darkness.

  In the course of the first weeks several teachers had followed our class to continue teaching us the more important subjects. We went on learning Latin, history, and for a while also mathematics and one or two of the natural sciences. But the school lessons—entirely subordinated to the military timetable—were almost necessarily peripheral, until Dr. Kiefer turned up. He appeared in front of the class in an unusual outfit, wearing a black cape and a red scarf loosely draped around his neck.6 He threw his slouch hat onto the lectern and introduced himself with a brief address, which went roughly like this: “I have a story to tell you of German narrowness and provincialism. Also of the preeminence of Italian and French culture, as well as of traveling players who were hardworking but hopelessly backward and were still wandering around the country with their cart when Paris already had several proud theaters and Naples even had an opera house. Until Lessing, the first German writer with a worldwide reputation, appeared. In the hundred years that followed, his genius turned the country into a center of influence of the arts and sciences such as Europe had seen only once before: I’m now talking of Athens, or perhaps at a pinch of the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent.”