When, accompanied by my parents, I arrived at Anhalt Station with my two school friends, my father took us aside. As always, he walked down the platform to the end of the now partly damaged glass roof and a few steps beyond that, while my mother remained behind at the carriage door with the older of my two sisters. “I trust you,” he said to my two friends, “and know that you won’t repeat a word.” When they nodded, he went on: “I expect to see the Russians at the Brandenburg Gate. Everyone accuses me of being pessimistic. I would like to be wrong, because in the long run knowing you were right is an empty triumph. I’ve already had too much of it.” Back at the carriage door, he said, “Make sure, if there’s anything you can do about it, that you stay in the West.” Then, as we were already crowding at the window to wave goodbye: “I expect God to give a sign at the end. I don’t dare say how that sign will turn out.” As the train moved ponderously off we heard my father above the puffing sounds, as he ran alongside, shouting, “I hope we’ll meet again!”
In Friedrichshafen we were back to the same routine as before with field duty, gun maintenance, empty hours in the afternoon, and thunderous snoring at night. During exercises Sergeant Grummel shouted all the time and tried to assume a grumpy facial expression. At irregular intervals, good-natured and potbellied Captain Kersting, who had a shop in Karlsruhe, inspected our drawn-up ranks and warned us to be even more vigilant. Because, since the fall of Mussolini and as the Allies slowly advanced, the air raids were becoming more frequent and now hardly a week passed in which we were not several times, by day as by night, called to man the guns.
The few teachers who had accompanied us to the camp were still there. At the blowing of a whistle we ran with books and jotters in hand to the school hut. Dr. Kiefer had meanwhile got to Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck and in the new year read Gerhart Hauptmann’s Before Dusk with us.13 To the disappointment of the class he no longer applied his trick of bringing the classics up to date, but then, when no one was expecting it anymore, with the help of an extended red-herring story, he took it up again with Keller’s Green Henry.
This time, too, in the face of the military situation, he frequently talked about doubt as the citizen’s first virtue, and I thought of Dr. Hausdorf, who said the same thing in different words. Following a suggestion by Dr. Kiefer, I started to read Nietzsche, as well as plays by Oscar Wilde. Like many of my generation, I also studied Spengler’s The Decline of the West, as well as an annotated edition of the Book of Revelation: all mixed up, half-understood, gripped by an apocalyptic mood.14
The six or eight Russian prisoners of war, who now also did duty at the guns, were a new item. They dragged over the heavy 8.8 cm shells, kept the battery emplacements and the huts clean, and carried out every kind of work. They were without exception friendly and ready to help, and sometimes there came from the small Finnenzelten (Finnish tents) the “hummed singing” that I remembered from Berlin. Over time we developed an almost warm relationship with some of the Russians. But a lance corporal, who was an unrelenting party man and once saw me standing in conversation with Mikhail and Lev, summoned me and warned me “not to fraternize with the Russian rabble.” “That lot,” he said, pointing in their direction, were “all revolutionaries. They would like nothing better than to kill all of us. Every one of them.” Then, raising his finger, “If they could! And you’re encouraging them!”
We had to watch out for him, especially when we listened to foreign broadcasts late in the evening. Even the station broadcast from the Balkans, which announced itself with “Lili Marleen,” aroused his suspicion.15 When I warned my classmates that listening to enemy stations was strictly forbidden and was punishable by at least two years’ imprisonment, a majority decided that profit and pleasure were too limited and the risk of “wireless crime” too great. Despite that, about a dozen of us from now on listened to the “enemy broadcasts” in an out-of-the-way hut with heightened caution and attention.
The other innovation was the women headquarters auxiliaries, who had arrived at the battery during the Christmas vacation to “reinforce the clerical staff,” as it was put. They lived in a separate building a few hundred yards away. Crafty comrades found out that in the “auxiliaries’ billets” there were regular “auctions” at which one of the girls would dance on the table to music from the wireless; at some point the music would suddenly be stopped and the “dancing girl” would freeze in mid-movement. When the others standing around shouted, “Take it off! Take it off! You don’t need it anymore!” she would begin to move again and, after some fumbling around and with gestures that were as suggestive as possible, drop the next piece of clothing.
At Christmas 1943 I was in Berlin and it so happened that during my stay Karlshorst was for the first time hit by an air raid. The bombs didn’t cause too much harm, but the destruction and damage were impossible to miss. Perhaps because of the greater proximity of the war the days passed in a strangely depressed atmosphere. Winfried and I tried, somewhat clumsily, to lighten the mood, and in particular to play the beau for our two sisters, who had entered the poetic phase of adolescent girlhood. For gentle Hannih we thought up more or less invented gossipy stories about sentimental love, while Christa, who was much more lighthearted and blessed with a down-to-earth intelligence, preferred cheerful stories, even more so if they were witty.
Things became more entertaining when Wolfgang arrived in Karlshorst for a short leave of one and a half days. On the way to a Christmas service he told me that he had wanted to give our mother as a present a poem he had written himself; one in Heine’s style, but without the ironic final couplet, which she so hated. But none of his dozen attempts had been a success. The poem was supposed to include my mother’s favorite phrase (“summer wind”), her favorite activity (“piano”), and her main piece of clothing at present (“black apron”), or at least contain a play on these diverging terms. He had tinkered for a long time, but he was “too dopey” to be a poet; he’d learned that much at least. I retorted that he’d obviously tried to scrawl the thing with his left hand. He laughed and said he could make jokes about his lack of talent himself.
It befitted the mood of these days that shortly after Christmas Eve I saw my mother sitting in front of her keepsake casket, evidently deep in troubled thought. A little before that she had lamented that every prediction had turned out to be wrong: Wolfgang and I had become soldiers after all; there was no end in sight to Hitlerism. Now, one after the other, she was holding her beloved trifles, which were kept in the little box along with some letters and family documents: first locks of hair from her children, notebooks in which she had kept a diary about each one, three gold coins, which were presumably supposed to ensure everlasting prosperity, and so on. Also some letters from Wolfgang and myself. She sat there silently, staring at the wall in front of her, and jumped as she suddenly saw me beside her. “You shouldn’t do that!” she said. “Imagine if I had been crying!” I sat down beside her and asked if she often felt like crying, and she replied, “I feel like it every day.” Then she shut the casket, put the key in her handbag, and said, like a warning to herself, “But everyday feelings are not what make up a life.”
The antiaircraft auxiliary period ended in the middle of February 1944. Then we were informed that we would be drafted into the Reich Labor Service just two days after our discharge.16 As one of the spokesmen of the unit, I negotiated with Captain Kersting an “interim leave” of two weeks before the start of our labor service deployment. Since my friend Helmut Weidner sympathized with my dislike of the boarding school, he invited me to spend the few free days in the guest room of his parents’ home.
To my surprise, when I called at the boarding school in Freiburg—where I went on my second day back in the city—among three or four pieces of correspondence I found call-up papers ordering me to start labor service in two days’ time. As I discovered, my schoolmates had received a letter that fixed the call-up for the end of February, as had been agreed with Captain Kersting and the army d
istrict command. After numerous discussions, which consumed the whole of the following day, I resolved to report for duty, but—with the help of a confusing story that was difficult to understand—I managed to get my leave after all.
So, when I arrived at the assembly point not far from the station at eight in the morning. I presented myself to a superior who was shouting orders and whose dirty brown uniform was trimmed with silver braid, and I once again laughed silently at the silly Robin Hood cap of the labor service. When asked what I wanted, I muttered something about a clerical error, but as if I were no more than an insignificant irritation for him, he barked at me, “Do you have call-up papers?” and when I said yes he gave me the order, “Well then! Step into the ranks!”
I pretended to fall in farther to the back, and then, in a second attempt, made my way to the clerical hut. The day before I had tried by telephone to get written confirmation from Captain Kersting stating that I, too, was entitled to two weeks’ leave, but had only managed to reach Staff Sergeant Knuppe, who had reprimanded me: “You’ll get no written confirmations here! You can get a couple of foot cloths! But you’ll have to pick them up yourself!” After that I had drawn up a document in which all the members of the 1926 age group of the 218th Flak Battery were granted special leave from the twelfth to the twenty-sixth of February 1944 on conclusion of their duties, because of their exemplary service. Dr. Hans Kersting’s name was typewritten at the bottom and it was signed by the eleven classmates I had managed to reach the previous evening.
At the counter of the clerical office—after describing my case—I held out the piece of paper to the officer on duty. He looked at it helplessly and, after scratching his head in irritation, asked for more details. When I presented the case as incoherently as possible and even contradicted myself, he interrupted me. “Come now, come now!” he exclaimed. “I don’t understand a word! Have you been called up or not?” I responded in the forceful tone of voice that everyone in the packed room adopted: “Of course not! Here’s the proof. It’s a misunderstanding!” As I kept on talking in order to make the matter even more opaque, he cried out, “Man, what are you pestering me for? I’ve got a thousand things to do! And now I’m supposed to waste my time with idiots like you! Away with you, out of here!” Despite my civilian clothes, I gave a suggestion of clicking my heels and made myself scarce.
For about half an hour I watched from a safe distance as the conscripts climbed onto the trucks that drove up and left shortly after. Two weeks later I was at the assembly point again, this time with the class, and reported to the clerical hut. When no one could find my name, my particulars were noted and I was sent away. For the next two weeks I heard nothing from the Reich Labor Service.
It was during this time that I had an unusually fierce argument with my father. Almost in passing I had mentioned in a letter that I had recently volunteered for the Luftwaffe air force, and hardly had my letter arrived in Berlin when my father was on the telephone. I could hear his voice rising in anger. “Volunteered!” he shouted, trying to catch his breath. “For this war! Have you thought of me? Of us?” When I said yes, he retorted: “That I’ll never understand!” I said that he must understand, almost the whole class had volunteered, and from my letters he knew something about their views. He denied that as well, and at the end of the exchange, which got little further than repeating what had already been said, I let slip that reporting as a volunteer was the only way not to be drafted into the SS, whose recruiting officers had recently been in the class. I no longer know what words I used to try to make my decision plausible to my father. Finally, after a long argument and even longer silence we hung up. In the letter which arrived a few days later he wrote with unbelievable lack of caution that one does not volunteer for “Hitler’s criminal war,” not even to avoid the SS. “This decision,” he concluded, “you must leave to God or, if you prefer, to Fate. At any rate, it’s not in your hands, even if that’s what you assume.”
No matter how often we talked about our difference of opinion or exchanged letters we still didn’t manage to come to any agreement. Finally my father announced his intention to visit me specially in Freiburg and to lodge a complaint at the regional Luftwaffe headquarters in order to cancel my registration. I wrote to tell him that a withdrawal was not possible, and besides I might be expected to report for labor service any day. He said something and then, without waiting for an answer, slammed the phone down. Even years later we avoided the subject. Only once did we briefly come back to it and I have never forgotten my father’s intelligently discriminating words. “In the only serious dispute we had during the Nazi years, you were not wrong. But I was the one who was right!”
After the departure of the class I had another fourteen days. Then, just before six in the morning, my hosts’ doorbell rang. Two men in uniformlike coats with the brims of their hats turned down were at the front door. They asked for me and when they were told I was up in the guest room they ran upstairs without another word. When they got to the top they tore open the door of the neighboring room and woke me up just with the noise they made. “So you’re the deserter!” they shouted. When I denied it and instead gave my name, they ordered: “Get yourself ready!” They waited outside the bathroom door, repeatedly urging me to hurry, and then led me out of the house. Downstairs, at the entrance, they explained, as if with one voice, that they didn’t want any trouble and threatened me with arrest by the police. We were now going to the tram stop on Komturplatz, they added, and I had to stay ten steps in front. “Off you go! Now!”
The officer at Gestapo headquarters on Dreisamstrasse left me waiting for about an hour while he read through a bundle of files. When I plucked up my courage and asked him whether it wouldn’t be better if I just left—especially as I hadn’t had any breakfast—he looked up with a smile and said I would have much, much more time on my hands yet. “And breakfast? Well, if you want to call it that!” Half an hour later another officer came and discussed my case with his colleague, who leafed disinterestedly through a pile of papers. Then one of the two brought some tea and, a little later, the other, suddenly sitting up straight, began a kind of interrogation.
The examination lasted quite a long time; the questions concerned only the obvious. Nevertheless, the procedure was repeated several times, in the afternoon and the evening, as well as finally almost at night. Meanwhile, I had been put in a cell. On the second evening the officer who had kept me waiting so long at the beginning came and silently handed me a number of documents. One was the call-up for labor service; another my destination in the Stubaital in the Tyrol; a third my travel pass. “Tomorrow morning at 7:12 departure from Freiburg,” he announced. “If you don’t miss any connections you should be in Innsbruck at about six in the evening. From there you take the train up to the Stubaital” in the Tyrol.
Relieved, I made my way to Herdern, a suburb of Freiburg. During all the interrogations and in the breaks between them I had constantly thought of my parents and how worried they would be if they knew of my arrest by the Gestapo. The thought of my mother’s sorrow had upset me more than my father’s scruples. But he had just brought trouble on himself.
1 “National comrade” is the translation for Volksgenosse, a term coined by the Nazis, who were fond of linking all their ideas to the word Volk (folk) in some way or other; thus society became a Volksgemeinschaft or community of all belonging to the same folk. These terms applied only to those whom the National Socialists deemed worthy of their new state; outsiders, like non-Aryans, could not gain acceptance. You were either born into the Volksgemeinschaft or forever remained excluded; there were no conversions.
2 “Flak” is an acronym for Flugabwehrkanone (or Fliegerabwehrkanone), or antiaircraft gun, literally “aerial defense cannon.”
3 Franz Schubert (1797–1828), beloved musical genius of the Romantic school, wrote symphonies, chamber music, church music, but above all lieder, which means simply “songs” in German but has become the universal technical term
for musical settings of poems, as Schubert composed for his famous song cycles.
4 Many Jews and opponents of the regime who could not flee in time despaired of their situation and committed suicide.
5 The Nazi propaganda ministry tightly controlled all the media of the time and listening to foreign broadcasts was difficult and illegal. Regular programs of the BBC and some Swiss stations were the only sources of outside information for many Germans.
6 This description as well as the later reference to Dr. Kiefer’s corpulence may owe as much to a famous poster as it does to reality. Everyone in Fest’s generation had seen or owned the likeness of Aristide Bruant as depicted by Toulouse-Lautrec in precisely these colors and pose.
7 The Schlegel-Tieck translation (completed by Tieck’s daughter Dorothea and Count Baudissin) of Shakespeare into German is so successful and faithful a rendition that it has made the English dramatist a virtual German author. August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767–1845) and his brother Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829) were also the foremost theoreticians of German and European Romanticism; their writings have become the basis for most of modern literary criticism. Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) was a major Romantic author with numerous novels, stories, and dramas to his credit; he was instrumental in preserving and editing early chapbooks and medieval texts virtually unknown until then.
Not I Page 22
