Not I

by Joachim C. Fest

  8 Like all European languages other than English, German has polite and familiar forms of address, which are used according to the degree of social familiarity or distance between the speaker and the person spoken to; the use of the formal mode indicates respect and was therefore used in the past not only for persons of higher social status but also for one’s elders and parents, as it still is in France in some families.

  9 Josef Weinheber (1892–1945), Austrian novelist and poet who wrote traditional hymns, odes, and sonnets, but also tried to capture the cadences of common folk; seen as close to the Nazis and thus politically controversial, he appears to have committed suicide in 1945 (no one is quite sure—he died at the very end of the war, when many Nazi fellow travelers killed themselves). Aware of this undesirable legacy, Fest wants to distance himself from the man while maintaining his admiration for his work and its influence on him as a young reader.

  10 Wittenbrink is using the typical code of the time—his reference to the Inquisition is intended to draw out the visitors to declare their political views; since they refuse to do so, he immediately changes the subject.

  11 Of the five Berlin Caravaggios, three appear to have been destroyed in a fire at the end of the Second World War.—Trans.

  12 Because of the air raids most museums kept only a small number of works on display; the rest were safely stored off location, sometimes in abandoned mines, where they were found after 1945.

  13 Both Büchner and Hauptmann were socially critical writers who attacked the ills of their own time and often drew the ire of the establishment. Georg Büchner (1813–37) published political pamphlets and wrote powerful dramas and a major prose fragment; his works only came to be appreciated after 1918. One of the most prestigious German literary prizes bears his name. Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946) is Germany’s main representative of Naturalism. His social criticism was presented in both tragedy and comedy; although primarily a dramatist, he also wrote novels and other narratives, receiving the Nobel Prize in 1912.

  14 Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was an exceptionally influential writer; his philosophy of history essentially views the major cultures as organisms with distinctive lifestyles which can best be captured by a world-historical morphology.

  15 A German army radio station based in Belgrade.—Trans.

  16 In peacetime this would have been the expected progress of the average young German male: Hitler Youth to Reich Labor Service to Armed Services, learning to operate in coordinated units with people of all walks of life. The Nazis, quite intentionally, did a lot to tear down social barriers.

  EIGHT

  •

  Of the Soldier’s Life and of Dying

  At the beginning of April 1944 my father received an official letter. It came from a party office and informed him that on the nineteenth of the month he had to present himself at the Karlshorst racetrack. He had been assigned to a unit building tank obstacles. He had promptly replied that it was no doubt known to the responsible department that in accordance with Paragraph 4 of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service he had been dismissed on April 7, 1933. Consequently, in accordance with the graded catalogue of measures of the law, he was required to avoid every activity. As he knew that the administration attached great importance to the proper application of its decrees, his call-up must be an error. He awaited an appropriate notification “as soon as possible.”

  The letter was pure mockery. This time, however, even my mother was in agreement. Nevertheless, years later, whenever the conversation turned to these events, her mouth still began to tremble. But the demand to defend Hitler’s Reich, which had brought her nothing but “troubles” to the lives of three members of her family, was going too far. And in taking this risk she had, as she later liked to say, “the luck of the bold.” The protecting hand, which we suspected was being held over many of my father’s rash and angry actions, spared him once more.

  It was during these anxious days that I arrived in Neustift, more than three thousand feet up, at the end of the Stubaital Valley, with Innsbruck and the glittering Nordwand peak in the background. A camp with huts had been put up in a wood behind some farms. On the night before Easter one of the farms burned to the ground; at three in the morning when the firefighting, to which our unit had hurriedly been detailed, was over, I walked with my friend Franz Franken, whom I had met in the camp again, through the brightening dawn down the valley to Innsbruck. Perhaps it had something to do with the unique charm of the landscape that I soon hated everything to do with the labor service: the crumpled overalls we had to wear in which our so-called foremen drove us into the dirt right after the clothing issue; the army bread with the disgusting margarine; the “spade care,” as it was called, in which we polished away at the shiny surfaces; and the ridiculous shouted commands of “Shoulder spade!,” “Order spade!,” or “Spade—present!” Furthermore, at this late point in the war there was nothing useful to do anymore—no dike building, no draining of swamps, no road construction—so that the never-ending drill was as much a makeshift solution as the singing of the same old songs that hadn’t changed for years about Geyer’s black troop and the tents beyond the valley. One got the impression that the leaders and subordinate leaders of the Reichsarbeitsdienst were all failed career officers who suffered from a profound inferiority complex.1

  After a few weeks the unit was transferred from the high valley near Innsbruck to Hohenems in Vorarlberg, and one of the commanders explained that we were now moving closer to the front that would soon no doubt open up in the West. What we actually saw at the end of April—across Lake Constance—was the destruction of Friedrichshafen, which had been spared in our time there, in a nighttime firestorm. We thought of our younger classmates, whom we had left behind in the town. With the first post I received a letter from my mother, which told me that my father had been called up to the army. Quite without the caution which she usually displayed, she added that with the help of the Wehrmacht someone had evidently wanted to save him from the clutches of a “higher authority.” Because at almost sixty no one is ordered up to “active service,” as it’s called, but at most to the Volkssturm.2 “But then, what applies to us?”

  My mother had included with her lines a school report by Dr. Hermann or one of his underlings. “Father read it before he left,” she wrote, “but he thought you should see it, too.” It had been written by one of the officials at the boarding school in preparation for my departure from school. Like so many things it was lost in the confusion of the end of the war, so I can no longer recapture its tone of ecclesiastical bureaucracy. But the sentences struck me like blows, from which even the cutting marginal comments of my father could not protect me. This is more or less what was written there:

  Joachim F. shows no intellectual interest and only turns his attention to subjects he finds easy. He does not like to work hard. His religious attachment leaves something to be desired. He is hard to deal with. He shows a precocious liking for naked women, which he hides behind a taste for Italian painting. He displays a noticeable devotion to cheap popular literature; in the course of an inspection of his work desk shortly before he left, works by Beumelburg and Wiechert were found. That a volume of Schiller’s plays was lying beside them does not make the find any better, since dramatic literature demands much less effort than philosophical pieces. He is taciturn. All attempts by the rectorate to draw him into discussion were in vain. It is not impossible that J. will still find the right path. We wish it for him—and for you.

  My father had put a note with the report. On it was written, in contrast to his usual strict manner: So that you have something to laugh at in these serious times. He had underlined the phrase about my lack of intellectual interest and written in the margin: I don’t understand. Dr. Hermann and the others in charge of the house seemed sensible people when I met them last year. My mother, for her part, had noted: Wolfgang got an outstanding report when he left. You’re not so dissimilar! What does he do that�
��s different? I wrote back: Here at the Reich Labor Service I’m constantly being reproached by my superiors, because I spend almost every free minute reading. A couple of days ago, after some clumsiness while putting up a tent, one called me “an educated idiot.” What does one learn from that? School reports are Seich (rubbish)3, as they say in Alemannic dialect.

  At the beginning of July 1944 my time with the labor service came to an end. I was drafted into an air force unit in Landau an der Isar. Chance had it that I made a friend on the first day. Reinhold Buck from Radolfzell was quite brilliant, with a temperament that swung between severity, delight, and the demonic. The hours he spent over scores and notebooks were proof of the effort it cost him to come to rest. He wanted to be a conductor and was obsessed by music. So it was inevitable that even as we were making up our beds we got around to themes and composers who had for a long time been his passion as well as mine. A little later, as the whistles were blown for first roll call, we stood next to one another and missed one command or another, because we were talking about Beethoven’s piano sonatas. The lieutenant who was inspecting the ranks and had picked up a couple of fragments of our conversation asked Reinhold in which major key Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was composed and received the answer: “In none. It was composed in D minor. And, if I may add, the opus number is 125.” The officer was pleasantly surprised. “But you don’t have a clue about anything?” he said, turning to me. “I do,” I contradicted him in an unmilitary manner. “But more about literature.” The lieutenant thought for a moment. “Then tell me off the top of your head the last line of ‘The Erl-King.’ ” Without hesitation I answered, “In seinen Armen das Kind war tot” (In his arms the child was dead). From that day on he called us “the professors” when he ordered us to fetch coffee or clean the latrines.

  After duty, which here, too, consisted of mindless infantry training, we became engrossed, evening after evening, in our passion for debate. We got excited about Mozart and his taste for alla turca, inspired by the Turkish Wars and the contemporary fashion for coffee-drinking in the late seventeenth century. I talked about the Viennese idolization of Schubert or about Beethoven’s dramatic sense of music and his simultaneous lack of interest in literature, which was so unlike the stage genius of Mozart. At some point we came around to Mozart’s futile search for stage plays or librettists. Yet Shakespeare had been translated since the 1770s, and with a friend in Berlin I had imagined the spell of a Mozart opera of Romeo and Juliet. A little later, as if he wanted to defend Beethoven against Mozart, Buck (as I soon called him) talked about the magnificent closing bars of each of Beethoven’s orchestral pieces, which, like those of Brahms, seemed to strive toward a climax that was also a catastrophe. I noted on a piece of paper: The craving for the abyss, there is something like it, says B.

  On our lengthy walks, however, we also talked about literature. Once I told him about my Fontane reading, my Schiller experiences, and my unsuccessful attempt at Thomas Mann; also about Ernst Kiefer and his unusual way of conveying literature. Buck, on the other hand, returned almost obsessively to music, above all Romantic music. He called Carmen its highest point on the stage, went from there to Wagner and on to Richard Strauss. All in rather large leaps, I sometimes suggested, which made making links so easy. But he laughed and said that was the freedom that being half educated gave him.

  However, the conversations we had—mostly in the evening, walking outside the camp—also showed me what gaps there were in my musical knowledge and that in the unspoken rivalry which develops in every friendship such as that between Buck and me, it was only with my literary knowledge that I could keep up at all. And with the Renaissance. With Lorenzo the Magnificent, for example (of whom I had just read a biography), who was the rare example of a tyrant whom even lovers of freedom were, supposedly, happy to acknowledge as one of their own. The author had quoted one of the leading thinkers at Lorenzo’s court saying that when Plato returned from Hades he would seek out not Athens but instead the Florence of the Medici princes. Astonished, Buck allowed me to tell him about the wonders and peculiarities of this epoch, its combination of intellectual boldness, splendor, and a sense of beauty. Sometimes, in the middle of the conversation, he forgot where he was, took a couple of steps to the side, and, in nervous haste, began to make notes.

  On one of these far too short days we were woken earlier than usual and ordered out to the roll-call square. Three high-ranking officers stood in front of the assembled units. One of them read from a leaflet that an underhand and dishonorable assassination attempt—unworthy of a German officer—had been made on the Führer’s life. The two other officers stood beside him, staring blankly into the distance. The deed, continued the reader, was all the more reprehensible as the Reich, since the invasion of Normandy, was also threatened from the west. Then several measures to improve our readiness for defense were read out.

  Our superiors took the July 20 assassination attempt as an excuse to intensify the drilling, and several times fetched us out of bed in the middle of the night for an exercise. “If drill and increased imbecility are the only result,” said one of our comrades, who until that point had hardly been conspicuous for his political remarks, then he regretted even more that the assassination had failed. Almost everyone found the abolition of military salutes, which was announced at issue of orders a few days later, and their replacement by the Hitler salute just as annoying. He felt like a monkey, Buck said in the circle of his comrades, and I added that I had recently seen a picture of a historical Berlin masquerade in which some of the masked were walking under a grotesque pig’s or donkey’s head. That’s just how we must appear to others, interjected Buck, only they had done voluntarily what we were forced to do. He would have to think hard as to which of the two looked more ridiculous.

  In retrospect the frankness with which this group of Gymnasium boys (which is what the majority of us were, thrown together from all over) declared their opposition to the given conditions is astonishing. No one, of course, wanted to make a show of courage. Everyone simply knew at a first or second glance whom he could trust and when caution was called for; and, without a word of conversation, anyone with even a bit of intelligence had a feeling for what could be said in front of whom and what it was better to remain silent about. Because at this late stage of the war there was hardly any doubt that even innocent-sounding remarks could be life-and-death matters.

  So the days, which granted us an unexpected friendship, drifted by. But they didn’t last long. In the second half of September the unit was lined up for roll call and after a few phrases, which were supposed to rouse us, we were divided into two groups. Then a clerk took the names, and as the trucks had already arrived at the barracks, the sergeant gave us half an hour for “regulation packing.” To my dismay Buck and I found ourselves in different sections. Since this departure, too, took its course with the usual military waste of time, we were at least able to get a few moments to say goodbye to each other and some other comrades. I said something to Buck about the musical insights I had got from him, and that we should stay in touch. He replied that he must return the compliment, because only thanks to me had it become clear to him how much time he had frittered away in German and history classes. Now a couple of things had dawned on him, and on the whole he wanted to say that never in his life had he felt as free as in our conversations. “And that as a dumb-ass private! Who can make sense of the world?”

  As we were taking our last steps a little way from the rest, Buck told me how, as a seven-year-old, he had dug up cobblestones in front of his parents’ house on the marketplace of Radolfzell and put them aside. When a passerby asked what he was looking for, he had replied, “For the Devil, of course. Someone has to find him.” And if he didn’t exist, he wanted to discover what the secret was and what was hidden under the stones instead of the Devil. A little later he wrote to me in a letter that we had come a tiny bit closer to the market-square secret. When this “utterly stupid war” was over, we sho
uld start looking again as soon as possible. It was convenient that Freiburg was such a noted center of music.

  Then we saw the trucks driving up, and out of the crowd of NCOs zealously hurrying around one shouted over to ask why we were walking so far away. An hour later the convoys moved off. A destination was not named, but we soon discovered that we were traveling north. In Aachen the two units separated, and about three days later, after numerous further interruptions and an interim halt in Tilburg, we reached a military camp near the Dutch town of Eindhoven. Even as we were getting down from the trucks the news spread that we were not going into action, because the British airborne troops that had landed a few days before had already been wiped out. At Arnhem and Nijmegen Montgomery had wanted to attack the Germans from the rear and capture the Rhine bridges, but the operation had failed. So there was once again time for practice in military mindlessness. At the arrival roll call the sergeant major addressed the column with the words: “Soldiers! My name is Neuber. I am the sergeant major. On duty I am—to the best of my ability—a bastard, but off-duty I’m a pleasant fellow. You will get to know both!” And then, suddenly bellowing with all his might: “All men, take cover!”

  At the beginning of October 1944 our unit was transferred to a small town on the Lower Rhine. There we were trained in duties as sappers, in building pontoons and in moving bridges. A new friendship arose with our company commander, Lieutenant Walter Kühne, who summoned a few chosen comrades for an interview. After some words about my parental home and education, he asked me, almost without a transition, about Rilke and I recited the first three or four sections of Cornet Rilke until he signaled it was enough. As I later found out, he asked others about Kleist, Fontane, or Stefan George and with the four or five boys who had satisfied his demands he formed a circle of lovers of literature. He was probably not much liked by his brother officers because of it. Any rate, I overheard two officers say, “Kühne’s crazy! He should be kicking ass. Instead, he tries to make himself interesting by being highly educated.”4 One evening at this time I heard over the crystal set, though with a great deal of interference, The Marriage of Figaro. Once more I regretted that Reinhold Buck wasn’t there with me. In the end, I thought, literature could hardly replace music.