Not I

by Joachim C. Fest

  As the month drew to a close, news of death came in from all sides. Once, on a single day, four comrades whom I had felt close to were reported killed in action, and I heaved a sigh of relief at every day that ended without terrible news about relatives or friends. Shortly after this I received a letter from Wittenbrink, which he had given to a parishioner who belonged to a signals unit. Wolfgang was not well, it said. Lieutenant Kühne moved heaven and earth to find out more. In mid-October he told me that Wolfgang was seriously ill and had been taken to a hospital in Beuthen in Silesia. My mother had rushed there from Berlin when she heard the news, and was with him day and night. My father, too, was trying to get special leave. Both were terribly afraid and my mother, in particular, was in despair—that was the message Lieutenant Kühne had got from a medical orderly, who had scribbled it down on a piece of paper. Blinded by tears and with nothing to hold on to, she often lost her way in the unfamiliar surroundings, Kühne read to me. “She admitted that to a stranger?” I asked. I couldn’t believe it. “You’re right,” he said, “here on the piece of paper it says only that she couldn’t get her bearings at all in the town, and prayed to God to spare her son. Then it says that because she was weeping all the time she found it hard to carry out the simplest tasks. And at the end it also says that it is very important to her that Wolfgang’s brother is told everything.”

  The news struck me like a thunderbolt. Probably, I thought later, because it was utterly unexpected and it made my worst fears come true. Of the friends I had made and lost in the course of the years, it was Wolfgang to whom I was closest. Not only had I always been able to talk to him, but we had discussed many things of lasting importance. Even when we had arguments or differences of opinion, there always remained an indissoluble bond. Free from the usual jealousy of younger siblings, I admired his wit, his independence, and his pride. Almost ten years before, when the second supper had been inaugurated, he had told me (giving my chest a nudge) that now it was we two against the world, and at the time that high-flown phrase had been quite incomprehensible to me. When it became clear what he had meant, I realized why our arguments, which might have destroyed other friendships, resulted in no lasting offense between us. In a way I thought him invulnerable. Only now did I begin to have a presentiment that the world was stronger than we could ever be.

  An endless week—in the course of which I again and again tried to find out more news, and several times applied in vain for short leave—passed without further details. I often went for a walk in the evening, and to distract myself asked one of the comrades from the Kühne circle to accompany me. We stumbled over the uneven terrain. I avoided all reminiscences. Instead, we talked about books, films, or actors, as well as the discovery of those years, Georg Trakl, and also Stefan George.5 At times I suspected that my companions—no matter what the subject—wanted to talk me into having a confidence, which I myself could no longer summon up.

  On a bright November day, as I’ve never forgotten, there came certainty. Wolfgang had already died in the middle of October 1944 in the hospital in Upper Silesia, exactly one week after his twentieth birthday. Slowly, thanks to communications from my mother, which often reached me by surprising routes, I found out more details. In the course of a military operation near Riga, on the Baltic front, he had contracted a lung infection; summoning up all of his strength, he had been helped to battalion headquarters by two comrades. There his commander had first of all shouted at him for being a “malingerer,” then driven him back to the front line with his drawn revolver. Two hours after arriving at the makeshift dugout, he had collapsed, lost consciousness, and been taken to a hospital. A few days later a train carrying the wounded had brought him to Beuthen.

  When my mother got there, Wolfgang had passed the night with a high temperature and had difficulty breathing. On October 13, his birthday, he said to her, “Today death was with me. We came to an agreement. He granted me another postponement.” After two earlier operations he had to endure an operation on each of the following seven days. “They don’t have any anesthetic and painkillers here anymore,” he groaned after the fourth operation. “I can’t bear it much longer.” On October 19, after overcoming endless difficulties, my father got to the sickbed while Wolfgang still had moments of clarity. Ten hours later profuse perspiration set in and Wolfgang’s face was covered in glassy beads of sweat. Abruptly recovering consciousness, he begged our parents, “Please don’t write ‘In deep sorrow.’ ” Then he lost consciousness again, and minutes later, with a last movement of his hand, he died. According to my mother, he had replied to the devout consolation that she uttered, “Don’t worry! The little bit of life I had didn’t leave me any time to get up to much mischief.” And after a pause in which he fought for breath: “I liked it.”

  Wolfgang’s death was an unspeakable misfortune for our family. My mother had always said as long as we were all alive she would not complain. Now that pillar of stability had broken down. In the almost twenty-five years that remained to her, whenever Wolfgang’s name or an episode involving him was mentioned, she rose from her seat and left the room. I was there on some occasions and followed her. Each time I found her in one of the other rooms, where, her head in her hands, she tried to compose herself. Once in the mid-1960s, when I inadvertently talked about Wolfgang, she simply looked at me and with an imploring “Please!” left the room. Later, she said that after everything else, Hitler had also taken her son and she hoped, quite without Christian magnanimity, that he would never be granted forgiveness for it.

  At the news of Wolfgang’s death all the lordly manner of my supposedly unapproachable grandfather collapsed. His villa not far from the Seepark had already been destroyed in an air raid, and with my grandmother he had moved into my parents’ apartment, half-empty now, since my sisters, to avoid evacuation, were at a girls’ Gymnasium in the Neumark east of Berlin. He had locked himself in his room for two days, not let anyone in, and answered all pleas with a dismissive blow on the door. My two sisters, who liked to call him “hardhearted,” later related that when he silently returned to the family table his eyes were red from weeping.

  For me, too, the death of my brother was a profound break. I had once said to Reinhold Buck that in his life each person has four fundamental experiences: first, being overwhelmed by a perfect musical work; then, reading a great book; then, first love; and then, the first irreplaceable loss.

  Wolfgang Fest just before his call-up to the army in 1943

  Among the viler Nazis in our unit was a Medical Corporal Schneider, a man of about forty, a male nurse by profession, who (as he often boasted) had joined the party in 1933. Some of us suspected that he had been assigned to our company of mainly middle-class school-leavers as an informer. At any rate, we called him “the Ear,” because he was constantly eavesdropping and treated everyone he met with the mistrust of the born spy. Someone had evidently told him that I had spoken with disgust of the death of my brother, and in particular of the battalion commander who had forced him back to the front line. Without hesitation, Schneider formally reported the “incident,” and, together with the overzealous Sergeant Major Mahlmann, tried to submit it directly to the court-martial to whose sphere of responsibility the regiment belonged. Lieutenant Kühne, however, asserted his superior rank as company commander and—feigning outrage, he stated in the presence of the sergeant major—he had come to a provisional decision. I was given a “final warning,” but given the difficult military situation I was declared indispensable for the time being. After the foreseeable final victory, however, which I also impatiently anticipated thanks to my trust in the Führer, continued Kühne, I would certainly be placed before a court-martial and, should the accusations made against me prove well founded, be punished by the full force of the law.

  The next day I had to come to the orderly room and Mahlmann immediately brought up what had taken place. He bellowed angrily, “I can see through it all! Always Kühne, Kühne, Kühne! That’s going to stop! Otherwise
, I’ll be the one who is up at regimental headquarters in full dress uniform!” When I described the incident to him, Lieutenant Kühne remarked, “Once Mahlmann would have been someone to fear. In the present situation I don’t worry too much about him. I feel more unease at your behavior. Of course, I understand you. But don’t do anything else stupid! Even someone who has the better arguments doesn’t let the Mahlmanns and Schneiders of this world notice it.” And, patting my shoulder, “Not least because we despise them.”

  In November 1944 our unit was moved to the army training camp at Cologne-Wahn. We had hardly arrived before preparations for Christmas began. Fir twigs were nailed up everywhere, hung with tinsel or apples, and sometimes even a candle found somewhere was attached. As always the celebrations began with an hour of contemplation, which opened with an address boldly cobbled together by the commanding officer about salvation, sacrifice, and final victory; then there followed a drawn-out “O Tannenbaum.” Franz Franken—the opera enthusiast I had got to know during our time on the antiaircraft battery, and who was in one of the battalions at this camp—had managed, within a short space of time, to form a chamber orchestra, which performed Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” and Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks. The three hundred or so participants returned once again to Christmas with a tearful “Stille Nacht”; then it was time for the jolly part of the festivities. Without a pause, the tables became boisterous and whoever had been sitting at them seemed, as if at a signal, to romp back into the forests from which his ancestors had emerged in primeval times.

  Lieutenant Walter Kühne, who saved the author from a court-martial, in front of his house in Stelle, near Lüneburg, in the early 1950s

  As soon as circumstances allowed, I fled to my books. On the second day of Christmas my father was unexpectedly on the phone. He hinted he was awaiting the Russian attack somewhere on the edge of West Prussia. We talked about family things and about Wolfgang’s death, and I had the feeling that he hid his need to avoid any kind of sentimentality behind somewhat worn phrases. He mentioned my mother’s dreadful state, the wretched farewell when he himself had to leave for the front again, and that he didn’t have much more to say. “It’s all been said, and even this call can only tell you what you already know. And as for Mother,” he added, “you have known of her sorrow and the reasons for it for a long time.”

  Then he asked me about my books and I said that I had taken some from Berlin or Freiburg, and had exchanged some for cigarettes or other things. One day I had come by an officer’s map case and since then had kept my “library” in it. It contained nothing but the obvious: Goethe’s Poems, selected ballads by Schiller, a volume of Hölderlin, and a couple of thin paperbacks with quotes from Jean Paul, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Also the copy of Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs that he had given me, and I even had Josef Weinheber’s Selbstbildnis (Self-Portrait). “But no Thomas Mann,” I added as a weak joke. Altogether, apart from a map of the country between Cologne and Düsseldorf, there were thirteen books in the leather bag which was attached to my belt. Then the conversation suddenly broke off.

  The next day I unexpectedly bumped into Reinhold Buck outside the canteen, and I was so surprised that with a quite uncustomary gesture I embraced him. From then on we were, as far as conditions allowed, inseparable and spent whole evenings together in some empty hut or other. We told each other what had happened in the past weeks, and realized that without us knowing it our units had the whole time been quite close. I talked about the radio broadcast of The Marriage of Figaro, he about Mozart’s highly developed psychological understanding. When I related Wittenbrink’s “proof of the existence of God,” he said that, for once in history all the conditions of the ideal moment had indeed come together, which made the great work of art possible, and the pious might say, God had revealed Himself. For fifty years. At Mozart’s death this moment had already almost passed. Beethoven and Schubert, with extraordinary efforts, had extended it for a while. That made their contribution all the greater. With Wagner it was finally over. In him one heard too much loud panting, he said. “You must be thinking of the beginning of Das Rheingold,” I interjected ironically, but he replied that Rheingold was one of the exceptions; there, even he (for whom the Nazis had spoiled the pleasure in Wagner) could, without any effort, hear the “breath of the universe.”

  Whenever the canteen was empty we could even listen to the wireless and, whenever possible, in the time that followed, we scoured the stations. We also talked about literature, about which we agreed much less often than music, and I remember only that Buck regarded the poets “of the second rank,” such as Eichendorff, Geibel, and Kerner, as “mere text providers” for Schubert and Schumann, and called Rilke a “word cobbler” who had turned my head. At some point I told him about Wolfgang’s death. Buck said that after the war the battalion commander who forced my brother back to the front line should be put on trial. Then we talked about the first dead we had seen, and I told him about the NCO who had been sprawled across a shattered tree near Düren, while he remembered six or seven Englishmen who had lost their lives when their plane came down close to Groningen.

  On several evenings Buck spoke repeatedly about death. “Don’t have any illusions,” he said, “there’s no escaping it.” He only hoped, he added, during a walk across the barracks, whose buildings were like tenement blocks, that death trod loudly when it came. When I asked what he meant, he replied that he didn’t want to be surprised by his going. Not like a thief in the night, he added, ending with a wild giggling. One must be fully aware of the end! “But of course, without suffering.” He hinted at making the sign of the cross and went on, in his way of pushing everything to an extreme: “I don’t want to die wretchedly—not like one of those stinking lumps of humanity I saw lying in the field hospital, groaning away.” He made me promise to stand by him in death, one way or another.

  But the following day we were unexpectedly separated once again, and Buck said, as we parted, that he hoped to get through the war, despite everything. With a smile he said, “That goes for you, too. No wretched dying!” Already ten steps away from me, he stopped and shouted half to the side, “One so rarely finds a friend!” Afterward I tried for a couple of days to find out through Lieutenant Kühne where he had been deployed, but without success.

  Joachim Fest’s friend, Reinhold Buck

  My company was sent to Euskirchen near Bonn to lay glass mines on a half-finished military airfield. The newly developed explosive devices looked like preserving jars, and when they exploded burst into countless tiny splinters that caused terrible wounds. Day after day, as we worked out in the open, American Lightning fighter-bombers would appear and use us for target practice as we lay exposed amidst the glass jars gleaming in the sunlight. That was the next set of dead I saw. After nightfall we fetched them from the field and laid them out in a hall; finally, together with the corpse in the tree, I got to twenty dead. Then I stopped counting.

  Back in Cologne-Wahn we spent the days, and occasionally the nights, practicing pontoon-building, often standing up to our knees in water in the icy River Sieg, and a couple of times we even tried it in the fast-flowing Rhine. After about two weeks we were informed a room at a time that the next day we were starting out for Mettmann near Cologne. The reason given was that Montgomery, although with some delay, was moving toward the Rhine. The approaching end of the war began to make itself felt in the muddle with which we were sent back and forth. Even before we took up position in Mettmann, the deployment was broken off and we were ordered back to our starting point.

  That day we stood shivering for several hours in a forest of thin, awkward trees. Without warning we heard a whistling sound and at the same moment two shadows, which we took to be a new type of American plane, flitted over us, no more than one or two hundred feet above our heads, so that we threw ourselves to the ground looking for shelter. Later, we found out that they were Messerschmitt Me 262 fighter-bombers, which, powered by jet e
ngines that had recently gone into mass production, flew faster than the speed of sound. Immediately, there was talk again of “miracle weapons” that would change the course of the war. Even as we were still talking about them we had to assemble again and received the order to get onto trucks which had just driven up.

  That, however, was not yet the end of the confused deployment situation. About thirty miles farther south we were just as abruptly given the order to get out and march. At Leverkusen we passed a military hospital where we took a short rest, surrounded by staff cars and military ambulances. Pitiable sounds came from the buildings near us; doctors and male nurses were running around shouting; in the corridors we found long rows of bandaged figures, looking like shrunken larvae, and between them tubs full of sawn-off limbs.

  Around midnight we crossed the railway bridge near Cologne’s cathedral, where a cold smell of burning wafted toward us from the riverbank. The streets along which we marched consisted of buildings “blown through” by the wind, as the popular phrase had it; in between them we made our way over blackened mountains of rubble and hills of ash. Whole facades covered by missing relatives’ or friends’ messages stood ghostlike in the emptiness: HANNES, WHERE ARE you? GISELA.6 When a gust of wind blew over the fields of ruins we felt grit crunching between our teeth. Sometimes someone opened a hatch or removed the cardboard from a cellar hole to see who was coming along the street; in other places white faces appeared in a square hole in brickwork. Pointlessly, some sirens suddenly howled. The pathetically swelling sound involuntarily reminded me of Liszt’s Les préludes, which had accompanied the victory announcements of the Russian campaign on German radio and had not been heard for a long time. Instead, the talk now was constantly of a “straightening of the front,” the camouflage term which the propagandists of the regime had invented for “retreat.”