Not I

by Joachim C. Fest

  On the day before Winfried and I departed, he said into a moment of silence that he never again wanted to be asked about the Nazi years or what had happened. Nor about his memories. Because, for better or worse, one only appeared self-important by doing so. That was not his way. In the end, with his sometimes blunt manner, Winfried defused the rising tension with the words that in such a position one unavoidably appeared “either a hero or an asshole.” In an effort to play down his actions and behavior, my father added that he had often thought during the Hitler years that in his own life he was merely recapitulating the basic situation of Prussia: isolated, surrounded by enemies, with no ally far and wide. That’s the way he had seen the world from quite an early age, and one didn’t abandon a perspective like that, just because such conditions really had intervened.

  Occasionally, Herr Gravenholt from next door would burst into our largely low-key conversations. He—like his no less massive figure of a wife—radiated an indestructible vitality. He would throw himself uninvited into an easy chair and boom, “Well, still going on about the end of the world?!” The ruins of yesterday did not especially weigh him down. “We’re all of us born lucky!” he tried to encourage us. “And we’re on the brink of a fairy-tale ascent. The ruins are our finest promise. We’ve got no alternative except to get out of the dirt by every means we can!” I thought of Reinhold Buck, Helmut Weidner, and the many others. We had only become Sunday’s children by getting through the war. But Gravenholt thought that nothing could stop people who had survived such times; from now on the good spirits were on our side. He leaned back in the easy chair with a sigh, wiped his face with his handkerchief, and burst out with “It’s unbelievable! But the black market takes it out of me!” He took a salami out of his briefcase and asked for knife and beer glass. “Not refined,” he himself admitted. “Refinement has to wait until the day after tomorrow! But I’m already on my way! Cheers!”

  During my Berlin stay, in a street near Tempelhofer Damm, my father bumped into Fengler, the block warden who in Hentigstrasse had played the “hot-pot inspector” and cost my mother (as she put it at the time) two deadly sins. My father drew the man, who couldn’t avoid him on the deserted pavement, into conversation and asked him if it was he who had warned him about the Gestapo visits and made sure his outburst at the “Hitler Youth rascals” was not taken seriously. Also, had he redirected my father’s refusal to work on building tank barriers to the regional army command, because everyone knew that the party would give short shrift to an “objector”? My father said he wanted to thank him.

  Fengler denied everything. He was no “traitor.” He had sworn an oath of loyalty to the Führer. An honest man like him didn’t simply forget such a thing. Anyone with eyes in his head could see that the country built up by the Führer and respected by the whole world was now only a heap of ruins, but Fengler continued to deny any involvement in contributing to this collapse: “Not a bit of it!”

  My father had seen through Fengler’s intention of dragging him into a political argument, but he refused to be sidetracked. He didn’t want to get into a debate that would lead nowhere, he told Fengler, but was merely looking for an answer to a simple question, which, after all, reflected very well on him. After a lengthy exchange, Fengler admitted that he had been the caller, and when my father inquired why he had been ready to do so, the response was: “Perhaps because it was the decent thing to do.” Asked why he found this admission so terribly difficult, Fengler replied that he was no scoundrel. And to my father’s remark that he had not just been concerned with a cause, but apparently with people as well, Fengler said that possibly this was what had made him weak. But he still found his behavior unforgivable: breaking his oath to Hitler would weigh on him for years to come. “At least he didn’t proclaim himself an opponent of Hitler,” concluded my father, “or ask me for an exoneration certificate.”

  My Berlin memories of this period include an encounter with Jean-Paul Sartre, who, when he introduced himself, was as pleased as a schoolboy at having arrived in the city without attracting any fuss. He spoke to a small circle of about thirty people in a Charlottenburg apartment. A French teacher had invited me and said the writer had come to investigate the conditions for a visit planned the following year, when his play Les Mouches (The Flies) would be performed. Sartre had been one of the first to take up a position on the German question: the starting point of his talk was the problem of the responsibility of nations and the fate of children when both stand naked, so to speak, before the powerful. But the “Grand Vizier,” as I called him at the time, also talked about Germany, France, Europe, and the dawn of freedom. Everything that he said seemed to me to be notably well informed and yet disordered, in part also muddled, but always touching on our sense of the times. Everyone was impressed.

  If I sum up my responses, I learned through Sartre that a degree of muddleheadedness can be quite fascinating; a view I later corrected when I began to see him as at once more serious and more dependent on the current mood. I had already begun to think that during his polemical dispute with Camus, and hence long before he visited Andreas Baader in Stammheim Prison.20 Afterward, he had remarked to those accompanying him, “What an asshole!” But then, in public, he burst out with the usual deliberately misleading lament about prison conditions. On the Charlottenburg evening, when one of the guests asked a question about the future of freedom, Sartre talked about the play of new art forms, about the American novel, Dos Passos, jazz, and contemporary cinema. One of those invited summed up our impression in these words: the writer seemed to him like a South American peasant working his way forward with a machete through the thicket of confusing contemporary phenomena. But what is cut down, I put in, is quite fortuitous. Oh yes, said the other, and the parrots as they fly away display the most beautiful wing colors. “Only Sartre,” added a third person, “does not see himself as a parrot, but as a prophet.”

  It was during this time that Aunt Dolly visited us. After all these years her elegance had faded and her mood was not much better. When I suggested going to the opera as we used to do, she said, “If you can find anything!” and complained about the deterioration of Berlin’s opera houses. I concluded that she was no longer really interested in opera, clothes, or anything else. Rather, she had not got over the great disappointment of her life. Later Hannih and Christa told me that Aunt Dolly had grown quite bitter and had recently remarked, in passing, that she could never ever forgive life for what it had done to her.

  Aunt Dolly was sipping listlessly at her teacup when there was a knock at the door. A man we didn’t know introduced himself and, after a long-winded introduction, handed my mother a skimpily wrapped package. “It’s for you, madame,” he said, “or rather for your husband, who I believe is still alive.” The visitor explained that he had discovered these things on a mountain of rubbish on Wuhlheide Heath, and, since the books bore their owner’s name, he had through various connections traced our address. When my mother invited him to sit down and opened up the package in front of us all, the first thing she found was the index volume of the big Goethe edition, then a volume by Jean Paul, as well as one by Emil Julius Gumbel about right-wing assassinations in the early years of the Weimar Republic, and there was a smaller-format memoir of an Italian trip with the never-forgotten title Arcadia Lies by the Arno: A Journey to Florence.

  But the pleasure of this initial moment of recognition was also marred by profound disappointment. Every volume was soaked through and the spines had come apart, so that whole sheets were missing. Even the better-preserved parts were damaged by wind and weather, the pages stuck together and largely illegible. My father, who had meanwhile joined us, had tears in his eyes, as we later realized, almost with a shock. The next day he visited the area on Wuhlheide where the books had been found, but there was nothing but a mass of papery pulp. At some point the four books that had been brought back also disappeared. My father remarked that he would not search for them again, because they reminded him of t
oo much that had gone missing because of the damned Hitler years. We suspected he had disposed of the books himself.

  One afternoon Paul Mielitz dropped by for tea, as he often did. He had proved himself a staunch friend for many years, ever since he and my father had been in the Reichsbanner together. We were just talking about the rather plain Italy book found among the volumes saved, and my father expressed his regret that he had been to Italy only three times. He had been hindered, of course, by constant money problems, he said; but also, perhaps, because his affection for “the land where the lemons bloom” had always had something to do with “escape and playfulness,” not with anything serious like England, where the philosophical and practical grounds of democracy would shortly be explained to him at Wilton Park.21 Italy had seemed to him no more than a caprice, the most charming caprice in the world, but for the Prussian that he was, like every caprice it bordered on the impermissible; sometimes more than that. “A beautiful spell,” he turned to his guest, “but what does an old trade unionist know about all that? I don’t even know if in Italy today, after Mussolini, they have trade unions again.”

  One could tell that Mielitz had borne with impatience the five minutes my father spent on his Italian caprice. Then he let it out: “Great news! Fantastic! You won’t believe it!” And more such exclamations. “A sensation! I’ve been allocated a house in Lichterfelde. A house! No, a whole villa for the little house I lost! Just imagine: a villa in posh Lichterfelde. Even though my mum always said, ‘Paul? He’ll never get anywhere!’ As a socialist—don’t make me laugh! Now she hasn’t lived to see it!”

  My father shook his friend’s hand and said something like “Good luck! Here comes the social climber!” We all joined in. The rest of the visit passed with a few sentences about the previous occupant, who had ascended to high rank as an official in the Nazi Party with a notable lack of scruples. But more time was spent on the plans for the housewarming, the guest list, the most suitable date, the furniture, the drinks, and the fact that, inappropriately, only “shabby Berlin pretzels and rolls” could be handed around. Then Mielitz left to go back to his cramped Kreuzberg flat.

  He was hardly out the door when the debate began. We talked about legitimate compensation, about justice, and already imagined whole suites of rooms and the garden we would soon have again. “But please, without fruit bushes. They tear your clothes and scratch your arms!” Hannih said excitedly. Christa thought that in Lichterfelde only ornamental gardens were allowed anyway, and apart from that she would prefer a swimming pool. During this animated babble of voices—in which my mother, with a sense of foreboding, did not join—my father sat there with a withdrawn expression and didn’t say a word. When there was a brief pause I saw deep furrows of irritation on his forehead.

  “Am I surrounded by lunatics?” he exclaimed. “Are you all in your right minds? Do you really want me to be paid for my political decisions? Then I might just as well have joined the Nazi Party and made a career for myself. A villa in ‘posh Lichterfelde,’ says Paul. But there are much posher ones in Zehlendorf and in Grunewald anyway. But that’s not where a class-conscious worker goes. And guest lists with rolls! Dear Lord! And no fruit bushes! A minute ago I asked myself if I was surrounded by lunatics. Now I know: they’re everywhere!” He cleared his throat a couple of times, while, in embarrassment, we said nothing. “So not another word about it—at least not when I’m around.” He pushed his chair aside and left the room.

  We sat there not knowing what to say. I thought that there was much that was true about his objection, but it was Winfried, always level-headed, who spoke first. “He’s completely right!” he said. “We were trying to take away his life. Everything we said must have sounded like an insult to him. We behaved like crooks. And it won’t be long before others follow us and make a profit out of the Hitler years. I can already see them coming …” And he went on talking so convincingly that everyone agreed with him. The final word was left to my mother: “After this performance you now know that he still has his spirit. The depressions will come again, I’m sure of that. But his spirit, too! We just have to wait!” There was never again talk of a villa in Lichterfelde or anywhere else.

  From my mother I learned that my father—after he had already been appointed a superintendent of schools in 1946—was agonizing over whether he should accept a seat on the Berlin city council, as he was on all sides being urged to do. In the end he decided on a “test run,” as he liked to say, on the Neukölln borough council, and, if his health held up, to stand for the city parliament the following year. At the same time he took on the position of chairman of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation—“in remembrance of my good friends Dr. Meyer, Dr. Goldschmidt, and the Rosenthals,” he once said, adding, “but not forgetting poor Sally Jallowitz.” On his last visit to Karlshorst in early 1943, Jallowitz had rejected my father’s suggestion that he go into hiding: “I’m not so easily killed, dear friend!” Later, with pleasure and great sadness, my father found his name on a memorial plaque in Israel.

  The list of characters I came across by chance in the few weeks of my Berlin stay could be extended indefinitely. One person who should not be absent from it is Peter Schulz, who had started as a law student at the Humboldt University and was a subtenant on the floor above us. He was sharp-witted, cool in a lawyer’s way, and at the same time cynical. When, for obvious reasons under the circumstances, we yet again drew comparisons between the two political systems, he spoke openly of his readiness to “go to the East.”22

  Peter Schulz had great hopes for Communism and held that nothing more than a pretty illusion was being presented of the capitalist West. “They’ve got their experts for that!” he often repeated. The future, at any rate, belonged to the East: “That’s where the sun rises!” In six or eight years at the latest, socialism would be ahead in all respects. “And freedom?” I asked. “That comes after,” he said. Freedom was only a consequence of affluence, not its precondition. Freedom first was “one of the lavatory wall slogans of capitalism.”

  We often spent whole evenings on such questions, and with Peter Schulz I for the first time discovered that stubborn, conventional people frequently utter nothing but commonplaces with respect to everyday life, but as soon as the conversation turns to political questions, they not infrequently express fantastically foolish ideas. In the West, too, it was the dreariest philistines who could be won over by almost any eccentric craziness.

  When I asked him what he would do if things did not turn out the way he anticipated, he made a dismissive gesture. Very simple, he responded. If he remained in West Berlin and the Russians took over the city, they would send him to the mines. “Finished. Lights out!” But if he went over to the East and it was taken over by the West, then at most he would have to attend a “reeducation course,” perhaps two. Then he would come out again as a model democrat. And, after brief reflection, he added, “I’m not indulging in any dirty tricks there. Although I learned them in the Hitler Youth. Understand?”

  “Well,” he asked me shortly afterward when I made my farewell visit, “have I learned my lesson for idiots, in your opinion?” I shook my head. “Only the wrong one!” I retorted. No doubt Peter Schulz successfully worked his way up. But despite some efforts, no one in the family or any friend ever heard of him again after the end of 1948, when he moved to the Soviet Occupation Zone.

  Someone else who belongs in this gallery of brief Berlin acquaintances is Otto Zarek, who had returned to his “once-loved Berlin”—“just to take a look around.”23 He had been a well-known author in the 1920s and now wanted to get to know a young German. He was introduced to me through the good offices of a committee member of the Christian-Jewish society. We met in the restaurant of a French officers’ club, which was reputed to have a kitchen of an international standard. Zarek had brought a promising author with him called William Golding, who would later have a worldwide success with Lord of the Flies and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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  Both were amusing, intelligent, and tireless in their English malice about colleagues, whether they were talking about George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, or Christopher Fry. But more extravagant was Otto Zarek, who evidently took English eccentricity all too literally. He interrupted even the slyest anecdotes with long-winded digressions on the best restaurants in the world, which is, of course, one of the dullest conversational topics in existence. After flight and terror, explained Zarek repeatedly, he now only patronized “select establishments,” and without exception drank renowned Italian white wines or a classic Bordeaux.

  Nevertheless, in the course of the evening I couldn’t get rid of the impression that neither the dishes nor the vintage Bordeaux meant anything to Otto Zarek. To my astonishment he hastily shoveled down each course on the menu as it came and, after a ritual connoisseur’s glance, poured glass after glass of wine down his throat. I thought during this display of gluttony, which William Golding also observed with surprise, that Zarek was unable to enjoy anything anymore. Instead, he only wanted to prove that the years of terror were over. Later on, after he had become Boleslaw Barlog’s dramaturge at the Schiller Theater in Berlin, we became close friends.