Not I

by Joachim C. Fest

  It was a life full of privations, which, after a promising beginning, he had chosen in full awareness of the consequences; indeed, it had meant the sacrifice of any kind of future. Of the many heroic speechmakers who take the platform at commemorative ceremonies nowadays, I have often asked myself which of them would have done the same as my father? For compensation, my father had only the knowledge of meeting his own rigorous principles. And if this consideration did not make everything good and sometimes drove my mother, in particular, to despair, it nevertheless provided him with a significant degree of satisfaction.

  My mother, on the other hand, though she held the same views as my father in political matters, had a much more difficult time dealing with day-to-day life. For her, family came before principles; only once did this imperceptibly smoldering difference of opinion burst out into the open. She got nothing but the burdens, caring for the pots, the washboards, and the tiled stove. And all the while, she wanted to get each one of us through those times, alive and at the same time “with decency.” Long after the war we heard her say, with a touch of bitterness, “He had his circles of friends, Hans Hausdorf, Dr. Gans, Dr. Meyer, and many more besides. I had the burden of five children. Not that I’m complaining. But it was a lopsided arrangement. I don’t think I was made for a life like that. But then who is? We paid a high price.”

  At the end of the 1940s something else stood in the way of normality. We were young, enterprising, and, especially after the limitations of the Nazi years, susceptible to intellectual whims of one kind or another. Yet judgment, discernment, and common sense were also demanded of us. Inevitably there was friction as these two sets of demands came into conflict. Yet no one could give a convincing answer to historical questions in the narrow sense, how Hitler and all the havoc he had caused could have come about. It was certain that only a minority had wanted the war or had wanted to settle in Byelorussia and beyond that to the Ural Mountains, and no one had been keen to defend the heights of the Caucasus against Muslim mountain tribes. Nor did the simplistic faith in a Nordic race have more than a tiny number of supporters.

  Altogether it was not abstruse arguments such as these that had brought Hitler to power; the motives deriving from the personal experiences of individuals were much more determining. These included inflation and the world economic crisis, together with the collapse of the middle classes on whom the stability of the state depended. Everyone who had been affected by such troubles feared falling even deeper into the abyss. In addition, there were the ideological conflicts of the body politic and the trend of the time to totalitarian or at least dictatorial systems—especially when a master of moods and demagoguery like Hitler was staging his oratory so attractively and powerfully. Consequently, broad but fickle sections of the population, who were essentially well disposed to the republic, believed themselves to be threatened by radicals of the right and left; they increasingly surrendered to the idea that nothing less than the spirit of the age was against them. With Hegel in one’s intellectual baggage one was even more susceptible to such thinking.1

  The author in 1946 as a prisoner of war, drawn by Alfred Sternmann

  Nevertheless, the question still being asked is how these ideas were capable of driving such an old and civilized nation out of its mind. How was it possible that the leaders of the National Socialist movement were able to overcome the constitutional safeguards with so little resistance? And, furthermore, how was so much disregard of the law possible in an order-loving country? I once heard my father say that the Germans were no longer German: “They have lost their passion for introspection and discovered their taste for the primitive. Their model is no longer—as it once was—the reflective scholar type of the nineteenth century. He prevailed for a long time. Today, however, it is the tribal warrior, dancing around a stake and showing his chief a painted grimace. So much for the nation of Goethe!”

  The most obvious explanation for the success of National Socialism was that—like all groups ready to use force and then endowed with funds—it attracted opportunists. That is attested to by the mass defections of spring 1933, when hundreds of thousands went over to the Nazi Party after the seizure of power, as well as by the almost instantaneous and complete disappearance of the party in 1945. No one wanted to admit to having supported a lost cause. For years people had ignored the atrocities of the regime and fawned on those in power: senior civil servants, employers, generals, and the rest. Each person soothed his conscience in his own way. The conduct of the actress Adele Sandrock will always represent the exception. At “afternoon tea for ladies” at the Reich Chancellery, when Hitler burst out with invective against the Jews, she supposedly interrupted him: “My Führer! In my presence not a word against the Jews, please! All my life they have been my best lovers!” But perhaps that was only an anecdote passed on in a whisper. Then one put the party badge in one’s buttonhole and went to cheer along with the rest. Then there followed, after 1945, the Great Denial.

  The attitude in the early years after the war was later described as a “communicative silence,” which was not simply a form of repression. Disillusionment, shame, and defiance combined to form an opaque refusal of guilt. In addition there was a tendency to belatedly construct heroes. Some invented acts of resistance; others (as part of the game of contrition) sought out a prominent place on the bench of the self-accusers. But in all their lamentation, they were very ready to defame anyone who didn’t do as they did and constantly beat their sinful breasts. When Günter Grass or any of the other countless self-accusers pointed to their own feelings of shame, they were not referring to any guilt on their own part—they felt themselves to be beyond reproach—but to the many reasons which everyone else had to be ashamed. However, the mass of the population, so they said, was not prepared to acknowledge their shame.2

  Seen as a whole, what I had experienced was the collapse of the bourgeois world. Its end was already foreseeable before Hitler came on the scene. Solely individual characters survived the years of his rule with integrity—no classes, groups, or ideologies. Too many forces in society had contributed to the destruction of this world, the political right just as much as the left, art, literature, the youth movement, among others. Basically, Hitler had merely swept away the remaining ruins. He was a revolutionary. But because he was capable of hiding behind a bourgeois mask, he destroyed the hollow facade of the bourgeoisie with the help of the bourgeoisie itself: the desire to put an end to it all was overpowering.

  Of the twelve families at 13 Hentigstrasse, only one tenant was a member of the Nazi Party. As far as I know, it was not much different in the neighboring buildings. If asked, each person living in our building would have passionately defended middle-class and civil virtues. Yet, inwardly, this stratum of society had decayed long before, so that I was essentially brought up in accordance with the principles of an outmoded order. Its rules and traditions right down to its poetic canon were passed on to me. It kept me at a distance from the times to some extent; simultaneously, it put some solid ground under my feet, which helped to sustain me in the years that followed.

  As is evident in retrospect, each member of our family had his or her own distinctive way of coping with the challenges of the age and, taken all together, we were a reflection of the various possibilities of evasion in the face of the regime. My father’s stubbornness was coupled with a contempt that never diminished and allowed of no compromise. My mother’s opposition derived from her quite different set of values, impregnated by religion, which she was able to bring into play with often surprising skill. Wolfgang was able to checkmate every difficulty with his wit and charm. I drew attention to myself with acts of impudence that my parents observed with some concern, but which also had a political aspect. Winfried had his level-headed introversion. My sisters faced life each in her own way, in part quietly, in part defiantly, and had no problems either with the world or with regarding it ironically. We sometimes defined the behavior of friends in accordance with this family catalo
gue of types. Everyone in our close circle of friends had their own way of getting through the times halfway undamaged.

  Also among those things that survived the Nazi Reich, despite the heavy losses, was for a few years a link between Germans and Jews. In the Berlin of the first years after the war I still encountered brilliant, educated, and charming witnesses to this past, and I regard it as one of the strokes of luck of my life that during the 1950s I experienced a brief revival of this world in the home of the respected doctor Walther Hirsch. He had been born around the turn of the century and in his Grunewald villa he tried to conjure up once more the luster of the 1920s and to revive the memory of the vanished days of his youth. At the soirees which he held at his home every couple of weeks I got to know Fritz Kortner and Joachim Prinz, Wolfgang Lukschy, Hans Scholz, and Sebastian Haffner, as well as Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, Melvin Lasky, and the painter Heinrich Heuser, and many more.

  Long after midnight, when most of the sixty or so guests had taken their leave, a circle of about a dozen remained behind, and each time three of them were called on to enter a kind of competition for the best story of the night. Anyone who was present will remember tales that were developed in masterly fashion and brilliantly told, and often the winner was the host himself or the writer Hans Scholz, whose great success was yet to come. I still regret that these tales were never recorded and collected. They are gone and lost forever, like the German-Jewish community.

  Many voices—most prominently that of Gershom Scholem—have argued that the much-discussed German–Jewish symbiosis never existed. That is very understandable as a response to injustice stretching over generations, and above all to the horrors of the Hitler years. But as a conclusion it remains inaccurate. The relationship between Germans and Jews was always deeper and more profound than, for example, that between Jews and the French or Jews and the English or the Scandinavians.

  The sense of fellowship was based above all on three things. There was first of all a delight in speculation, imaginatively taking an idea as far as it will go, even into entirely new realms of thought. Further, there was an inclination toward complicated structures of ideas, which possibly have a theological aspect and, ultimately, a utopian goal, because world and man are unceasingly searching for salvation. And, finally, there should be mentioned an obsessive love of music to the extent that it becomes almost a metaphysical background, as did German music, notably from Beethoven to Richard Wagner. This common interest can be found in the relationship between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal or Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, and in many outstanding conductors from Otto Klemperer to Leonard Bernstein. So, perhaps the Germans’ hatred of the Jews and the genocide may be interpreted as a kind of fratricide, even if one remains aware of how debatable as such an assertion is.

  Such affinities were mostly destroyed by the Holocaust, and Walther Hirsch’s moving attempt to resurrect them in his house could not last longer than the lifetimes of those involved. Today the relationship between Germans and Jews is atrophied and largely trivialized. There are no great communities of interest anymore, no visible results. Among my notes I found some record of conversations with Dr. Meyer just before I went to Freiburg. They sound like an anticipated epitaph. “We have no future,” he once responded to a remark by me about how things would go on. “With our end the world ends. All of us here are appearing in a tragedy. But it has no fifth act. There is no continuation. Our book of life suddenly breaks off. Someone has simply torn out the last page.”

  The shattered country to which I returned in 1947 was not so much a world of restriction and lack of freedom of movement, as it is often viewed today. There was, in fact, plenty of free space to be found. Efforts at restoration by leading figures and various governments—for which they are criticized even today—were helpless attempts to find a way back to certain rules without which life as a society is impossible.

  Intellectually, too, these were years without rules. We took the freedoms that were available for granted. It was, in fact, this temptation that stopped me from returning to Berlin immediately and beginning my studies at the Humboldt University, because I could not imagine that in the eastern sector of the city there would be the same freedom as in Freiburg.3 There, in addition to my studies, I continued to read about the Italian Renaissance and to extend my knowledge of the fall of the Roman Empire. I read everything I could find by Thomas Mann, picked up all the American literature I could get hold of—from John Steinbeck to William Faulkner—as well as the more recent French writers from Raymond Aron to Emmanuel Mounier; and I went to the theater whenever I could. Among the productions that have stood the test of time are Sartre’s Les Mouches, Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning, and Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. Then I came across Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler and Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt and was deeply impressed.

  Toward the end of my period of study I got to know Eckart Peterich, who was very amused to discover that he had once influenced my notion of the ideal profession.4 With him was his daughter, charmingly nicknamed “Coccolo,” and both of them invited me to their grand house high above Florence on the “other side” of the Arno. The two weeks that I spent reading and writing in the topmost tower room of the villa once again made the profession of “private scholar” a tempting one, even more so when we drove out to the country seat of the Peterichs in the middle of a pine forest in the then still rural Forte dei Marmi. Here I got to know, for the first time, the daily routine of a scholar living in sophisticated and affluent circumstances: in a Mediterranean landscape, occupied with studies by day and entertaining friends in the evening, sitting at well-spread tables late into the night.

  The country home welcomed guests from all over the world. I met Ernst Jünger and Aldous Huxley, Hilde Spiel and Peter de Mendelssohn, Luigi Barzini, Indro Montanelli, and Elio Vittorini. Arthur Koestler dropped by one day with an excitingly good-looking woman, and among the guests for the month was a retired British general who told stories about India and other places full of adventure, but preferred to spend the evenings by the fire, saying nothing. It was striking that in these cosmopolitan surroundings no one treated me as a member of a nation that had fallen into disrepute. All those present felt themselves to be Europeans or at least saw themselves as part of a European-American cultural context.

  The successful French writer André Germain, who lived in a palazzo in Florence, called several times; his young, homosexual secretary had just run away; but what particularly incensed Monsieur Germain was the fact that he (the secretary) had persuaded the wife of the British consul general in Florence, of all people, to take off with him. At that time Monsieur Germain was, rather bizarrely, working simultaneously on a biography of Lucrezia Borgia and another on Benito Mussolini. Years later I found the latter in the library of Gaston Gallimard, when I myself had become a Gallimard author. I assisted André Germain as a secretary for a while and during that time wrote about two dozen short stories, which an agency sold to a number of small newspapers for me, and for which I received about ten marks each. In addition, I took extensive notes on the age of the Borgias.

  Italy—at least in the part I got to know—had everything that Germany (for me) lacked: warmth, lightness, naive animality, and theatrical sparkle. And, like my father, I experienced the country as an overwhelming antipode. It did not have the fadedness, the delicate patina of the day before yesterday which I had so often found striking on trips to France. After two months in Forte dei Marmi I felt as if I were at home and at the same time far from the world. For how long, I asked myself, could both be combined? When I couldn’t find an answer I felt an ever greater desire to return to Germany.

  In early 1950, soon after my return, I began to address more precise topics. The first essay that I offered Northwest German Radio, and which was also in memory of the “Romantic” Reinhold Buck, had the somewhat high-flown title “German Romanticism in the Twilight of Contemporary Experience.”5 I’ve forgotten
the topics and titles of my subsequent reflections, but I remember that despite my considerable reluctance, the Hitler years found their way into almost every manuscript. Gradually, the American broadcasting station RIAS6 became the focus of my early journalistic efforts. I saw my future preferably as a publisher or as the author of reflections on the reciprocity between the events of the day and the “spirit of the age.”

  At the same time I was writing my doctoral thesis at the Free University of Berlin, which was just establishing itself. It investigated within a legal context the influence of advertisers on the daily press. The thesis was almost complete and a date set—some considerable time in the future, due to overcrowding in the new institution—for the oral examination, when I received an offer from the RIAS. After a long conversation with my father, who advised me to finish my thesis first, I turned it down, but shortly afterward I received an even better offer. This time I accepted. Soon after taking up my post, the deputy director, Mr. Bloomfield, whom I had already met privately once or twice, asked me to his office and suggested, among other things, that I edit or, preferably, write a series of broadcasts on German history. The idea was to treat the period from the dismissal of Bismarck in 1890 up to the year 1945 in a number of increasingly detailed individual essays elaborating the reasons for the disaster. To be taken into consideration was that listeners in the Soviet Zone of occupation were getting a completely distorted picture of the German past.

  A lengthy discussion ensued, in the course of which I argued against the proposal to the best of my ability. Something like that was better placed in the hands of a professional editor, I objected. At Freiburg University I had attended several lectures by Gerhard Ritter, Hans Herzfeld, Gerd Tellenbach, and other well-known historians, but I had avoided contemporary history as much as possible. I had never been sufficiently interested in it. Consequently, for both professional and personal reasons, I did not feel myself qualified to produce a series of programs on the period proposed.