Mr. Bloomfield remained adamant; I even had the impression that it was my very objections that lent force to his insistence. But for myself, I kept on thinking—on top of everything else—of a conversation I had recently had with my father about a commentary I had written on the 1932 German presidential election. He had praised the piece for its formal aspect, but objected that my “high style” was inappropriate when writing about the “Nazi gang.” Then came the words I have never forgotten. Hitler and his rule was no subject for a serious historian, he said. It was nothing more than a “gutter subject.” Hitler’s supporters came from the gutter and that’s where they belonged. Historians like myself were giving them a historical dignity to which they were not entitled.
My father’s view, I argued, betrayed an old-fashioned and much too exalted conception of history. Nobody was ennobled by being in a history book. History simply recorded the course of events. Historians wrote about series of events, men of violence, ham actors, and murderers, just as they did about saints. But my father had experienced and suffered the Hitler years, so his objections were understandable. The younger generation, on the other hand, wanted to know how those years had come about.
My father remained unimpressed, and I began to understand just how much he continued to feel the injustice of those times, when the best years of his life had been stolen from him. I had wanted to study Colleoni, the Gonzagas, and Lorenzo the Magnificent, and now I had exchanged them for the inferior riffraff of Ley, Streicher, or Sauckel—they did not deserve any “literary enhancement,” he insisted toward the end of our conversation.7 He was quite able to see the tensions which followed from his position, but it was impossible to escape from this dilemma. I should therefore return to my old preference, the Italian Renaissance. I told him that I had mentioned that preference to Mr. Bloomfield but he indicated that after the Hitler debacle airtime for such remote topics might become available at best ten years from now.
When I called on Mr. Bloomfield again, he turned out to be as obdurate as my father had been, whom he wanted to meet after hearing my report. In the end he asked me to “simply get started” working on the series. If that did not, in the long run, agree with me it would not be hard to find some other kind of project in addition to the ones I was responsible for now. To put an end to the pointless quarrel I excused myself and, practically out the door, said to him: “All right, so be it! I should be able to crank out a dozen manuscripts about German history.” Mr. Bloomfield stopped with surprise and called me back to his desk. He said: “I am afraid we have misunderstood each other. I did not mean a dozen shows; I was thinking more like eighty. At any rate, I am planning on a program of some length.” So we were at loggerheads once again and I replied to him, “You are turning this awful contemporary history into a lifetime occupation for me!” But in the end I agreed to give it a try. It turns out Mr. Bloomfield was more prescient than I was. “It will be more than a try,” he said, standing at the door to his office. And that’s how I got into contemporary history.
I stayed with contemporary history for many years, but always with a touch of bad conscience, because I could never get the words “gutter subject” out of my head. I still preferred the Renaissance, and read whatever I could in my free time, including Charles de Brosses’s Secret Letters from Italy, Landucci’s A Florentine Diary from 1450 to 1516, and the Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois. Some of it I eventually forgot, but the Italian Renaissance remains my subject of choice.
In the early 1960s my father died. On the day before his death I spent several hours by his bedside in the hospital, and we talked in broad terms about his times and his life. Some of what was said has found its way into these memoirs, such as his reasons for showing Wolfgang and me the burnt-out Reichstag in 1933. Smiling, he recalled throwing the Hitler Youth leaders out of the house and his letter protesting his being drafted to build antitank fortifications. Reviewing those years, he managed one of his characteristic plays on words which Wolfgang had called “parsing syllables.” “Ich habe,” he said, “im Leben viele Fehler gemacht. Aber nichts falsch.” I have, he said, made many mistakes in life. But I have never done wrong.
Part of our time we spent talking about the whereabouts of old friends and those we had lost in the turmoil of war. He quoted an old French popular ballad, “Que sont devenus mes amis?” which he had learned from the Straeter family. This led us on to Karlshorst and I told him that with Mother’s help and despite all the mishaps, he had made our youthful years happy ones. Then he said, as he was fading away into some state of half-awareness: “Please, tell me a story! Any story!” And some parable about life came to me, a mix constructed of things read and invented. It was probably pointless to base the narrative loosely on the Odyssey, but I thought he, being a Prussian Bildungsbürger, might find that pleasing.
Much abbreviated, the story went as follows. When man first stepped onto this earth he had to get to know the garden, the animals, and the bushes—just as we did back then in the Hentigstrasse. Once he had become reasonably familiar with all, he might do well to explore the city near and far, as we did when driving to Unter den Linden, to Potsdam, and to the Stechlinsee. At some point he will find himself a wife, start a family, and sally forth into the world where many challenges await, perhaps even a war, albeit not like the one Hitler had started so willfully. On that and other similar occasions he will encounter a lot of useless things and even lose his way. I continued, increasingly leaning on the Odyssey: At some point everyone has to deal with a modern version of Polyphemus—the world was still filled with monsters, taking on technological or hierarchical shapes nowadays. Later it would behoove one not to submit to a magical Circe, to pass through Scylla and Charybdis and whatever else one might encounter, not to forget the graceful and barely resistible Nausicaä and her tears. And once one returned to one’s home, some stranger or other is occupying it, strutting about, and when they have finally been removed—then what? What was there to add? Then ennui awaits. Nor is there an end to travail—that much, at least, I had grasped. It seemed as if my father, lying below me on his pillow, slightly tilted his head. It even seemed to me as if he smiled one more time.
My professional life continued. First at RIAS, mainly as editor and producer for contemporary history; also a brief, happy time as a kind of impresario of the RIAS Youth Orchestra under Willy Hannuschke at the Brussels Expo of 1958; then from 1961 in charge of TV plays at North German Broadcasting and, a little later, as its editor in chief. That was when my first book, Das Gesicht des Dritten Reiches (1963), was published, which collected some twenty portraits from the contemporary history series Mr. Bloomfield had talked me into doing years before. The publication was a success, translated into many languages, and I was asked if I would undertake a biography of Hitler. Naturally, my father’s phrase about “gutter subject” came to mind yet again; against that, however, there was his maxim that one should never submit to the opinion of others. As the pressure of the political parties on the broadcasting stations increased and became almost unbearable for me, I resigned from my broadcasting post to write the Hitler book. What also persuaded me was that I would at last fulfill the dream I had had as a fourteen-year-old to live and work as an independent scholar—as I had written home in November 1941.
My mother was very worried by my departure from North German Broadcasting. She saw her own fate about to be repeated. She said, “I do not like repetitions,” or, more accurately, she added, she only liked repetition in music, as well as in lyric poetry and—sometimes—on the faces of children. Anywhere else they were an indication that things were about to go wrong. “On the subject of Hitler that is almost inevitable,” she said. “You will always antagonize one side or the other.” All my friends, when asked, advised me not to take the risk and said I was reckless, but I stuck to my guns, and, as a compensation for the book on the Renaissance which I had now finally abandoned, I went to Italy, as I would from that time on almost every year.
Germany was
almost suffocating in its limitations, but whenever I visited Italy it was as if many doors were opening. Sometimes it seemed to me I was meeting the world and the people of the Renaissance in the present, albeit reduced in their dimensions. Wherever I went south of Lake Garda, I had the impression I was revisiting the “lost paradise” of my childhood years, an overwhelming combination of natural and architectural beauty. It was also a land of sharply etched profiles and entertaining stories. I simply must talk about one of these encounters. One of the first acquaintances I made in Italy was Conte F., from a tiny town near Florence that time had passed by. The tales with which he entertained his friends were a vivid reflection of a multicolored world, despite its distance from the present.
The Conte was a stocky man who turned visibly grayer every time we met, brimming with the solid energy found in many Italian nonurban nobles. He also possessed a defining kind of charm which I likened to that of a condottiere who had been civilized over the course of many generations. But that comparison was met by a short, bellowing laugh and the comment that rheumatism, thick glasses, and an incipient paunch prevented any jumping onto coursers: “Just ask my sons!”
They were called Fabrizio and Camillo. Fabrizio was correct to a fault, pedantic, and had a tendency to be rather stern with himself, while Camillo lived only for dolce far niente and would at most act the eccentric Englishman. When I first met the Conte, people talked about the latest of Camillo’s scandals. He had invited two of the local worthies to dine with him and a surprise guest in the private room of a local club; when they arrived they found that guest to be a totally naked woman, stretched out on a sofa next to Camillo. As one might expect, he met an unhappy end a few years later, while Fabrizio rose to become a director of a reputable bank. Whenever these names came up I was reminded of Eichendorff’s poem about the two “brave lads” or the friends Charles and Sebastian in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. I also thought of the two Buddenbrook sons. One of them, Thomas, spends his time abroad acquiring an education and brings home his future bride, while the other, Christian, can only tell stories about Johnny Thunderstorm and sing “That’s Maria!”
I was so deeply caught up in my notion of Italy that back then I believed that the Florentine tale of Conte F.’s family was simply a continuation of the Renaissance story, while the English novel or the German tales were mere literature that made visible every calculated thought in every line. It seems to me one could base an entire research project in intellectual history on this observation, and once again I regretted that I had to busy myself with Munich’s bohemian circles and Hitler’s march to the Feldherrnhalle in 1923. For at the time the Conte told me about his two sons, my intellectual game playing had already ended. The decision had been made some time ago.
Around this time my mother asked me to write down her recollections of the Nazi years. She indicated her willingness to help me record them. When I mentioned that Father did not want anything written down about those years, she replied it was only he who refused to record his experiences. Our conversation lasted all evening. Once or twice it seemed to me that she regarded her life as a failure. I suggested that she had borne a greater burden than my father, but she firmly denied it. “It was his decision,” she said, “his responsibility.” She had borne nothing but the external burdens, whereas his life had been destroyed. Did one suffer more at the hearth, she asked, or from the utter lack of prospects imposed on one’s life? That depends on how one looks at it, I said. Her life, too, had been ruined. She replied that she had never seen it like that and did not want to do so, either. “Ruined” was in any case the wrong word. Only her girlish dreams had been smashed. But where were they ever fulfilled anyway? No matter how much she tried to downplay her own role, I could tell that she was very far from having come to terms with the Hitler period, even if it had been long ago by then.
When Winfried also refused to record his memories, my mother chose to say nothing more about the Hitler period. She remained stubbornly silent, as if she had erased it from her memory as a final sacrifice. However, when she read a draft chapter of my Hitler book, she was moved to observe that, from a distance, world events seem rather grand, whereas if one looks at the fates of individuals, one discovers a great deal of shabbiness, powerlessness, and misery. But once again, she refused to talk about her own feelings.
Some time later she fell ill. When I visited her in the hospital for the last time, a few days before her death, she had begun to lose consciousness with increasing frequency. She talked unceasingly and ever more quickly. With every word that could be understood the misfortune of her life burst out of her. It was the first time I heard her quarrel with fate. She spoke about the never-ending worry, the constant shortages and making do, the informers everywhere, and, above all, how much she suffered losing a son in Hitler’s war. From time to time she returned to the world from her confusion, became aware of me, and managed a sign of acknowledgment by raising her hand from the blanket. After that she fell into a semiconscious state and damned the world and her botched life. I had never heard her curse before, but now it seemed to me she was making up for it—for all those years of repressed bitterness. I took her hand, but she hardly noticed and went on cursing. It lasted for hours. When it had already grown dark, she managed some coherent words. Once she said, with lengthy pauses, “The days are no longer lost … God knows they’re not! … They count again … Each one is another twenty-four hours less! … That’s what I always tell myself! … That is my comfort.”
Two days later nothing was left of the rebelliousness which had haunted her semiconscious state only hours earlier, and she passed away in her sleep. After her childhood and the happy early years of marriage, my mother had increasingly begun to realize that evil exists. It was easily visible in the simple images which constituted her world. It was embodied in drunkards, swindlers, murderers, and Nazis. Even long after the end of the Third Reich she said that one always had to be on one’s guard against evil. Because evil is extremely imaginative. Life had taught her that. It liked to present itself in a humane guise, as a lover or benefactor, a flatterer, and even as a kind of god. Masses of people fell for it.
In a conversation we had a few months before her death, she said that the preferred guise of evil in her time had been the slogans, demonstrations, and festivities of the Nazis and the Communists. When I was young she had always been the one to contradict my father’s gloomy view of things, and her plea “Stop being so apocalyptic!” had become almost proverbial in the family. But looking back she had to say that he was right. She still could not understand why so few had seen the naked evil around them: the obscenity of political uniforms, the sheer loathsomeness. Dr. Gans had always said that at the end of time reason would prevail, but she did not believe it. Rather, she was certain that evil would triumph. It required no justification, because people loved it. She had belonged to the wrong generation, she said, and she hoped we would have better luck. That was more or less all that life had taught her. When Winfried and I left her apartment in Zehlendorf, he said that her words were a simple and, in fact, conclusive judgment on the world of political daydreams.
If I remember rightly, it was after this visit and on some other occasions that we discussed the formative influence of our parents and our home. I talked about the many attacks I had come under for not conforming to the left-wing mood of the time, and, laughing, we quoted the nonsense then making the rounds about me. In our youth, Winfried explained, we had been taught a kind of pride in stepping out of line—and that was something none of these “grown-up Hitler Youth kids” realized or understood. Whenever I was asked about my guiding principles, I would always refer to my skepticism and even to a distaste for the spirit of the age and its fellow travelers. I had never doubted my father’s ego non, to which he had introduced us on that unforgettable day when he instituted our “second supper.” The lesson of the Nazi years for me was to resist current opinion. Hence I was never seriously tempted by Communism, unlike m
any respected contemporaries, who succumbed at least for a while. Several friends from my youth remained in East Germany, and in the years that followed it became evident that the Communist regime there was often more successful at persecuting its citizens and more impenetrable in its bureaucracy than the Nazis, and that it would not have tolerated the survival of such a halfway happy family home as ours had been. At any rate, we never had the feeling as children that we were growing up in a world without a future, unlike some of my schoolmates who lived in the German Democratic Republic. Yet Communism has largely succeeded in not being equated with National Socialism in the long run. That is surely its greatest propaganda victory.
If I look back at the key experiences of my youth, both my background and my education taught me political skepticism. At the time it was mainly directed against the prevailing ideological assumptions. Similarly, I have never understood why the rebels of 1968 and other politically confused and morally self-important young people longed to explain the world from a single point of view. The blindness and horrors of such ideas had only recently been patently manifested in our own country. And as for those older radicals, who suddenly wore jeans and long hair in carefully coiffed disarray—I never found words for them and never wanted to.
For those who could read the signs of the times, the wrongheadedness of all the fashionable nonsense of the age was always evident. Already in the 1930s Communism—and then in its train Nazism—should have caused every unprejudiced observer to take up a position of fundamental opposition toward them. The inhumanity of both ideologies, arising from their formulaic explanations of the world, was all too clear. There were many, however, who could not resist the temptation of making their dreams a reality. Even today, plenty of people remain sentimentally attached to some “ism” or other which has long since failed dismally. Against such nonsense, the much more intelligent words of Henry David Thoreau have always impressed me. “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good,” he said, “I should run for my life.”
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