Not I (3 page)

In May 1895 the district administrator signed the permit to build on the 150-acre Karlshorst Estate and immediately a kind of competition got under way for the best plots of land. The philanthropic society of Prince zu Fürstenberg proved more than a match for its competitors and appointed my twenty-seven-year-old grandfather
as manager. His task, working with Oscar Gregorovius and the local authorities, was to establish a suburb on the land acquired, to lay down the street plan, to parcel up the plots, and to sell them at reasonable prices. At each stage of expansion a new quarter was added: there were streets named after the nobility, those with Rhineland names, the legend quarter, the Wagner quarter, and so on, step by step.

My grandfather mastered his task with great skill, but soon recognized that beyond the comfortable living quarters which still dominated Karlshorst when I was growing up, the place needed certain centers of attraction. So a hospital and a Protestant and a Catholic church were added, and a little park with a small lake that was laid out on previously marshy terrain soon began attracting strollers from a wide area. With prudent planning, the Treskow racecourse was expanded into a center of social life. In later years—in fact, just after my grandfather’s time—a military school also came to Karlshorst. In the end the “little place of troubles,” as he liked to call it, or the “barren sandy heath,” as it was once described in an official document, which on his arrival had consisted of eight houses or rather farms with fewer than a hundred residents, had more than thirty thousand inhabitants.

In the years when I was consciously aware of him, my grandfather was a withdrawn, imperious, austere man, who, during crowded family gatherings, could silence a room with a single dry remark. On the street he was usually to be seen wearing a frock coat and a bowler and carrying a stick. Even then he had an old-fashioned aura,
which he played up to with stubborn determination. Unlike my three younger siblings, who kept out of his way as much as possible, my elder brother Wolfgang and I enjoyed talking to him, no matter how monosyllabic he often was, because he was an attentive listener, who always knew how to ask questions that led somewhere. One of my sisters later complained that his face was all-too-glum and “the corners of his mouth always drooped so dreadfully.” But even his silences, so Wolfgang and I found, carried weight. His handkerchief was always sprinkled with a couple of drops of eau de cologne. Passersby greeted him respectfully and doffed their hats with a low gesture that reached almost to the knee and often made us laugh. Older people still remembered that Karlshorst was, in part, his creation.

The woman at his side, my grandmother, was graceful and devoted, and was able to talk to each of her grandchildren in a different way, appropriate to their age. Her life had not always been easy and although the many troubles had left their mark on her face, she displayed no sign of unhappiness; instead, she was cheerful and practical. She was happy when she could make herself useful—that feeling made up for all the burdens, I often heard her say. They had five daughters and—to their everlasting sorrow—no son. Two of the daughters had entered a religious order: one worked on a mission station in Africa; the other (given the beautiful name of Sister Alcantara) was assigned by her superiors to a convent in Merano. She was tall and bore herself with the poise of an abbess but seemed oddly fragile. She had what she called “chest
trouble” and contracted in the “chilly convent vaults,” as my mother sometimes complained, a lung infection, from which she died before she was even thirty.

In 1917, during the First World War, the youngest daughter fell ill with diphtheria at the age of fourteen, resulting in complete physical paralysis. My grandparents spent a fortune on distinguished medical specialists and even consulted quacks without ever gaining any relief for her. All day long my aunt Agnes lay on the chaise longue in the dining room and, as she could not move her head, every time someone entered she looked sideways at the door with wide-open eyes, in which there was a reflection of the futile effort of life. In the evening my grandfather had to carry her into her bedroom, casting aside, as I once observed, the pride of an elderly gentleman. If one alluded to her suffering, she would merely respond: “Please! I can manage!”

Dorothea, whom we called Aunt Dolly, was the elegant daughter. She was slim and striking in appearance and, like my mother, had been educated at a boarding school for young ladies in Silesia. Her wardrobe revealed a fondness for bold patterns, which sailed close to the limits of good taste. She usually turned up wearing the very latest hat, a fox fur over her shoulders, its silvered claws glinting in the sun, and discreet gold jewelry around her neck. She was well-spoken and frequently admonished us for talking in a Berlin accent. My father thought that she had acquired an affinity for the big wide world at boarding school in the small town of Liebenthal, whereas my mother left there with poetry and good sense.

Emma Straeter, Joachim Fest’s grandmother, during her years at Valençay

Indeed, my mother, whose name was Elisabeth, but who was called Tetta by the family, was considered the strict one of the sisters. In contrast to her manner, however, which was self-confident and not without a touch of
pride, she had a charming side and an attractive warmth in company. The complexity of her character was also evident in her liking for “gentle music,” to which her poetic tastes corresponded. She liked Eichendorff and Mörike, above all, but also Heinrich Heine, except that when she recited his poems she would leave out the last two lines.
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“He doesn’t stand by his feelings,” she would say. “He’s ashamed of them. When you are older and have the aptitude”—she said, turning to my brother and me—“you must write new endings to Heine’s poems. Then I will at last be able to love him completely.”

There was something to my father’s otherwise quite unfair judgment on Dolly. She wanted to make an entrance. The moment her noisy children were out of the house, my mother sat down at the piano and improvised a little before playing her favorite pieces: Beethoven’s “Für Elise,” some Mozart variation or other, and many Czerny études. Finally, she would sing in a pleasant voice a few songs by Schubert and Schumann, and best of all some pieces by Carl Loewe, such as the one about “Herr Heinrich am Vogelherd” (Sir Heinrich at the fowling floor) or “Die Uhr” (The clock). “Why do you do that?” asked Aunt Dolly, puzzled. “Who benefits from it? Why don’t you organize house concerts with guests?” But Tetta, my mother, would not be won over to anything like that.

Thanks to some family connections, my mother had been invited to balls at the Imperial Stables on a number of occasions and, even at an advanced age, she would talk enthusiastically about the cavaliers in tails and colored sashes who had paid court to her. She also talked of chests covered with military decorations and how a young man might let a monocle drop, significantly and revealingly, from the eye at a coarse joke or in feigned surprise. And then there were the lieutenants, who (as she said, losing herself in her memories) “were indeed dashing—I know how much foolish pink from a girl’s face you can still see in that remark.” She no longer remembered whether the attendants who stood around attentively everywhere, intercepting searching looks, wore
escarpins
with buckles. “But the servants had a matchless way of looking expressionless when one of the cavaliers helped me out of my coat. Beautiful, brilliant, and superficial, like some baroque music,” she said—then, in her turn, without expression, “but gone, gone!” Yet she didn’t mourn those days; because who would mourn a fairy tale once it was over?

For Aunt Dolly, on the other hand, who so relished talk of “higher things,” which she loved for their inimitability, theater and especially music only became significant and affecting in a social context. She came to life in the hum of the gradually filling stalls or to the sound of the instruments tuning up, but she also enjoyed strolling in the lobbies and probably above all seeing the soigné gentlemen who, with a slight inclination, threw her reserved or occasionally brazen glances. She sometimes
mentioned these to the accompaniment of girlish giggles, although she was by then almost thirty. It was then that I began to suspect that between men and women there were mysterious understandings that one would have to find out about later.

Everyone wondered why Aunt Dolly, who was everywhere courted by a certain type of experienced gentleman—the kind who (as my mother liked to say) had “unfortunately been around a bit”—never found a husband. Only much later was the answer discovered: she had for years been enslaved to a great love, which had robbed her of all sense: a married naval officer from Kiel. Around him she constructed an endless theater of dissemblance. Only my parents knew something of it, and after dropping a few hints they made us promise never to breathe a word. Once, when Aunt Dolly took me to the Gloria Palast at Karlshorst Station, where we saw a romantic film with a tragic ending, she began sniffling surreptitiously into her handkerchief, and then wept quietly to herself through the whole screening, sighing ever more deeply. At the exit, with a strained smile on her still-tearful face, she asked me to leave her alone and find my way home without her.

A couple of days later she turned up at Hentigstrasse at an unusual time and chatted away awkwardly. On my arrival she pulled me into the drawing room and apologized for her “faux pas.” When I said there was nothing to apologize for, she retorted that at her age, too, one had to maintain one’s composure and, even more important, have manners. “My weeping was discourteous.”

Proud Aunt Dolly! I thought. To me, a fourteen-year-old, her every word seemed to betray how much she envied my mother. At the end of 1919 my mother had joined the Bleichröder banking house as an assistant and was going to the city center every day. There she got to know people, gained experience, and even climbed a rung up the career ladder. Aunt Dolly, on the other hand, had set limits to her ambitions early on and become a librarian because she had succumbed to the courtship of that damned naval officer, whose future she hoped to share. Tetta, by contrast, was not at all histrionic; reserved by nature, she did not need to make a splash emotionally or socially. She was not a diva, I once heard her say to one of my father’s friends, who had reproached her for not showing her feelings sufficiently, and, for a while, the remark became a favorite saying in the family: “Mama isn’t a diva!” Less than two years after starting at the bank she had got to know my father and (as she liked to say) “taken a girlish fancy to him,” then “fallen a little in love with him,” subsequently “really fallen in love with him,” and married him soon after. All “quite unsurprising,” all quite “normal,” Aunt Dolly would sometimes say, and perhaps even a little boring, but promising so much more happiness than her own life.

On my father’s side the family circumstances were considerably more remote and complex. As far back as the facts can be traced (that is, to the seventeenth century) his ancestors came from the small market town of Liebenau (Lubrza in Polish) in the Neumark of the province of Brandenburg. The parish registers, begun again in 1654
after the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, first mention their names in the 1670s. Most of them had made a living as craftsmen or tradespeople, and in one branch of the family also as brewery owners. Over the generations many of them had held office as “able councillors,” churchwardens, or “village mayors.” The first names common in the family also point to higher pretensions. In each generation there was a Rosina; many of the female ancestors were called Cäcilia or Justina; and my grandfather bore the first names (Latinized in the Baroque style) Robertus Tiburtius. He was an exuberant man full of the joys of life, who, it was once said, “set every dance floor in a state of excitement.” Newly married and driven by the ambition (typical of the time) to settle new land, he had moved to the province of Posen, today called Poznan, and acquired a large farm there. Less than a year after his arrival, although only in his mid-twenties, he had become mayor and was respected by both Germans and Poles. His wife, however, did not get along with Polish conditions, and so, in 1895, the family, by now with seven children in tow, moved back to Liebenau. There my grandfather bought a flour mill close to the village.

He died in the early 1930s, before we got to know him well at all, and so any memories of him remain a tangled mixture of what one was told and what one remembers. Whenever we caught sight of him, he was walking like a shadow through the rooms, leaning silently and ghostlike on his walking stick, commenting in passing on our squabbling with a “Well, well!” He could only be induced to speak at length if my father asked him to recite
word for word one of the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, which he had learned as a child, or, on Sunday evening, to say the lesson from the morning Mass. Then he briefly shut his eyes before beginning: “And Jesus, when he came out, saw many people, and was moved with compassion toward them …” When we arrived in Liebenau for the funeral he was laid out in the yard of his house, a very old, unfamiliar, and seemingly fragile man, who in death had shriveled up.