Not I (31 page)

4
Many Jews and opponents of the regime who could not flee in time despaired of their situation and committed suicide.

5
The Nazi propaganda ministry tightly controlled all the media of the time and listening to foreign broadcasts was difficult and illegal. Regular programs of the BBC and some Swiss stations were the only sources of outside information for many Germans.

6
This description as well as the later reference to Dr. Kiefer’s corpulence may owe as much to a famous poster as it does to reality. Everyone in Fest’s generation had seen or owned the likeness of Aristide Bruant as depicted by Toulouse-Lautrec in precisely these colors and pose.

7
The Schlegel-Tieck translation (completed by Tieck’s daughter Dorothea and Count Baudissin) of Shakespeare into German is so successful and faithful a rendition that it has made the English dramatist a virtual German author. August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767–1845) and his brother Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829) were also the foremost theoreticians of German and European Romanticism; their writings have become the basis for most of modern literary criticism. Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) was a major Romantic author with numerous novels, stories, and dramas to his credit; he was instrumental in preserving and editing early chapbooks and medieval texts virtually unknown until then.

8
Like all European languages other than English, German has polite and familiar forms of address, which are used according to the degree of social familiarity or distance between the speaker and the person spoken to; the use of the formal mode indicates respect and was therefore used in the past not only for persons of higher social status but also for one’s elders and parents, as it still is in France in some families.

9
Josef Weinheber (1892–1945), Austrian novelist and poet who wrote traditional hymns, odes, and sonnets, but also tried to capture the cadences of common folk; seen as close to the Nazis and thus politically controversial, he appears to have committed suicide in 1945 (no one is quite sure—he died at the very end of the war, when many Nazi fellow travelers killed themselves). Aware of this undesirable legacy, Fest wants to distance himself from the man while maintaining his admiration for his work and its influence on him as a young reader.

10
Wittenbrink is using the typical code of the time—his reference to the Inquisition is intended to draw out the visitors to declare their political views; since they refuse to do so, he immediately changes the subject.

11
Of the five Berlin Caravaggios, three appear to have been destroyed in a fire at the end of the Second World War.—Trans.

12
Because of the air raids most museums kept only a small number of works on display; the rest were safely stored off location, sometimes in abandoned mines, where they were found after 1945.

13
Both Büchner and Hauptmann were socially critical writers who attacked the ills of their own time and often drew the ire of the establishment. Georg Büchner (1813–37) published political pamphlets and wrote powerful dramas and a major prose fragment; his works only came to be appreciated after 1918. One of the most prestigious German literary prizes bears his name. Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946) is Germany’s main representative of Naturalism. His social criticism was presented in both tragedy and comedy; although primarily a dramatist, he also wrote novels and other narratives, receiving the Nobel Prize in 1912.

14
Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was an exceptionally influential writer; his philosophy of history essentially views the major cultures as organisms with distinctive lifestyles which can best be captured by a world-historical morphology.

15
A German army radio station based in Belgrade.—Trans.

16
In peacetime this would have been the expected progress of the average young German male: Hitler Youth to Reich Labor Service to Armed Services, learning to operate in coordinated units with people of all walks of life. The Nazis, quite intentionally, did a lot to tear down social barriers.

EIGHT
•

Of the Soldier’s Life and of Dying

At the beginning of April 1944 my father received an official letter. It came from a party office and informed him that on the nineteenth of the month he had to present himself at the Karlshorst racetrack. He had been assigned to a unit building tank obstacles. He had promptly replied that it was no doubt known to the responsible department that in accordance with Paragraph 4 of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service he had been dismissed on April 7, 1933. Consequently, in accordance with the graded catalogue of measures of the law, he was required to avoid every activity. As he knew that the administration attached great importance to the proper application of its decrees, his call-up must be an error. He awaited an appropriate notification “as soon as possible.”

The letter was pure mockery. This time, however, even my mother was in agreement. Nevertheless, years later, whenever the conversation turned to these events, her mouth still began to tremble. But the demand to defend Hitler’s Reich, which had brought her nothing but “troubles” to the lives of three members of her family, was going too far. And in taking this risk she had, as she later liked to say, “the luck of the bold.” The protecting hand, which we suspected was being held over many of my father’s rash and angry actions, spared him once more.

It was during these anxious days that I arrived in Neustift, more than three thousand feet up, at the end of the Stubaital Valley, with Innsbruck and the glittering Nordwand peak in the background. A camp with huts had been put up in a wood behind some farms. On the night before Easter one of the farms burned to the ground; at three in the morning when the firefighting, to which our unit had hurriedly been detailed, was over, I walked with my friend Franz Franken, whom I had met in the camp again, through the brightening dawn down the valley to Innsbruck. Perhaps it had something to do with the unique charm of the landscape that I soon hated everything to do with the labor service: the crumpled overalls we had to wear in which our so-called foremen drove us into the dirt right after the clothing issue; the army bread with the disgusting margarine; the “spade care,” as it was called, in which we polished away at the shiny surfaces; and the ridiculous shouted commands of “Shoulder spade!,” “Order spade!,” or “Spade—present!”
Furthermore, at this late point in the war there was nothing useful to do anymore—no dike building, no draining of swamps, no road construction—so that the never-ending drill was as much a makeshift solution as the singing of the same old songs that hadn’t changed for years about Geyer’s black troop and the tents beyond the valley. One got the impression that the leaders and subordinate leaders of the Reichsarbeitsdienst were all failed career officers who suffered from a profound inferiority complex.
¹

After a few weeks the unit was transferred from the high valley near Innsbruck to Hohenems in Vorarlberg, and one of the commanders explained that we were now moving closer to the front that would soon no doubt open up in the West. What we actually saw at the end of April—across Lake Constance—was the destruction of Friedrichshafen, which had been spared in our time there, in a nighttime firestorm. We thought of our younger classmates, whom we had left behind in the town. With the first post I received a letter from my mother, which told me that my father had been called up to the army. Quite without the caution which she usually displayed, she added that with the help of the Wehrmacht someone had evidently wanted to save him from the clutches of a “higher authority.” Because at almost sixty no one is ordered up to “active service,” as
it’s called, but at most to the Volkssturm.
²
“But then, what applies to us?”

My mother had included with her lines a school report by Dr. Hermann or one of his underlings. “Father read it before he left,” she wrote, “but he thought you should see it, too.” It had been written by one of the officials at the boarding school in preparation for my departure from school. Like so many things it was lost in the confusion of the end of the war, so I can no longer recapture its tone of ecclesiastical bureaucracy. But the sentences struck me like blows, from which even the cutting marginal comments of my father could not protect me. This is more or less what was written there:

Joachim F. shows no intellectual interest and only turns his attention to subjects he finds easy. He does not like to work hard. His religious attachment leaves something to be desired. He is hard to deal with. He shows a precocious liking for naked women, which he hides behind a taste for Italian painting. He displays a noticeable devotion to cheap popular literature; in the course of an inspection of his work desk shortly before he left, works by Beumelburg and Wiechert were found. That a volume of Schiller’s plays was lying beside them does not make the find any better, since dramatic literature
demands much less effort than philosophical pieces. He is taciturn. All attempts by the rectorate to draw him into discussion were in vain. It is not impossible that J. will still find the right path. We wish it for him—and for you.

My father had put a note with the report. On it was written, in contrast to his usual strict manner:
So that you have something to laugh at in these serious times
. He had underlined the phrase about my lack of intellectual interest and written in the margin:
I don’t understand. Dr. Hermann and the others in charge of the house seemed sensible people when I met them last year
. My mother, for her part, had noted:
Wolfgang got an outstanding report when he left. You’re not so dissimilar! What does he do that’s different?
I wrote back:
Here at the Reich Labor Service I’m constantly being reproached by my superiors, because I spend almost every free minute reading. A couple of days ago, after some clumsiness while putting up a tent, one called me “an educated idiot.” What does one learn from that? School reports are
Seich (
rubbish
)
³
,
as they say in Alemannic dialect
.

At the beginning of July 1944 my time with the labor service came to an end. I was drafted into an air force unit in Landau an der Isar. Chance had it that I made a friend on the first day. Reinhold Buck from Radolfzell was quite brilliant, with a temperament that swung between severity, delight, and the demonic. The hours he
spent over scores and notebooks were proof of the effort it cost him to come to rest. He wanted to be a conductor and was obsessed by music. So it was inevitable that even as we were making up our beds we got around to themes and composers who had for a long time been his passion as well as mine. A little later, as the whistles were blown for first roll call, we stood next to one another and missed one command or another, because we were talking about Beethoven’s piano sonatas. The lieutenant who was inspecting the ranks and had picked up a couple of fragments of our conversation asked Reinhold in which major key Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was composed and received the answer: “In none. It was composed in D minor. And, if I may add, the opus number is 125.” The officer was pleasantly surprised. “But
you
don’t have a clue about anything?” he said, turning to me. “I do,” I contradicted him in an unmilitary manner. “But more about literature.” The lieutenant thought for a moment. “Then tell me off the top of your head the last line of ‘The Erl-King.’ ” Without hesitation I answered, “
In seinen Armen das Kind war tot
” (In his arms the child was dead). From that day on he called us “the professors” when he ordered us to fetch coffee or clean the latrines.

After duty, which here, too, consisted of mindless infantry training, we became engrossed, evening after evening, in our passion for debate. We got excited about Mozart and his taste for
alla turca
, inspired by the Turkish Wars and the contemporary fashion for coffee-drinking in the late seventeenth century. I talked about the Viennese idolization of Schubert or about
Beethoven’s dramatic sense of music and his simultaneous lack of interest in literature, which was so unlike the stage genius of Mozart. At some point we came around to Mozart’s futile search for stage plays or librettists. Yet Shakespeare had been translated since the 1770s, and with a friend in Berlin I had imagined the spell of a Mozart opera of
Romeo and Juliet
. A little later, as if he wanted to defend Beethoven against Mozart, Buck (as I soon called him) talked about the magnificent closing bars of each of Beethoven’s orchestral pieces, which, like those of Brahms, seemed to strive toward a climax that was also a catastrophe. I noted on a piece of paper:
The craving for the abyss, there is something like it, says B
.

On our lengthy walks, however, we also talked about literature. Once I told him about my Fontane reading, my Schiller experiences, and my unsuccessful attempt at Thomas Mann; also about Ernst Kiefer and his unusual way of conveying literature. Buck, on the other hand, returned almost obsessively to music, above all Romantic music. He called
Carmen
its highest point on the stage, went from there to Wagner and on to Richard Strauss. All in rather large leaps, I sometimes suggested, which made making links so easy. But he laughed and said that was the freedom that being half educated gave him.

However, the conversations we had—mostly in the evening, walking outside the camp—also showed me what gaps there were in my musical knowledge and that in the unspoken rivalry which develops in every friendship such as that between Buck and me, it was only with my literary knowledge that I could keep up at all. And
with the Renaissance. With Lorenzo the Magnificent, for example (of whom I had just read a biography), who was the rare example of a tyrant whom even lovers of freedom were, supposedly, happy to acknowledge as one of their own. The author had quoted one of the leading thinkers at Lorenzo’s court saying that when Plato returned from Hades he would seek out not Athens but instead the Florence of the Medici princes. Astonished, Buck allowed me to tell him about the wonders and peculiarities of this epoch, its combination of intellectual boldness, splendor, and a sense of beauty. Sometimes, in the middle of the conversation, he forgot where he was, took a couple of steps to the side, and, in nervous haste, began to make notes.