Not I (33 page)

The next day I had to come to the orderly room and Mahlmann immediately brought up what had taken place. He bellowed angrily, “I can see through it all!
Always Kühne, Kühne, Kühne! That’s going to stop! Otherwise, I’ll be the one who is up at regimental headquarters in full dress uniform!” When I described the incident to him, Lieutenant Kühne remarked, “Once Mahlmann would have been someone to fear. In the present situation I don’t worry too much about him. I feel more unease at your behavior. Of course, I understand you. But don’t do anything else stupid! Even someone who has the better arguments doesn’t let the Mahlmanns and Schneiders of this world notice it.” And, patting my shoulder, “Not least because we despise them.”

In November 1944 our unit was moved to the army training camp at Cologne-Wahn. We had hardly arrived before preparations for Christmas began. Fir twigs were nailed up everywhere, hung with tinsel or apples, and sometimes even a candle found somewhere was attached. As always the celebrations began with an hour of contemplation, which opened with an address boldly cobbled together by the commanding officer about salvation, sacrifice, and final victory; then there followed a drawn-out “O Tannenbaum.” Franz Franken—the opera enthusiast I had got to know during our time on the antiaircraft battery, and who was in one of the battalions at this camp—had managed, within a short space of time, to form a chamber orchestra, which performed Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” and Handel’s
Music for the Royal Fireworks
. The three hundred or so participants returned once again to Christmas with a tearful “Stille Nacht”; then it was time for the jolly part of the festivities. Without a pause, the tables became boisterous
and whoever had been sitting at them seemed, as if at a signal, to romp back into the forests from which his ancestors had emerged in primeval times.

Lieutenant Walter Kühne, who saved the author from a court-martial, in front of his house in Stelle, near Lüneburg, in the early 1950s

As soon as circumstances allowed, I fled to my books. On the second day of Christmas my father was unexpectedly on the phone. He hinted he was awaiting the Russian attack somewhere on the edge of West Prussia. We talked about family things and about Wolfgang’s death, and I had the feeling that he hid his need to avoid any kind of sentimentality behind somewhat worn phrases. He mentioned my mother’s dreadful state, the wretched farewell when he himself had to leave for the front again, and that he didn’t have much more to say. “It’s all been said, and even this call can only tell you what you already know. And as for Mother,” he added, “you have known of her sorrow and the reasons for it for a long time.”

Then he asked me about my books and I said that I had taken some from Berlin or Freiburg, and had exchanged some for cigarettes or other things. One day I had come by an officer’s map case and since then had kept my “library” in it. It contained nothing but the obvious: Goethe’s
Poems
, selected ballads by Schiller, a volume of Hölderlin, and a couple of thin paperbacks with quotes from Jean Paul, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Also the copy of Ernst Jünger’s
On the Marble Cliffs
that he had given me, and I even had Josef Weinheber’s
Selbstbildnis
(
Self-Portrait
). “But no Thomas Mann,” I added as a weak joke. Altogether, apart from a map of the country between Cologne and Düsseldorf, there were thirteen
books in the leather bag which was attached to my belt. Then the conversation suddenly broke off.

The next day I unexpectedly bumped into Reinhold Buck outside the canteen, and I was so surprised that with a quite uncustomary gesture I embraced him. From then on we were, as far as conditions allowed, inseparable and spent whole evenings together in some empty hut or other. We told each other what had happened in the past weeks, and realized that without us knowing it our units had the whole time been quite close. I talked about the radio broadcast of
The Marriage of Figaro
, he about Mozart’s highly developed psychological understanding. When I related Wittenbrink’s “proof of the existence of God,” he said that, for once in history all the conditions of the ideal moment had indeed come together, which made the great work of art possible, and the pious might say, God had revealed Himself. For fifty years. At Mozart’s death this moment had already almost passed. Beethoven and Schubert, with extraordinary efforts, had extended it for a while. That made their contribution all the greater. With Wagner it was finally over. In him one heard too much loud panting, he said. “You must be thinking of the beginning of
Das Rheingold
,” I interjected ironically, but he replied that
Rheingold
was one of the exceptions; there, even he (for whom the Nazis had spoiled the pleasure in Wagner) could, without any effort, hear the “breath of the universe.”

Whenever the canteen was empty we could even listen to the wireless and, whenever possible, in the time that followed, we scoured the stations. We also talked about
literature, about which we agreed much less often than music, and I remember only that Buck regarded the poets “of the second rank,” such as Eichendorff, Geibel, and Kerner, as “mere text providers” for Schubert and Schumann, and called Rilke a “word cobbler” who had turned my head. At some point I told him about Wolfgang’s death. Buck said that after the war the battalion commander who forced my brother back to the front line should be put on trial. Then we talked about the first dead we had seen, and I told him about the NCO who had been sprawled across a shattered tree near Düren, while he remembered six or seven Englishmen who had lost their lives when their plane came down close to Groningen.

On several evenings Buck spoke repeatedly about death. “Don’t have any illusions,” he said, “there’s no escaping it.” He only hoped, he added, during a walk across the barracks, whose buildings were like tenement blocks, that death trod loudly when it came. When I asked what he meant, he replied that he didn’t want to be surprised by his going. Not like a thief in the night, he added, ending with a wild giggling. One must be fully aware of the end! “But of course, without suffering.” He hinted at making the sign of the cross and went on, in his way of pushing everything to an extreme: “I don’t want to die wretchedly—not like one of those stinking lumps of humanity I saw lying in the field hospital, groaning away.” He made me promise to stand by him in death, one way or another.

But the following day we were unexpectedly separated once again, and Buck said, as we parted, that he
hoped to get through the war, despite everything. With a smile he said, “That goes for you, too. No wretched dying!” Already ten steps away from me, he stopped and shouted half to the side, “One so rarely finds a friend!” Afterward I tried for a couple of days to find out through Lieutenant Kühne where he had been deployed, but without success.

Joachim Fest’s friend, Reinhold Buck

My company was sent to Euskirchen near Bonn to lay glass mines on a half-finished military airfield. The newly developed explosive devices looked like preserving jars, and when they exploded burst into countless tiny splinters that caused terrible wounds. Day after day, as we worked out in the open, American Lightning fighter-bombers would appear and use us for target practice as we lay exposed amidst the glass jars gleaming in the sunlight. That was the next set of dead I saw. After nightfall we fetched them from the field and laid them out in a hall; finally, together with the corpse in the tree, I got to twenty dead. Then I stopped counting.

Back in Cologne-Wahn we spent the days, and occasionally the nights, practicing pontoon-building, often standing up to our knees in water in the icy River Sieg, and a couple of times we even tried it in the fast-flowing Rhine. After about two weeks we were informed a room at a time that the next day we were starting out for Mettmann near Cologne. The reason given was that Montgomery, although with some delay, was moving toward the Rhine. The approaching end of the war began to make itself felt in the muddle with which we were sent back and forth. Even before we took up position in
Mettmann, the deployment was broken off and we were ordered back to our starting point.

That day we stood shivering for several hours in a forest of thin, awkward trees. Without warning we heard a whistling sound and at the same moment two shadows, which we took to be a new type of American plane, flitted over us, no more than one or two hundred feet above our heads, so that we threw ourselves to the ground looking for shelter. Later, we found out that they were Messerschmitt Me 262 fighter-bombers, which, powered by jet engines that had recently gone into mass production, flew faster than the speed of sound. Immediately, there was talk again of “miracle weapons” that would change the course of the war. Even as we were still talking about them we had to assemble again and received the order to get onto trucks which had just driven up.

That, however, was not yet the end of the confused deployment situation. About thirty miles farther south we were just as abruptly given the order to get out and march. At Leverkusen we passed a military hospital where we took a short rest, surrounded by staff cars and military ambulances. Pitiable sounds came from the buildings near us; doctors and male nurses were running around shouting; in the corridors we found long rows of bandaged figures, looking like shrunken larvae, and between them tubs full of sawn-off limbs.

Around midnight we crossed the railway bridge near Cologne’s cathedral, where a cold smell of burning wafted toward us from the riverbank. The streets along which we marched consisted of buildings “blown through” by
the wind, as the popular phrase had it; in between them we made our way over blackened mountains of rubble and hills of ash. Whole facades covered by missing relatives’ or friends’ messages stood ghostlike in the emptiness:
HANNES, WHERE ARE
you?
GISELA
.
⁶
When a gust of wind blew over the fields of ruins we felt grit crunching between our teeth. Sometimes someone opened a hatch or removed the cardboard from a cellar hole to see who was coming along the street; in other places white faces appeared in a square hole in brickwork. Pointlessly, some sirens suddenly howled. The pathetically swelling sound involuntarily reminded me of Liszt’s
Les préludes
, which had accompanied the victory announcements of the Russian campaign on German radio and had not been heard for a long time. Instead, the talk now was constantly of a “straightening of the front,” the camouflage term which the propagandists of the regime had invented for “retreat.”

On the night of March 8, 1945, after crossing the Rhine again, we reached the town of Unkel, which was on the right bank of the river opposite Remagen.
⁷
Exhausted by the marching and our impressions on the way, we were granted “an hour’s rest.” Then we each received twenty rounds of ammunition, after which we
crawled up a wooded slope as far as the meadow which bordered it. At the other end of the meadow, about two hundred yards away, was an isolated farmhouse which lay in darkness. At the edge of the woods we got the order to dig one- and two-man foxholes at intervals of ten yards. Now we were also told that the American Ninth Tank Division had captured the undamaged Ludendorff Bridge only hours before and an armored advance guard had already crossed. Several attempts by the Germans to blow up the bridge or to smash the American units had failed.

When all the orders had been issued, Mahlmann called me over and instructed me to dig a two-man hole in an advanced position about seventy yards from the farmhouse. Surprisingly, he ordered the hole to be excavated a couple of yards this side of the edge of the woods in the open meadow and personally led me there in the shelter of the trees. When I asked why the foxhole was not to be dug in the woods like all the others, he simply retorted that it was not for me to ask questions here. After all, since Lieutenant Kühne had maintained with such conviction that I was so uncommonly eager for final victory, I should surely obey every order without hesitation. Then he ordered me, while standing at the edge of the wood, farther out into the open field. “Go on! Start now!” He went back into the trees to (as he said) check the work of the others. As I dug up the soil, we came under fire; the ground was plowed up without me being able to tell where the shooting was coming from. Once someone started to scream, which turned to whimpering, but
there, too, I couldn’t tell whether it was an American or one of ours. Now and then a machine gun tap-tap-tapped through the black, empty night.