Not I (40 page)

In those days almost every story ended with acts of violence of some kind. As the Red Army approached, my sisters had left their Gymnasium in the Neumark, east of Berlin, and returned to Berlin; they now learned that their classmates—all aged between twelve and fifteen—had been raped, before being abducted and disappearing in the expanses of Russia. The war—so presumptuously begun and so often accompanied by whipped-up fantasies of final victory—had come back to Germany in the most terrible way.

It was not until some time after her arrival that my mother mentioned the death of her parents, and Winfried agreed with me that she really didn’t want to talk about it at all. She said, however, that my grandmother had died in spring 1945, around the time I was taken prisoner. After the destruction of her house in an air raid and the death of her crippled daughter, she had shown ever less interest in life. That had still been noticeably different on my 1944 visit to Riastrasse, and when I embraced her on taking my leave she had said with a shy smile, “Now you have to grow up! At your age a lad has better things to embrace! Not his grandmother!” Then she embraced me. Later, she had complained that for thirty years she had only been there for her family. But now? What could she do with a life that had no meaning?
At the end she had spent many hours in the church and had visibly wasted away. One of the last things she said was that she had served God and her poor daughter “all her life with heart and hand.” That was why she was not worried about the end. The next day the doctors confirmed her death. The certificate noted an advanced immune deficiency. But one of the doctors said drily that she had simply died of life.

My grandfather followed her about a year later. The chaos of the evacuation meant that Karlshorst Hospital, which my grandfather had cofounded, had to be moved to a former hotel in the district of Friedrichshagen, which was where he was taken. Like my grandmother, he too asked every day into the emptiness what was the point of it all. He had always been surrounded by deference; now, after weeks of being moved from one place to another, he found himself in a hospital ward with sixty beds on which groaning patients awaited their end. Several times he asked my mother what else life still held in store for him and when she, at a loss, replied, “Well, no plans, no duties anymore! Just live!” he spoke of being the victim of a fraud. He had always believed that in almost eighty years he would get a couple of clues as to what one was really in this world for. But now he knew that life just made a fool of one.

When he had taken refuge in the hospital he had possessed nothing anymore. In the course of the evacuation, Russian soldiers had first taken his briefcase and his pocket watch, then his jacket and vest, so that he—always the
chevalier à la mode
—had appeared before the nuns in
shirt and suspenders. And the few things of value left to him, including his wallet, had one day been stolen from under his pillow, and a little later, his remaining clothes had also been taken, so that he literally owned nothing anymore except the nightshirt on his back. When he was asked how he felt, he said that he was ashamed of his poverty; after that the nuns placed a screen around his bed, so that he had more privacy. “Yes, it’s better to be alone, when one’s dying!” he said. To the sisters’ admonition not to talk so blasphemously, he merely said that his words were utterly serious. For years everyone had said that his wife had followed him as submissively as a maid. Now he was following her. Without her he no longer knew why he was here. He was leaving life “as quickly as possible.”

Then he asked what the date was. When he heard it was the fourteenth of July, he said that he had nothing more to do, nothing more to say, and nothing at all to celebrate.
⁴
Cause of death should be given as: no interest anymore. He thanked everyone, extended his folded hands toward the nuns standing around his bed, and commended himself to God. It was sinfully desired death, he admitted finally. But God would show understanding; He loved the sinners who stood by their sin. The doctors established typhus as cause of death. Two days later he was taken to the cemetery in a wooden box and put in the earth in a paper bag.

We heard further details about events in Berlin at the end of the war—about the courage of Hannih and Christa and the tragedies in the neighborhood—on our almost daily walks with Mother. She loved the benches on the Castle Hill, but often we also walked over the hills above Herdern to the Sonnenhalde, then on to the “professors’ huts” on Rötebuckweg, where Martin Heidegger lived.
⁵
About our father she said that after his release from Russian captivity in autumn 1945 he had suddenly stood at the door like a shadow, and after a few stumbling steps, supporting himself against the wall with one hand, he had collapsed. Then, over many weeks, he had been “brought back to life” by a nurse. He had regained half of the more than one hundred pounds he had lost and so was now “halfway there” again. Hardly was he able to stand on his feet again when he was already going to political meetings and sitting at Christian Democratic Union committee tables in one of the two—far too big—suits that had been saved.
⁶

From the summer of 1946 he spoke in public again, weak but composed. He talked about the subjects that had determined his life: the gradual collapse of the Weimar Republic, the Reichsbanner and the indecisiveness of the republican forces, the “debasement of the law” during the Nazi seizure of power, and the duty to take on political responsibility. Each of his speeches in mostly smoke-filled taverns ended with the sentences with which most of his letters to us also concluded: What had just happened to our country must not happen again. Once was shameful enough.

In early 1947 I found myself sitting behind a school desk again in Freiburg. The rooms were the same, the teachers were the same, the subjects and the names were the same as they had been before: Cicero and Homer and Lessing and Goethe. And although even the faces of my one-year-younger classmates appeared curiously familiar, I felt myself to be in an alien world. I was still crouching in a foxhole, as it were, of which the others hadn’t even heard. It was as if their problems, what they argued about or agreed on, and even their jokes came from very far away. I was not yet, as I had written in my first letter home, back in the world again.

In April Roger Reveille announced he would be coming to Freiburg.
⁷
He had business in nearby Colmar in Alsace and was (as I remembered him from Berlin)
loud, charming, and imaginative. He was embarrassed when, because of a chance remark, the subject of the behavior of the French occupiers arose; to the one example of the aggressive arrogance of his fellow countrymen that had been mentioned he could add a dozen more. At lunchtime he invited me to a mess that was reserved for high-ranking French officers before accompanying me back to my apartment for coffee. There I showed him the leather-bound volume with the handwritten poems that I had brought back from captivity. Roger remarked that he would like to have it, but I said that, understandably, there was only one copy. That didn’t bother him, replied Roger, but I demurred. “There’s nothing to be done! It’s my most important memento!”

Johannes Fest, in a passport-size photo taken about six months after his return from Russian captivity

As he was leaving he put the volume in his pocket as if it were a matter of course. “Hey! Hey, Roger!” I exclaimed. “You can’t do that!” We had just been talking about civilized forms of behavior. He shouldn’t act like an officer in the occupation forces. I could not give away the book, because my heart and my memories were attached to it. But he acted as if he didn’t hear me and went out to his car. “Roger!” I repeated loudly. “Please, leave me the book! It’s also a trophy! I can explain it to you!” But Roger was now someone with business to do. “I’m sorry!” he said at the car door and patted his pocket with the palm of his hand. “I wanted to have it from the start! And still do! Don’t let it bother you! A small reparation!” I angrily went back into the house even before he had started the engine. Soon after, Roger wrote me a letter of thanks for my welcome, the friendliness of which
he would not forget. I never replied to it—nor to a further letter which followed a couple of weeks later.

Soon I found time again for the things I liked and which I had long done without. In the first concert for which I obtained a ticket, Wilhelm Backhaus played Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, and I got into conversation with another member of the audience, who found the composer’s pathos profoundly French. I replied that Beethoven’s metaphysics, on the other hand, were incorrigibly German. My neighbor said one didn’t talk in such “national” terms anymore; that would be impossible for a generation or more. After that a longer discussion developed in which my acquaintance revealed himself to be a lecturer from Tübingen. The exchange ended with my question: Was it still acceptable to say that Beethoven was German? He said the statement was indisputable, but it was better to refrain from making it. “Our country,” he concluded, “is not
à la mode
at the moment.” He wondered if I had noticed this fact.

A longer-lasting friendship developed with Fritz Werner, the manager of the University Bookshop am Augustinermuseum. His quiet, bespectacled appearance did not at all betray his passionate love of literature. He looked like a character from Thomas Mann’s gallery of eccentrics, even if another friend later remarked he was more like a figure from the paintings of Carl Spitzweg.
⁸
He
was slight and he carefully combed streaks of hair across his bald head, which was framed by a circle of unruly curls. His great love was the poet Gottfried Benn, and already by my third or fourth visit he invited me into his office at the back of the shop, where between tall stacks of books he introduced me to poems such as “Negerbraut” and “Jena,” and attuned me to the unmistakably “Berlin tone” of the poet. Gottfried Benn introduced me to a swagger in verse form such as I had never encountered before. From him I also learned phrases like “jostling blood,” “burning gorse,” “honied lands,” and “waves of white violets.” It was a completely new lyrical realm that opened up before me, and once he realized how much I was affected by Benn, Werner even cleared a corner of the shop for me to read the problematic essays of the poet, in which he is all too often carried away by his own brilliance. But Werner did not lend me anything too valuable, he informed me; for him Benn belonged on the top shelf, because anywhere else he risked losing him.

Instead he offered me some titles from his “secret chest.” I should be familiar with Werner Bergengruen’s
A Matter of Conscience
, as with everything by Stefan Andres, he said.
⁹
He also fished out something by Knut Hamsun, who only four years before was being celebrated, as he noted with a scornful laugh, but was now forbidden. But he would think of me, he added, and of
Ernst Rowohlt’s first cheap paperbacks; I got Hemingway’s
A Farewell to Arms
and, as a special favor, Tucholsky’s
Castle Gripsholm
.
¹⁰
“No one gets more than one paperback,” he said. I was the exception. Nevertheless, as he reproached me years later, after that I was constantly pestering him for some large, cloth-bound American or French volume. Sighing, Werner took note but first introduced me to a circle of young poets founded by Claus Bremer and Rainer Maria Gerhardt that met once a month at the department store on the Cathedral Square. Once I even read two poems I had written to the few people who gathered for the department-store evenings. I lost them afterward.

At about the same time I received my school-leaving certificate and—thanks to my old Berlin school where things were drummed into one—I had good marks in Latin and Greek, as well as German and history, so that I easily achieved the grade average required at that time for university admission.
¹¹
Ten days later, provided with an American special permit for those persecuted by the Nazis for their political views, which also covered close family members, Winfried and I set out for Berlin.
¹²

I interrupted the journey in Mannheim to see my fellow escapee Wolfgang Münkel again, while Winfried went on to Frankfurt. It was long after midnight in the ruined city and we were still exchanging memories when we suddenly heard someone throwing pebbles at the window and shouting something. It was a woman’s voice, speaking German with a guttural accent: “Open up! It’s me!” Then came an unintelligible name. Puzzled, Wolfgang looked at me. “Should we open up?” he wondered. “At night?” I said there were two of us and we had hardly anything to fear. He went cautiously down the stairs; I followed at a distance. Then I heard a scream, followed by silence. When I—not without some anxiety—went farther downstairs, there was a couple passionately kissing at the door. A little later Wolfgang introduced me to Archivolde, the young Dutch woman about whom he had talked incessantly in our escape box. It was the first time they had seen each other after almost two years, and, Wolfgang said, he interpreted as a good sign the coincidence that the day on which we had met again had also reunited him with his great love. Now all obstacles would be overcome.