Not I (47 page)

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 many 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.”

Such observations would later become the topic of some of my works and thus leap ahead of time. I mention them here because they were and are important to me. Another look ahead concerns one of the most important events of our lifetime. Sometimes I am reminded of the pessimistic moods of my father and most of his friends which surfaced again and again. At our garden table one of them once tried to equate the proportion of reason and unreason in the process of world history to a ratio of ten to ten thousand. The gloomy picture of man and
history which my father’s generation could not get away from reflected the times. I shared in this mood, as when I observed that in all history the liberating trumpet signal of Beethoven’s
Fidelio
had hardly ever been heard and was no more than an “opera idea.” Yet I feel happy every time I drive down the long road to Glienicke Bridge, where the temperamental Sophie had once flung her arms around my neck and where—after 1961—all roads ended.
⁸
I am lucky enough to have experienced a historical event in which, exceptionally, reason overcame all blindness and the desire to inflict horror. Then—just once, at least, and in the face of all experience—the sound of the trumpet became audible. It made the wall fall down and forced those in power to surrender it.

On the ninth of November, 1989, I found myself in Palermo, Sicily. I had come home late and had arranged an interview the next morning with a journalist from the Communist newspaper
l’Unità
. It had been agreed that we would discuss recent political developments and the German media and I wanted to tell him about that “
république de lettres
” which was the inspiration and ambitious goal of that part of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
for which I bore responsibility at the time. But when I arrived for the interview, before I had uttered a single word, the journalist jumped up from behind his desk,
spread out his arms and exclaimed, “
Il muro della vergogna è caduto!
” (The wall of shame has fallen!) Assuming he meant the easing of restrictions on travel between East and West Germany, I said, “Yes, indeed! Things are getting better.” “No, not better!” my interviewer, a young man with unruly, curly hair, almost shouted. “It
has fallen! Gone! Finished!” Only then did I discover details about what had happened and gave a long interview. I expressed my regret about having to hear about the fall of the wall in faraway Palermo, but he replied that for him my presence on this day was pure reportorial joy. To my annoyance, I could not leave for Berlin immediately, as I had an appointment in Rome that could not be put off. I spent all of the tenth and eleventh of November 1989 in front of the TV, and often thought of Henri IV’s words: “
Pends-toi, brave Crillon! nous avons combattu à Arques et tu n’y étais pas!
” (Hang yourself, brave Crillon! We fought at Arques and you were not there!)

The Freiburg University bookseller Fritz Werner meeting the author in 1988

Early in the morning of the twelfth of November, 1989, I flew to Berlin.

1
Fest here refers not to the Hegel whose reception, especially via France, has dominated so much of postmodern Western thought. He writes of the founder and main representative of German Idealism as he was popularly dispensed in German secondary schools and universities well into the 1960s. One of the seminal modern thinkers, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) has profoundly changed speculation in most fields of philosophy from logic to ontology and from philosophy of history to aesthetics.

2
This was a right-wing hobbyhorse after the war and Fest loves to ride it. While antifascist himself, he cannot abide—echoing the sentiments of most German conservatives—the assumption of national shame and guilt urged upon the nation by most of its left-wing postwar writers. These include Günter Grass (born 1927), whose many novels and essays were the first and most successful attempts to deal meaningfully and critically with the Nazi experience. This was seen as inappropriate for serious art and as demeaning to the German nation. He was accused by CDU politicians of “befouling his own nest,” an opinion Fest obviously shares.

3
The Humboldt University building was located in the Soviet sector of Berlin at the time; it was to become the flagship university of the GDR. In 1948, professors leaving because of the Communist influence on teaching and administration founded the Free University of Berlin in West Berlin.

4
Eckard Peterich (1900–68), who lived primarily in Florence and wrote about myth, religion, and art in classical antiquity, is the prime exemplar of the “private scholar” young Fest always wanted to be.

5
Writing essays, radio plays, or short narratives for the radio was one of the most readily available and frequently used ways to make a little money for both established and aspiring authors.

6
RIAS: Radio im Amerikanischen Sektor (Radio in the American Sector)—i.e., the American Sector of Berlin.—Trans.

7
Fest senior here lists several notables of the Nazi regime who were tried as war criminals by the Nürnberg Tribunal and found guilty. Ley committed suicide while the other two were hanged.

Robert Ley (1890–1945) headed the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labor Front), in charge of all aspects of the organization and welfare of German workers.

Fritz Sauckel (1894–1946) wound up in charge of the massive slave labor recruitment which involved as many as five million people, many of whom were mistreated and died.

Julius Streicher (1885–1946) was Nazism’s most heinous anti-Semite and Jew baiter; his hysterical utterances and slanders became too much even for the likes of Göring and Goebbels and he was forbidden to appear in public by 1940 and dismissed from his party posts. He remained unrepentant all the way to the gallows.

8
The main road from Berlin to Potsdam crosses Glienicke Bridge, which today marks the boundary between the cities. The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 cast the boundary in concrete, as it were. From then until 1989 the bridge had a certain notoriety as a place where spies and others were exchanged between East and West.—Trans.

Postscript

I want to end these memories here. There are many gaps in them. The years they deal with, after all, already lie a generation back and often rely—at least as far as many childhood details are concerned—on stories handed down in the family or questions asked of relatives. I am also aware how some experiences took on a consistency and sometimes a pathos which I would gladly have avoided. “That doesn’t quite capture it!” said an inner voice, and received as answer: “But almost every detail has been checked and confirmed by others.” Soon afterward the images flowed into each other again and became mixed up in new combinations.

That was not the only difficulty. Other things remained unsaid, because when the necessarily fragmentary memory was dug up it yielded no more than a
few disconnected ruins. Or because the peculiar atmosphere of a time—its tone or the color of an experience—could no longer to be captured in words. Because what the memory has preserved is never, strictly speaking, what actually happened. The past is always an imaginary museum. One does not, in retrospect, record what one has experienced, but what time—with increasing shifts in perspective, with one’s own will to shape the chaos of half-buried experiences—has made of it. By and large, one records less how it actually was than how one became who one is. And that is not only the weakness, but the justification of memoirs.
¹

The questions arising from these observations recur again and again. I wanted to know “What is truth?,” and came up, again and again, against an insight formulated by Sigmund Freud. He wrote to Arnold Zweig that pure biographical truth “cannot be had” no matter how hard we try. There is no better observation, I thought, for the beginning or the end of any memoir. That is why it is included here.

1
This is a deliberate echo of Leopold von Ranke’s (1795–1886) famous dictum that it is the historian’s task to show us “
wie es eigentlich gewesen
” (how things have actually been). Ranke is credited with having founded the modern discipline of academic history, and his requirements for a critical use of primary sources are still valid today, even if his assumptions are no longer universally shared by historians.