Not I (10 page)

2
La Jana was a “scandalous” dancer and film star, whose real name was Henriette Margarethe Hiebel.—Trans.

3
Twilight of Man
(
Menschheitsdämmerung
) is the title of a famous anthology of Expressionist poetry, published in 1919;
Storm of Steel
(
Stahlgewitter
) is Ernst Jünger’s 1920 memoir of the Western Front in the First World War;
Decline of the West
(1917) is a pessimistic work of historical speculation by Oswald Spengler.—Trans.

4
On that date, the German chancellor Franz von Papen removed the democratically elected government of Prussia from office.—Trans.

5
On that day Adolf Hitler became chancellor of the German Reich, which sparked massive public demonstrations of joy throughout Germany.

6
April 20 was Hitler’s birthday, hardly a coincidence.

7
The author is shown with this cone in the photograph on p. 34; traditionally it is filled with candies meant to “sweeten” the start of school and its discipline.

8
Pseudo-French, used in Berlin slang, showing the influence of the important Huguenot presence and tradition in Berlin.

9
A then quite recent song from Franz Lehar’s
The Tsarevich
.—Trans.

10
Fest is describing the appearance of the Gestapo or Secret State Police (
Geheime Staatspolizei
) and its typical mode of operation.

11
Roughly (and without the rhyme): You, nation from the depths / You, nation in the night / don’t forget the fire / stay on your guard!—Trans.

12
“The Seven Swans” appears in a collection by Ludwig Bechstein. “Dwarf Long-Nose,” “The Severed Hand,” and “The Cold Heart” are among Hauff’s tales.—Trans.

13
This mix of Germanic heroic tales, fairy tales, both ancient and modern, and classical literary masterpieces is typical for the exposure to literature of the
Bildungsbürger
, at least through the first half of the twentieth century.

14
Johann Peter Hebel (1760–1826) is the author of popular, humorous poems and stories of everyday life, some in his native Alemanian dialect. Ernst von Wildenbruch (1845–1909), the grandson of a Prussian prince, wrote patriotic and historical novels, poems, and songs, often on Prussian themes. Christian Morgenstern (1871–1914) is best known for his scurrilous nonsense poems with both a humorous and a melancholy tinge. His more serious poetry and his translations of Scandinavian literature are less known.

Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) was a Prussian officer and remains a major German dramatist whose plays, short prose narratives, and essays, while related to all the major intellectual currents of his time, are largely sui generis. His drama
Prinz Friedrich von Homburg
poses central moral questions in the context of Prussia’s military legacy and history, as does his most complex novella,
Michael Kohlhaas
, for the time of Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

Ricarda Huch (1864–1947) is the author of neoromantic and historical novels and novellas who renounced her membership in the Prussian Academy of the Arts in 1933 to protest its takeover by the Nazis.

15
Jakob Wassermann (1873–1934) specialized in novels with a sensationalist content;
Der Fall Maurizius
(
The Maurizius Case
) became a film.

16
“Röhm Putsch” was the Nazi designation for three days of murder by the SS (Schutzstaffel) at the end of June 1934, during which the entire leadership of the SA (Sturmabteilung or Brownshirts), including its head and Hitler’s close friend Ernst Röhm, was eliminated; the SS also used this opportunity to kill numerous political opponents within the Nazi movement and outside.

17
“Holy halls” is a quotation from
The Magic Flute
.—Trans.

18
Albert Lortzing (1801–51) composed and wrote the libretti for popular, often humorous operas.

19
The references from boarding school through early marriage are all intended to show how protected from real life the upbringing of a young “lady” like Fest’s mother was; they also set up the contrast to what she would endure later on.

THREE
•

Even If All Others Do …

One afternoon at the end of 1936, as Wolfgang and I were trying out new slides and leaps on our garden skating rink, my father told us to come to his study. The unusual tone he adopted as he did so made me ask, cheekily, “What’s the matter? Is there a problem again?” With visible reluctance, my father asked us to sit down at the smoking table. First of all he talked about the little summerhouse which had just been completed. He had decided to partition off the front part as living space—a sort of “den” with a desk, books, and drinks—and to keep a number of animals at the back. But, he interrupted himself midsentence—that was not why he had called us.

He wanted to talk to us about a subject, he began, that had been giving him a headache for some months
now. He had been prompted by one or two differences of opinion with our mother, who was terribly worried and was hardly able to sleep anymore. No doubt it was also harder for her than for anyone else in the family, and, furthermore, she took everything more seriously than he did. Of course, he knew that with the Nazis taking power, her life—for the time being, at any rate—had come to a stop. Perhaps his trust in God was greater, or perhaps he was only more foolhardy, although to reproach him with being so, as Aunt Dolly did in her haughty moods, was quite wrong. He knew what his responsibilities were. But he also had principles, which he wasn’t going to let anyone call into question. Least of all the “band of criminals” in power.

He repeated the words “band of criminals,” and if we had been a little older we would no doubt have noticed how torn he was. He had discussed what he was about to say with my mother and they had with some effort reached an agreement. From now on there would be a double evening meal: an early one for the three younger children and another one as soon as the little ones were in bed. We belonged to the later sitting. The reason for this division was very simple; he had to have a place in the world where he could talk openly and get his disgust off his chest. Otherwise life would be worth nothing. At least not for him. With the little ones he would have to keep himself in check, as he had done for two years now whenever entering a shop, in front of the lowliest counter clerk, and—by force of law—every time he picked up his children from school. He was
incapable of doing that, he said, and concluded with the words, more or less, “A state that turns everything into a lie shall not cross our threshold as well. I shall not submit to the reigning mendacity, at least within the family circle.” That, of course, sounded a little grand, he said. As it was, he only wanted to keep the enforced hypocrisy at bay.

He took a deep breath, as if he had got rid of a burden, and walked back and forth between the window and the smoking table a few times. In doing this, he began again, he was turning us into adults, so to speak. With that came a duty to be extremely cautious. Tight lips were the symbol of this state: “Always remember that!” Nothing political that we discussed was for others to hear. Anyone with whom we exchanged a few words could be a Nazi, a traitor, or simply thoughtless. In a dictatorship, distrust was not only a commandment, it was almost a virtue.

And it was just as important, he continued, never to suffer from the isolation which inevitably accompanied opposition to the opinion on the street. He would give us a Latin maxim for that, which we should never forget; it would be best to write it down, then brand it on our memory and throw away the note. The maxim had often helped him, at any rate, and even saved him from making some wrong decisions, because he had rarely made a mistake when he had followed his own judgment alone. He put a piece of paper in front of each of us and dictated: “
Etiam si omnes—ego non!
It’s from the Gospel According to St. Matthew,” he explained, “the scene on the
Mount of Olives.”
¹
He laughed when he saw what was on my piece of paper. If I remember rightly, I had written something like
Essi omniss, ergono
. My father stroked my head and said, consolingly, “Don’t worry! There’s time enough for you to learn it!” My brother, who was already at Gymnasium, had written the sentence correctly.

That, more or less, was how the hour in the study passed. I have, understandably enough, reproduced only the gist of my father’s words, no matter how often I later thought of them. After we returned to our room, Wolfgang repeated, with all the superiority of an older brother, that we were adults now. He hoped I knew what that meant. I nodded solemnly, although I didn’t have a clue. Then he added that all of us together now formed a group of conspirators. He proudly pushed against my chest: “Us against the world!” I nodded once again, without having the faintest idea what it might mean to be against the world. I simply felt myself to be favored in some indefinable way by my father, with whom in the recent past I had increasingly got into arguments because of some piece of cheek or other. The way he sometimes acknowledged me from then on with a passing nod, I also interpreted as approval. That evening, after the parental “Good night,” my mother came into our room once more, sat down for a few minutes on Wolfgang’s bed, and
later on mine. “I only say cheerful things—or prefer to say nothing,” she had once declared as a Liebenthal rule of life. She stuck to that now. But she looked depressed.

It was an adventure, as I often, in the weeks that followed, happily persuaded myself before falling asleep. Who had the opportunity of entering upon such an enterprise with his father? I was determined not to disappoint him. Possibly my happiness also had to do with the fact that the dominant childhood feeling of being defenseless against one’s parents returned now and then; but there wasn’t only powerlessness; on the whole, I was imbued with a sense of privilege. And trust in others—that, too, was one of the lessons of that afternoon—was not a present that one doled out casually, but a rare remuneration, which had to be earned.

Only when I was older did I understand the horror of the situation, in which constant watchfulness was required as a kind of law for parents as for children, mistrust was a rule of survival, and isolation a necessity—where the mere clumsiness of a child could lead literally to death and ruin. Fifteen years later, when I asked my father about the dark side of his afternoon talk, his expression again immediately revealed just how worried he had been then. He recovered himself and replied that at the time he had been very conscious of the risk to which he exposed himself and his family. Perhaps he had gone too far. But he had hoped to God it would turn out well. And, indeed, the gamble had paid off. At any rate, neither we nor Winfried, who had been allowed to join the second sitting of the evening meal later on, had
ever caused him any embarrassment. And, just as he had wished, none of us had ever forgotten the maxim which, he remembered, he had bequeathed us. Indeed, the fine Latin maxim “Even if all others do—I do not!” belonged to every truly free life.

Otherwise, everything remained as before. The petty quarrels between us children, the great reconciliations. In spring the lilac bushes bloomed, and when it rained the white and violet flowers bowed almost to the ground. Soon after the berries, the plum tree in front of the Deeckes’ window bore juicy black fruit, and once every three months my mother dressed up and went in her dark blue dress with the pale collar and the pearl necklace, which my father had given her on their wedding, to the Liebenthal Club, “dress informal,” where, as we joked, she heard the latest “market gossip” of the upper ranks, about the worries of bringing up children, about daughters’ romances that had come to nothing, and once even, amidst whispered agitation, about a premarital pregnancy.

In the early summer of 1936 my father and I had erected a pigeon loft on the roof of our little summerhouse. When we were finished, he said that in appreciation he was freeing me from the strawberry fields and instead entrusting me with a bigger, more instructive responsibility, of caring for the pigeons: feeding, watering, keeping the loft clean. Typically, he handed me a pale blue booklet with the title
Everything about the Pigeon for Beginners and the More Advanced
, and within a few days I was able to distinguish the different kinds: the vain pouters with their mechanical nodding; the tumblers,
who during vertical flight abruptly let themselves drop and, as if at a word of command, came to a standstill; the puffed-up fantail pigeons; and the carrier pigeons, which I soon took to friends and, bearing tiny messages, sent back to Hentigstrasse, address “Kitchen Window.” Then there were the evenings, when the greedy scrapping of the sparrows had come to an end and the talking in our room had stopped, while from outside, from the bottom of the garden only the sleepy sounds of the chickens could be heard, and farther away the clacking of the passing S-Bahn trains. Gradually, the day faded into darkness, only occasionally was there a shout or, when we were already drowsy, the bell of a cyclist.

The pleasant regularity of the days ended in autumn 1936. That was the point at which more and more neighbors and acquaintances began to go along with the rulers, not only formally but with increasing conviction. At any rate, that was the case in Karlshorst, where the big defection to the Nazis did not begin until then. At second dinner my father said this turn of events could probably be explained by the many benefits which the regime offered to people. Herr Patzek reported, delightedly, that for the first time he could hear Willi Domgraf-Fassbender and Elly Ney for an affordable price, and see
Faust
in the theater, and, of course, Ibsen’s Nora, or an opera production conducted by Arthur Rother.
²
When it was said
that Hitler’s rise was the history of how he was underestimated, my father would add that one should rather talk of Hitler’s history of “popular appeasement.” This had then evolved into the dramatically staged history of his acclamation.