Not I (29 page)

We did then go to the gallery in the city center, but I think the few paintings which I remembered from earlier visits had already been removed by this time.
¹²
However, I showed my guests the Museum Island, we walked through the Nicolai Quarter and down Unter den Linden, as well as to my former Gymnasium and other supposedly important places, always avoiding my father’s political conversations. Because all the time my friends were there I had a presentiment, possibly reinforced by my worried mother, that there would nevertheless be an outburst by my father. I asked once again as to the whereabouts of some friends, such as Walter Goderski, Bruno Block, and Dr. Meyer. But he had nothing specific to say.

Thanks to my father’s questions about the school classes, the conversation got around to Virgil, and Norbert, who was just reading a book about the state poet of Emperor Augustus, instantly presented himself as an expert. “Please, not a learned conversation!” begged Helmut. But once he had started Norbert wouldn’t let himself be distracted and knew countless details, historical or legendary, which linked the rise of Rome to the fall of Troy. He related how Aeneas, as he discovers the terrifying picture of his native city, becomes certain that compassionate people must be living in Carthage, because the ability to feel the misfortune of others is what constitutes a decent world. At some point my father joined in by saying that in Germany Virgil had never enjoyed such renown as in the rest of Europe. It was no doubt telling that the
Odyssey
ends in married bliss, but the
Aeneid
with the foundation of a state.

On one of the following days I went to Riastrasse for tea, and for the first time in my life experienced my grandfather as a communicative, even elegant conversationalist. He did not just know, as we had always maintained, how to growl a few sentences about life and business, but was also able to talk knowledgeably about classic French literature from Montaigne to Chateaubriand. Surprisingly, he mentioned the “first small piece of literature” I had sent him with my letter and wanted to know more about Dr. Kiefer and the other teachers, which book had most impressed me recently, and how I reconciled my literary preferences with the mindlessness of military life. Also the attentions, which were usually
our concern, now came from him: he poured tea for me, offered me biscuits, and from time to time asked what I would like. He also wanted to know my plans. I replied that what counted was to get through the war. Nothing else! He had heard about the letter in which I had declared I wanted to become a “private scholar,” and he said, “Hold firmly onto that in these times! If some laugh, pay no attention! One always has difficulties doing the right thing!” My grandmother, who had sat down with us for half an hour, gave me an earthenware pot with her famous crème caramel.

Soon after that my grandfather said that we had to bring matters to a close. At the door, when I wanted to say goodbye, he shook his head and said, “Today I shall accompany you!” During the ten minutes to Hentigstrasse we talked about the landscape around Friedrichshafen and Lake Constance. I told him that during guard duty at the dark gun emplacement one of my comrades had called it “tender,” but then, almost shocked, had immediately asked me to forget the word. When asked as to the reason, he said it didn’t fit in with the soldiers’ world and would only arouse laughter, which in turn amused my grandfather.

When we reached our house, I said that now it was my turn to accompany him back, that was only right and proper. Once again the old man said no. “Not today! Today I accompanied you home.” And while I was still wondering why my sisters found my grandfather so intimidating, he said, almost admonishingly, “See that you get through it!” Then, he added, there are things
one can do: “You know what I mean!” I had no idea, but pretended that I had understood. Finally, touching my shoulders, he suggested an accolade, turned on his heel, and left. When I told my mother about it, she said with a smile, “He just doesn’t like any kind of sentimentality. That’s who I get it from, after all!”

At the supper table the next evening my father’s feared explosion of anger came. It began fairly harmlessly with his remark that in the face of an existence that was passing by, every person had a debt to pay—if the circumstances allowed it. Clumsily, I asked if by that qualifier he was trying to justify his own interrupted career, and from one moment to the next it burst out of him like resentment which had been too long bottled up. How dare I say that to him? he shouted, throwing down his cutlery in the presence of my schoolmates. For years he had suffered from his inactivity. For the sake of his family—so what? he interrupted himself. To damn the regime at the garden fence, to listen to the BBC and to pray for those in need: that was nothing at all! “Yes!” he went on. “I keep out of things. Like everyone else! And I’ve got good reason to do so! But I now know that under the present conditions there is no separation of good and evil. The air is poisoned. It infects us all!” And so on for a long time, more or less, and as far as we were able to reconstruct it later.

At this angry outburst, which was unlike any before, my mother stood up, but remained standing by the door. After a brief pause she went to his chair and put her hands on his shoulders. “I beg you, Hans!” she said
quietly. “We have guests!” My friends sat there as if petrified, but my father was evidently not yet finished. “No one can acquit themselves,” he began again, “not even the most justifiable hate grants us absolution! And what does that mean anyway? Hate is not enough. Just stop the talking! You only do it to get the guilt off your back!’

The scene only came to an end when my two sisters, startled by the noise, appeared at the door in their nightdresses, crying. With reassuring words my father took them back to their room and a little later returned to the table with an apologetic phrase. As he picked up his cutlery from the floor, he said that he stood by every one of his words. He apologized only for yelling, which was crazy of him to indulge in, and for his loss of self-control.

The three days which still remained I spent with my friends mostly in town, which was already marked by the air raids, and at the garden table. Dr. Hausdorf called once and in an unusually serious mood involved us in a conversation about skepticism, which he called the other truly human virtue besides faith. Where one of the two was missing, then human coexistence was made more difficult or even impossible; both together, on the other hand, guaranteed the little bit of tolerableness that human beings could achieve. The question as to how these opposites could be reconciled gave rise to a lengthy discussion in which we drove him into a corner. Yet once he had gone we said that he had been right. Life simply did consist of contradictions.

On the day before our departure we came downstairs just as Father Wittenbrink was doing a round of
his garden, and when he saw us sitting down at the table he came toward us with quite impetuous strides. “I’ve got it at last!” he cried to us from a distance. “Forget the Scholastics and Thomas Aquinas! Forget Descartes and Leibniz! I have the definitive proof of the existence of God!” Wittenbrink seemed to be beside himself, and my mother, who was just bringing us tea, said later that his eyes had been damp. “The matter requires no complicated deductions,” he went on, “but consists of one word, like all convincing insights. The most convincing proof of the existence of God is … Mozart! Every single page of his biography teaches us that he comes from another world and at the same time, despite all the tormenting concealment, makes it visible. Why has no one seen it before?”

Wittenbrink continued in this vein almost entranced. “When has there ever been anything like it, that someone doesn’t need to work anything out, but simply writes down his inspirations, because he has always possessed them? Just compare Mozart’s notation, on the whole, at any rate, with that of Beethoven! He struggles with everything which Mozart came into the world with, and so Beethoven always writes incantatory music!” Naturally, I’ve forgotten most of what Wittenbrink said. But I still remember the impetuousness of his outburst. Some of the ideas also, such as, for example, that someone can be as light as air and at the same time deep, serene, and sad, literally in the same note, great and never banal. That he can translate even the most glaring contradictions into complete harmony without taking away anything of their opposition. “Anyone who hears the
Ave verum
,” he said, “must realize that no human voice can express devotion in that way. And it’s just the same with countless other emotions: for love the Rose aria from
The Marriage of Figaro
should be mentioned; for reverie the duet of Fiordiligi and Dorabella in
Così fan tutte
; for others, many movements from the piano concertos or passages from the string quartets.” He continued talking in the same fashion. At best Wittenbrink interrupted himself by throwing in the phrase “proof of the existence of God” from time to time. My two friends understood almost nothing of what he meant. I, at least, had some kind of schooling behind me. The way he said it seemed all the more convincing, and that day I understood how content can sometimes take second place to tone.

Shortly before we left, when the suitcases were already half-packed, my father suggested a short walk. At the sandhills, when there was no one to be seen far and wide, he came back to when he lost his temper: he had been upset because he had dreadful news from the East. When I asked for details, he refused to reply, and said, “Not now! Perhaps another time. Because it would only put you in danger!” He simply mentioned it, he added, to make his irritability comprehensible. His behavior had been a faux pas. But I should know that there had been reasons for it.

Nevertheless, anyone who kept his eyes open and summoned up a degree of mistrust toward those in power soon came across more and more clues about mass murders in Russia, Poland, and elsewhere. Certainly, much sounded contradictory and was only passed on as
rumor; but the accumulation turned what was reported into near certainty. I heard the first hints from Wigbert Gans on my next Berlin visit, and in Freiburg, too, there was whispering about indiscriminate shootings and mass graves. In spring 1944, and then again three months later, Wittenbrink, to the accompaniment of most earnest entreaties to keep silent, told me about hardly conceivable atrocities, which he had heard about from members of his congregation who had served on the Eastern Front and were at a loss what to do. He also said he had often discussed with my father—to the point where they were both in despair—what could be done about such crimes. Nevertheless, I should not say a word to my father about what I had learned, because Wittenbrink had promised he would tell us nothing. Besides which, each one of their conversations had ended with the two of them feeling even more oppressed by their powerlessness. In all the confidential pieces of information passed on to me, however, gas chambers were never mentioned. The frequently posed question was why the British broadcasting stations had not repeated and spread their knowledge of the extermination of large numbers of people, so causing outrage in the rest of the world. Yet London remained silent, said our religious studies teacher, whom I met as I left Freiburg Minster after one of the dissident, crowded Sunday sermons of Archbishop Gröber.

When, accompanied by my parents, I arrived at Anhalt Station with my two school friends, my father took us aside. As always, he walked down the platform to the end of the now partly damaged glass roof and a few
steps beyond that, while my mother remained behind at the carriage door with the older of my two sisters. “I trust you,” he said to my two friends, “and know that you won’t repeat a word.” When they nodded, he went on: “I expect to see the Russians at the Brandenburg Gate. Everyone accuses me of being pessimistic. I would like to be wrong, because in the long run knowing you were right is an empty triumph. I’ve already had too much of it.” Back at the carriage door, he said, “Make sure, if there’s anything you can do about it, that you stay in the West.” Then, as we were already crowding at the window to wave goodbye: “I expect God to give a sign at the end. I don’t dare say how that sign will turn out.” As the train moved ponderously off we heard my father above the puffing sounds, as he ran alongside, shouting, “I hope we’ll meet again!”

In Friedrichshafen we were back to the same routine as before with field duty, gun maintenance, empty hours in the afternoon, and thunderous snoring at night. During exercises Sergeant Grummel shouted all the time and tried to assume a grumpy facial expression. At irregular intervals, good-natured and potbellied Captain Kersting, who had a shop in Karlsruhe, inspected our drawn-up ranks and warned us to be even more vigilant. Because, since the fall of Mussolini and as the Allies slowly advanced, the air raids were becoming more frequent and now hardly a week passed in which we were not several times, by day as by night, called to man the guns.

The few teachers who had accompanied us to the camp were still there. At the blowing of a whistle we ran
with books and jotters in hand to the school hut. Dr. Kiefer had meanwhile got to Georg Büchner’s
Woyzeck
and in the new year read Gerhart Hauptmann’s
Before Dusk
with us.
¹³
To the disappointment of the class he no longer applied his trick of bringing the classics up to date, but then, when no one was expecting it anymore, with the help of an extended red-herring story, he took it up again with Keller’s
Green Henry
.

This time, too, in the face of the military situation, he frequently talked about doubt as the citizen’s first virtue, and I thought of Dr. Hausdorf, who said the same thing in different words. Following a suggestion by Dr. Kiefer, I started to read Nietzsche, as well as plays by Oscar Wilde. Like many of my generation, I also studied Spengler’s
The Decline of the West
, as well as an annotated edition of the Book of Revelation: all mixed up, half-understood, gripped by an apocalyptic mood.
¹⁴