Not I (39 page)

He stopped short. Then he angrily threw the leather-bound volume with my favorite poems at me. I held the book tight and paid no attention to his shouting. My first taste of freedom was to act as if I couldn’t hear him. The last time I glanced back, he was still looking at me, open-mouthed, even as he waved the next prisoner over. For a moment I thought that I had opened his eyes. Not until some time later did it occur to me that he had not understood at all what I wanted to tell him.

In another ten minutes I was out of the gate.

1
The German armed forces surrendered in Rheims on May 7, 1945, and in Karlshorst, Berlin, where the Russians were headquartered, on May 9.—Trans.

2
This library of small-format paperbacks made available to GIs and, later, interested Germans, literary works that had been unavailable in Nazi Germany.

3
Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, a German writer who, among other things, analyzed the effects of mass hysteria in his writings, was born in East Prussia in 1884 and died in Dachau concentration camp on February 17, 1945, shortly before the camp was liberated by the Allies.

Reinhold Schneider (1903–58) dealt extensively with issues of power and religious belief and the conflict between earthly power and divine providence in numerous essays, dramas, and narratives.

Romano Guardini (1885–1968) was a most influential Catholic theologian and youth leader after 1945; the Nazis had forced him into early retirement in 1939, but he returned to teach at Munich University.

4
After Germany’s military defeat in 1945, its territory—except for those parts permanently detached and given to other states like Poland or the Soviet Union, for example—was occupied by the Allied forces and initially divided into four occupation zones: American, British, Soviet, and French. Different laws, rules, and regulations pertained in all four and travel and commerce were severely limited, hampering the reconstruction effort. These zones only ceased to exist in 1949 with the formation of the two German states, the Federal Republic of Germany in the West (i.e., the three zones occupied by the United States, Great Britain, and France) and the German Democratic Republic in the East (the former Soviet Zone). But all foreign powers retained a military presence well into the 1990s, and the United States does so to this day.

5
Cigarettes were the most sought-after fungible commodity after 1945. Since the old Reichsmark was completely devalued, a black market featuring direct exchanges of commodities took the place of the monetary economy, and cigarettes, especially American brands, became the new money. This situation was ended by the introduction of a new currency, the Deutschmark, in 1948.

6
These girls’ names are all titles of and central to popular soldiers’ marching songs known to all.

TEN
•

Not Home Yet

From Heilbronn I traveled to Freiburg. In my kitbag there was some underwear, my toilet things, the three books I had been left with in Unkel, and the leather-bound poems, which I had in part written down from memory, in part taken from books available to me in the camp. Leafing through the pages I once again read the verses of poets unfamiliar to me until recently, such as Blake and Keats, also Mallarmé and Baudelaire and one or two favorite poems like Auden’s “If I Could Tell You,” which begins “Time will say nothing,” and Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” I had copied them out on evenings at headquarters when I had nothing to do, and then given them as a loose-leaf collection to the bookbinder Franz Scheuer. He had bound the pages so magnificently in leather cut from baseball gloves and the best officers’
boots that even the fat sergeant at the release camp had been taken by the volume.

When I got off the train in Freiburg I was glad—after all the destroyed towns of the European landscape of ruins through which I had passed in the last three years—to see a city that was only a little damaged. The one heavy air raid had not had too serious an impact, apart from a trail of rubble between the cathedral and the main railway station. At any rate, one encountered nowhere here the dirty colors which dominated the devastated cities all the way to Berlin; the aquatint tones of the town, the gentle sandstone red and unobtrusive grays, behind them the green of the castle hill, seemed almost like home. In a letter to my parents, in which for the first time in years I could express myself more or less openly, and, above all, explain why I had not applied for release to Berlin, I wrote:
All in all I was out of the world. Now I’m back. Not yet home. But in Freiburg at least, which has almost become in a small way my home. Who would have thought it!

The mother of my friend Helmut put me up in her house in Herdern. Her husband had died in the air raid on the town; her son was buried in France. But her attractive daughter was still there, as was my brother Winfried. After a few hours of exuberant conversation I went for a long walk with my brother—as we also did on the days that followed—across Sonnhalde Hill or up the Castle Hill. He told me about our parents and our two sisters, who, in 1944, after a third warning, had joined the BDM—the League of German Girls—but
had concealed their membership from my father. Then he reported on the expulsion from Karlshorst,
¹
the small flat in the Berlin district of Neukölln that the family had been allocated, the fate of my grandparents, and my Gymnasium class in Freiburg. In the last days of the war, according to Winfried, almost half of my former classmates had been shot not far away on a hillside in Alsace by a unit of General Lattre de Tassigny’s forces that did not want to take prisoners.
²

Winfried asked me how I had got through war and captivity, and I told him about the six days without food, the lieutenant from Heidelberg in Unkel, Captain Donaldson, and the escape attempt. During our walk I had the idea that instead of a book about the Italian Renaissance I would make the great cataclysms of history my subject in the coming years, because historical catastrophes were not only a matter of the epoch just passed but of life in general. Winfried merely laughed and said I should come down to earth again as soon as possible. First of all I had to earn my school-leaving certificate or
Abitur
and study something useful. “The plums are for the middle of life,” he added. “Besides which the topic is not at all as interesting to others as you assume.” People
only wanted to hear about the misfortune they had suffered once they were over the worst; but they were a long way from that now. Not even he was there yet.

Our conversation was a clash of two temperaments. Winfried had a greater sense of reality then, and he had wit. On our second or third walk he answered my question about his experiences in his modest way: “Oh, nothing special.” When I then asked what was special that he wanted to conceal behind the “nothing special,” he said simply, “Well, a small escape.” I had to insist before he came out with the story and related how the war had ended for him. In the last days of March 1945, the French troops had reached the other side of the Rhine at Breisach. When Winfried then received his call-up papers, he decided to spend “the next few hours,” as he supposed, in a hiding place on the outskirts of Freiburg. Out of consideration for the Weidners, he let them believe he was obeying the conscription order. In fact, however, he had agreed with the baker Welle, who lived at the end of the street, that he would wait for the arrival of the French in the family’s allotment hut.
³

But then the waiting went on and on. The French troops let days pass without making any preparations for a crossing of the Rhine. After Winfried had spent almost two weeks behind piles of coal, potatoes, and refuse, he went for a brief walk “to stretch his legs,” but after only
a few steps ran into a Gestapo patrol. He was taken to the same police station in which I had been interrogated months before. Winfried took care not to mention where he had been staying or who had helped him. On the third day he was brought to the local barracks. He was put in a cell with eleven others who had either deserted or, like himself, not obeyed the call-up; no one could say for sure what was going to happen to them. Some thought they would all be shot; others objected that even now there were no executions without formal proceedings; a few claimed to have information that they would all be released within forty-eight hours. The Führer, after all, was “no monster.”

After another few days the twelve prisoners were led to the barracks yard. There a lieutenant with a small staff and four older, very worn-out-looking soldiers were waiting for them. A sergeant announced that they would now march to the nearby town of St. Peter, because the Wehrmacht command considered it too great a risk to have so many “unreliable elements” in the ranks for the forthcoming battle with the French; after all, it was a question of final victory. After some disciplinary instructions the order to march was given.

That afternoon, escorted by the sergeant and the four soldiers, they marched up the Dreisamtal Valley. Winfried assured me that he had never had the slightest doubt that in St. Peter they would be put in front of a firing squad. Halfway there, they took a forest path in order to avoid attracting attention, and after a mile or two stopped for a short rest. He decided, acting on the spur
of the moment, to do something “extremely crazy,” as he later said. Without warning, he threw himself to the side and leaped down the slope at a point where there were only a few shrubs growing.

After a moment of astonished silence, he heard agitated commands and shouts behind him.

Shots were fired. But they struck the trees around him and ricocheted and whistled around his head. As he crouched in a hollow, he could hear the voices of two searchers about twenty yards behind him. Then they were ordered back by the sergeant, who, worried about further escape attempts, had remained up on the path with the prisoners. Winfried waited until the sounds of the group had faded away and then made his way back to Herdern. Close to Friedrich Gymnasium he spotted a military police patrol coming up the street, but was able to disappear, unseen, into a house entrance. “That would really have been the end,” he thought as he heard the two men come past the door talking loudly. At the baker’s house they were dismayed, but did not hesitate to let him use the hiding place again.

This time he was more cautious. He spent almost all of the following days underneath a woodpile; he left no trace of his presence when he went out for some fresh air for a quarter of an hour at night and on his return carefully arranged the wood above himself as a decorative chaos. A few times he heard voices very close by. After more than two weeks, the French at last moved into Freiburg on April 20. “I was not free,” Winfried concluded his report. “But I could at least move my limbs.
That was quite a lot. It was days before I could walk normally again.” Later it was said that his fellow prisoners had all been shot in St. Peter, but he did not know whether the information was more than a rumor. It was probably true, but he had not checked it. He had never wanted to make a big thing of his escape.

A few days after my return, just before Christmas 1946, I called on the headmaster of my school. Dr. Breithaupt had been my homeroom teacher and thanks to the vicissitudes of the time had now become rector of the Friedrich Gymnasium. Already on entering his office I realized that he had remained the strict, stiff man who had introduced us to Greek and taught us to read the
Odyssey
. Since he had enlisted my help privately on a number of occasions, I expected a certain amount of understanding on his part. Instead, he remained surprisingly cool and listened condescendingly to the account of my experiences, which I summed up in a few sentences, before curtly responding to the not unimportant question of which class was to be recommended: “You can enter the top form (senior class), which will give you a bare six months until the examination. Or the class below—there you lose more than a year, seventeen and a half months to be precise. But then you have better prospects for obtaining your certificate. The choice is yours. As rector of the Friedrich Gymnasium it only remains for me to say: there will be no special considerations!” Dr. Breithaupt seemed somewhat taken aback when I merely muttered a disappointed “Thank you,” turned on my heel, and left. That same day I decided that, to lose no time and to get
school over with as quickly as possible, I would enter the senior class.

At Christmas my mother came to Freiburg and was likewise put up at the Weidners. She had already been trying since late summer to get the necessary permit from the American occupation authorities, before she was finally allowed to make the journey to the French Zone. We were dismayed by the emaciated, scraggly picture that she presented, and how empty her eyes were. Now we heard for the first time details of the evacuation of Karlshorst in early May 1945, which it was better not to mention in correspondence, since letters were still monitored. Each person was allowed just one suitcase, into which, given the haste that was demanded, my mother had stuffed only what was most necessary: some underwear, bread, a suit and a jacket for my father, some laundry soap, and a few documents quickly snatched up. She had had to abandon her beloved “casket,” buried in the garden.

To list the numerous acts of violence—in particular against the female relatives on my father’s side—would take up an entire chapter. At the beginning, Uncle Berthold on the Walken Farm had borne the barbarities of the Russian conquerors with impotent anger, but when the brutalities against his wife and daughters had gone beyond all measure, he had begged one of the soldiers to show some human consideration. Instead of even listening to him, the soldier had drawn his revolver and shot my uncle in the head. Even more shattering was the fate of my “other” aunt, Franziska, who was crippled by polio: pulled out of
her wheelchair and repeatedly raped, she was flung back into her chair and thrown down the cellar stairs, where she died after moaning for more than two hours. It was a long sequence of atrocities, which my mother revealed unwillingly and only after some persuasion.