Not I

ALSO BY JOACHIM FEST

Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich
(2005)

Speer: The Final Verdict
(2002)

Plotting Hitler’s Death:
The German Resistance to Hitler
(1996)

Hitler
(1974)

The Face of the Third Reich:
Portraits of the Nazi Leadership
(1970)

The author with his father in early 1941

Copyright © Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, 2006

Originally published in German by Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, Germany, in 2006 Translation copyright © Martin Chalmers, 2012

First published in English in Great Britain by Atlantic Books in 2012
Introduction and footnotes copyright © Herbert A. Arnold, 2013

All photos reproduced here are the property of the Fest family, except for the photo on
6.1
, whose copyright owner is unknown.

Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site:
www.otherpress.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Fest, Joachim C., 1926-2006.
[Ich nicht. English]
Not I : memoirs of a German childhood / by Joachim Fest; Translated from the German by Martin Chalmers; edited by Herbert A. Arnold.
pages cm
“Originally published in Germany by Rowohlt Verlag GmbH in 2006.”
ISBN 978-1-59051-610-2 (hardcover) —ISBN 978-1-59051-611-9 (ebook)
1. Fest, Joachim C., 1926-2006—Childhood and youth. 2. Anti-Nazi movement—Germany—World War II—Biography.   3. Historians—Germany—Biography.   4. National socialism.   5. Germany—National socialism—Biography.   I. Chalmers, Martin, translator.   II. Title.
DD86.7.F47A313 2013
907.2′02—dc23
[B]
2013018230

v3.1

For my parents

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Preface

  1. How Everything Came Together

  2. The World Falls Apart

  3. Even If All Others Do …

  4. Don’t Ever Become Sentimental!

  5. Leave-takings

  6. Alien Worlds

  7. Friends and Foes

  8. Of the Soldier’s Life and of Dying

  9. The Escape

10. Not Home Yet

11. Retrospect and a Brief Look Ahead

Postscript

About the Author

Introduction

BY HERBERT A. ARNOLD

This is a quite unusual memoir in several respects, yet it is a memoir all the same. Ever since St. Augustine’s
Confessions
, the genre has been defined as an ex post facto ordering of selective parts of a person’s past, to explain how he or she became who they are at the moment of retrospective. Achievements of adulthood tend to dominate, while childhood and youth are often underreported. Not here. Fest insists in his subtitle and in his book on describing in considerable detail his early years, between his birth in 1926 and the early postwar years; he leaves out altogether the adult achievements for which he is actually known, and ends with a brief postscript about his reaction to the unification of Germany in 1989–90.

Moreover, instead of focusing on his own life, he chooses to devote an extraordinary amount of attention to his father, of whom he presents an astonishing portrait. The other emphasis is on the times as experienced by an intelligent but naive youngster and his education, both formal and informal. And they are unusual times, indeed. Born into the Weimar Republic and its social and political turmoil, Fest has just begun school when the Nazis come to power in 1933. They and his family’s firm and costly refusal to cooperate with the new regime will shape the narrative until near the end of the war, when young Joachim is drafted, survives the battle at Remagen, and is captured by American troops. He returns to Berlin, the city with which he identifies most strongly, and begins his work as a journalist and, eventually, historian of recent German history.

What makes this book so remarkable, however, and may well explain its extraordinary success in Germany, where it became a best seller with staying power, are the portraits of his family, of fellow Germans, and of the times. A major part of that success lies in the complexity, the contradictions, and the conflicts endured by the characters in this memoir. No simple black-and-white picture, good and evil, right and wrong conflicts—although they are there, of course—but the conflicted and sometimes self-contradictory nature of the protagonists makes for compelling reading. Here are real and not always likable people trying to live a life guided by principles which are in direct and consciously maintained conflict with the prevailing political and social environment. And here is the record of their battles, their
survival, and the cost of refusing to collaborate with a state and a regime they recognized as evil earlier than most.

Focusing on the father, as the author does, demonstrates these contradictions most tellingly—and is a clever narrative stroke by the author, who clearly knows about his own internal contradictions, which he only touches upon on occasion. Johannes Fest is a bundle of just such contradictions. An upright conservative Catholic head of a primary school in predominantly Protestant Prussia, he is active in the Zentrum, the political arm of Catholicism in the Weimar Republic. He is also an active member of the Reichsbanner, a conservative paramilitary organization set up to combat the corresponding groupings of both Communists and Nazis, with whom they engage in bloody street fights.

Such associations normally clearly identify a right-wing conservative, middle-class radical, tailor-made for a career in the NSDAP, the National Socialist Workers Party, and the new order. Instead, and quite startlingly, he is a staunch supporter of Weimar democracy and intrepid opponent of the Nazis. He continues in this opposition, much to the consternation of his wife and to the detriment of the family, even after it costs him his job and social position and after the authorities try to tempt him to reverse his stance. Indeed, he revels in his outsider status, as does his son. That is the reason for the title, supposedly based on the Gospel of Matthew, and for the motto of the family: Us against the world. Again a contradiction, since this echoes
Viel Feind, viel Ehr
(Many enemies equals great honor), a popular saying of German right-wing conservatives and
militarists. Yet here it means the inner emigration of the family unit, the mutual support, and the rejection of the dominant spirit of the times.

The father’s life also demonstrates how ineffective even the most determined opponents of Nazism were in practice—and how conflicted. Every time Hitler achieved one of his early coups—the annexation of Austria, the defeat of France—Johannes Fest was torn. He had wanted the union with Austria for the Weimar Republic—but not for Hitler and not as annexation; he reveled in the defeat of France as a justified revenge for her intransigence and spitefulness toward Weimar—but not as a victory for Hitler.

The German patriot and the antifascist were in constant conflict with each other, a situation that would become even more serious as the war progressed and the first inklings of the Holocaust became evident. Here Fest—both the father and the son—depart most clearly from many other Germans who have argued ignorance after the war. The Fests insist that information was available, even if not easily corroborated, and that the nature of the regime and its deeds were clearly visible to all who wanted to see. They would therefore also not accept what they saw as the paroxysms of guilt after the war—and thus, once again, found themselves at odds with their society and their countrymen. It is this outsider status Fest sees as the distinctive characteristic of his family, a tradition honed under Nazism but proudly maintained throughout: they are mavericks, outsiders, not unlike the characters of Thomas Mann’s narratives, which Joachim admires and his father condemns because of Mann’s earlier “nonpolitical views.”

There is another major influence on Joachim Fest’s youth: the introduction to German and European culture, especially its music and literature, which are made available by both his home and his schools, but even more so by friends and mentors, who provide him with an academy of learning and questioning outside the confines of formal education. Whether it is an aunt who takes him to his first opera, a neighboring clergyman who loves Beethoven’s
Fidelio
at least as much as disputing theological conundrums, or his older brother Wolfgang, who always seems a step ahead in his reading—young Joachim is a sponge and a classic example of the German
Bildungsbürger
, the broadly educated bourgeois who has gone to a Gymnasium.
¹
They constitute a quite unselfconscious elite with an ethos derived from German idealist philosophy and popularized by the great German writers and thinkers of the past century and a half. This ethos is also shared by most of the Fests’ many Jewish friends who populate this memoir. For many of them it became lethal because it kept them from leaving Germany in time to escape the Holocaust. Many of them argued that “their” Germany could never succumb to the rule of something as crude as Nazism and ignored the warnings of their friends like the Fests.

Few of them are still alive, therefore, during the postwar years, when Joachim makes his career in radio and
television journalism and as a historian of the Third Reich. That adult portion of the author’s life is totally missing, but it must be taken into account when one assesses the success of this memoir in Germany, because it is this public Joachim Fest—the conservative critic of the predominant cultural left in the Federal Republic of Germany—whose origins are here revealed. After two years as a prisoner of war and privileged by the known antifascist past of his family, he—as he recounts in these pages—more or less accidentally wound up researching and making public the Nazi past through his early work at Radio im Amerikanischen Sektor (RIAS, Radio in the American Sector of Berlin). His dream had been to become a
Privatgelehrter
(an independent scholar), working on obscure aspects of the Italian Renaissance, preferably supported by a beautiful and rich wife, while residing in some palazzo. Instead he was asked to work up portraits of some of the Nazi bigwigs for a radio series as a part of the American effort in reeducating the Germans after the war. These radio portraits led to books on Hitler, Albert Speer, the German resistance, and the end of Hitler, among others.

After rising through the ranks in radio and on German television to become editor in chief of Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), the North German Broadcasting Network, Fest became responsible for the major political magazine
Panorama
, from which he resigned for political reasons. He then proceeded to write and publish his biography of Hitler (1973), the first by a German author, and aided Albert Speer, Hitler’s protégé and armaments minister, in the publishing of his autobiography, before being
invited to become coeditor of Germany’s most prominent conservative newspaper, the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
(
FAZ
), whose cultural section he edited from 1973 through 1993. From that public platform he participated in the so-called
Historikerstreit
, a dispute initially among German historians about the nature of the Holocaust. At stake was the claim of the singularity or uniqueness of the Holocaust when compared to other mass atrocities of modern times, such as the Khmer Rouge’s mass killings in Cambodia. The predominant view of the mainly left-leaning German historians, most of whom were social history adherents, was challenged by Ernst Nolte, Fest, and others. Jürgen Habermas, Eberhard Jäckel, and many others responded and a lengthy battle ensued, in which many non-German historians became embroiled as well, because of the historical and moral sensitivity of the issues involved. The current memoir allows the reader to see where Fest’s skeptical and pessimistic challenge comes from: a dim view of human nature in general, pride in being an outsider to prevailing majority opinion, and a skeptical rejection of historical generalizations—all of which permeate the pages of his memoir. These are lessons, he insists, instilled by his father, the Nazis, the war, and postwar experiences upon which he has based his
Lebensregeln
(principles for life), as he likes to call them.