Not I (13 page)

I have forgotten most of Old Kat’s jokes long ago, though I remember him quoting Shakespeare with reference to Göring, saying a man may smile and smile and yet be a villain. “I got that from the Workers’ Educational Association,” he said.

In summer 1937 it was time for me to go to secondary school, and since there was no classical Gymnasium in Karlshorst my parents decided to send me—as Wolfgang had been two years earlier—to the Canisius Kolleg, a Catholic school run by Jesuits, even though it was in Westend, on the other side of the city. Because of its excellent reputation it was inundated with applicants, and to limit the annual rush for places a difficult entrance exam had been introduced. Nevertheless, that same year the Education Ministry declared it had decided to close the school due to lack of demand. A few days after I discovered I had passed the test and been accepted for the school, another letter arrived to cancel the admission.

That was one disappointment. The other was that in that same year the school caps with colored ribbons were banned. Wolfgang’s, as far as I remember, had white and shiny green ribbons. The braiding on the caps was graded according to year;
¹⁶
now they were abolished in
the name of national unity. Some compensation was provided by the briefcase, which my grandfather gave me as replacement for the ridiculous school satchel which I had carried to elementary school.

So I found myself at the Leibniz Gymnasium, a huge reddish-brick building on the Mariannenufer by the River Spree, not far from the Silesian mainline station. For generations the area had been a gateway for the mass of immigrants from the east, like the Scheunenviertel by Alexanderplatz not far away. The classroom smelled of stale sweat, leather bags, and margarine sandwiches. During breaks and after lessons we played football in the schoolyard or practiced taking corner kicks, complicated passes, and, individually, even the high art of the backheel. We also enjoyed, three or four of us at a time, just keeping the leather ball in the air with headers, and we often spent whole afternoons on Hentigstrasse playing dodgeball with Hansi Streblow, “Kutti,” and Sternekieker. “Motte” Böhm, a somewhat older girl, who always had an inherited tram conductor’s bag with a polished silver buckle around her shoulder, invariably took the part of the referee.

It must have been around this time or a little later that my father returned depressed from one of the meetings with his friends. There were still nothing but defeats, he said. Mielitz had reported—and Classe, with his English contacts, had confirmed it—that Fleet Street from
The Times
to Lord Rothermere’s
Daily Mail
showed undisguised sympathy for the Nazis.
The Saturday Review
front page had recently been taken up with HEIL HITLER in large letters. All had agreed that next
to nothing could be expected from Britain. Acknowledge the benefits of dictatorship was the message coming from the island, only a halfway civilized form of tyranny held the prospect of moving things on.

He himself would never understand, continued my father, why everyone who opposed Hitler was inevitably, sooner or later, left out in the cold. There had been a long, sometimes heated discussion about that. Agreement was only reached when it was concluded that they had been hopelessly unprepared for the dictatorship. What had come out on top in Germany might occur in darkest Russia or the Balkans, but surely not in their law-abiding country. What had happened? That was the question raised on all sides, but no one had an answer. In this agitated atmosphere Krone had finally said that in critical situations leaving a question unresolved was the best means of sticking together. One just had to accept that there were no easy answers.

Long-established bonds were not always equal to the pressures of the situation. Kalli Vaupel, one of my father’s close friends from his student days, had spent many years in the rural Uckermark not far from Berlin, and had failed to make the longed-for move to the capital. He was bald (to the degree that we called “polished”), had a wiry figure and an inexhaustible sense of humor, and even appreciated bad jokes. Later, he became less and less cheerful and began to drink. He couldn’t see a way out of the dark hole he was in, he said, yet he had to get it behind him; he just didn’t know how.

Perhaps, as some acquaintances suspected, the cause of Karl Vaupel’s depression was really his conspicuously attractive, very sporty wife. At any rate she was the reason the two friends drifted apart, because she, in the jargon of the time, was an enthusiastic
Nazisse
. She was capable of maintaining in all seriousness that the Führer had been “sent by God” and that the Lord had great things in store for Germany. Again and again there were arguments because of her, so that at some point both sides preferred to meet only occasionally and let the decades-old friendship peter out.

Irmi Vaupel was active in a party organization and, after the outbreak of war, in a uniform-wearing one; it was even rumored that, driven by admiration and ambition, she had risen through the ranks of the guard unit of a women’s concentration camp. After the war she was interned together with her husband. I have forgotten her further career. Kalli Vaupel got to know a very attractive American Jewish woman while he was being interrogated in a camp in Bavaria. She was employed in the U.S. camp administration and he fell in love with her. Since he was not accused of anything he was released after a few months, obtained a divorce, and married the American. Kalli was a weaker and more fickle personality than he had thought, said my father. The times were full of lives which took an absurd course, often dramatically and crazily so. Many were unable to resist the folly of the times. When, toward the end of the Hitler years, they regained their senses, it was too late.

One of my classmates, with whom I was friends and shared a number of interests, was Gerd Schülke, who lived in public housing close to the hospital. He had an alert, quiet character and lent me books that had made an impression on him. On a map of the world divided into squares we played Battleship; later we replayed historic sea battles from Salamis to Trafalgar and Jutland.
¹⁷
We threw dice for each movement of a fleet. He also invented the impending naval war in which the German Reich always put to sea against the British fleet. England was the enemy, he said, no other, because one needed to have a strong opponent if the victory was to be worth anything. Yet the course of battle was left to the throw of the dice. Reality, Gerd said, was not so very different.

Among the high points of the end of the year was the Christmas market around the royal palace. The memory of the majestic yet comfortable building designed by the architect Schlüter is for me always linked to the blissful fairground world of the days before Christmas, to colored lights, tinsel, and gingerbread. We admired the radiant Christmas tree, the merry-go-rounds and the Father Christmases bobbing up and down on them, and enjoyed the smell of baked apples and burnt almonds. And no visit was complete without explanations about the building of the palace or a look at the Schlüter courtyard. And, rising above it all, the somewhat squeaky
harmoniums playing Christmas carols. At the booths one could shoot metal arrows at stars, rubber candles, or Christmas balloons, and once by a stroke of luck I won five sticks of candy floss, which was so good for making my sisters’ hair sticky. It was a world of magic, fairground, and pre-Christmas happiness, and every one of these excursions ended with a childhood tragedy: when our parents called out that it was time to go home. From the S-Bahn train we still saw the sky above the palace glowing red, before the image faded away in the twilight of the great city.

Sometimes one of our parents’ friends also accompanied us. Once it was Felix Ernst with his sleeked-down hair who joined us, and whose little, mysterious smile never left him all evening. Not even on the ghost train, which Wolfgang and I had with a great effort persuaded him to go on, did it change. On another occasion we were joined by Hans Hausdorf, who, during the whole three hours in which we were pushed along between the booths and the candles, balanced a box of pastries for my mother on the tip of a finger. Sometimes the Goderskis also came with us, and once the Patzeks came, with (as we whispered to one another) the “whole flock of kids.”
¹⁸
But there were always tears when we left.

In the early days of 1938 we received a call from Dr. Goldschmidt. By chance I picked up the phone. He asked
what the new school was like, what my favorite subjects were, and how I got on with the boys from the proletariat. Then he asked to speak to my father. There was something interesting he had to tell him. I stayed in the room and observed from the guest’s chair as my father listened with an increasingly somber expression. Now and then he came out with a “So!” or a “Really!” and toward the end of the conversation made an unintelligible remark. When he had put down the receiver he remained silent at his desk for a while, and then said that in his incorrigible patriotism Dr. Goldschmidt had been trying to convince him that people were making a misjudgment in their eternal touchiness about the Nazis. Today he had gone to a government office on behalf of a client. The official he had had to deal with had been altogether accommodating, despite the “big” party badge in his buttonhole, and in clipped sentences had assented to everything Dr. Goldschmidt had requested, or at least hinted at one or another loophole. When Dr. Goldschmidt had thanked him, the official had replied with a smile, “But Herr Doctor! We’re not monsters after all!”

“I ask you!” Dr. Goldschmidt had added. “There you have it: not monsters! Just a little bit barracks square in tone! Too loud for our civilian world!” Nevertheless, he preferred that to noncommittal talking around a thing; he had always said that distrust makes one blind. At this remark, said my father, he had been dumbfounded, so that he had merely been able to interject: “And trust even more so.” After this remark Dr. Goldschmidt had said goodbye with a laugh and ironically urged my father to
turn over a new leaf. “One more thing that’s incomprehensible,” said my father, when he came to talk about the incident at second dinner: someone who didn’t notice that he was down on the ground, “Even when you shout it in his ears.”

As usual, when my father was beside himself, my mother’s lips began to tremble and it was easy to imagine that she was about to exclaim, “Please, Hans. Not in front of the children!” Instead, she only looked anxiously from one to the other and remained silent. Hardly had we swallowed our last mouthful when she began to clear the table to prevent any further conversation.

1
This line, which gives Fest the title of his memoir, may be translated as “Even if all others do—I do not!” The King James translation of this verse (Matthew 26:33) reads rather differently: “Peter answered and said unto him: Though all men shall be offended because of thee, yet will I never be offended.” German Bible translations don’t really correspond, either.—Trans.

2
Willi Domgraf-Fassbender was a famous and popular baritone, Elly Ney a pianist. Ney was a notably enthusiastic Nazi. Arthur Rother was likewise a keen Nazi; his career continued without a break after 1945.—Trans.

3
This was the lowest rank of National Socialist party officials above the regular rank and file, the most zealous of whom enforced petty Nazi requirements, such as the hoisting of flags and attendance at rallies, often to the annoyance of their neighbors.

4
Max Fechner (1892–1973), SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) member, survived the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and joined the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), but was demoted from his positions, imprisoned, and excluded from the party for supporting the striking workers in the uprising of 1953. He was rehabilitated in 1958.

Fest mentions Fechner and Franz Künstler (SPD) to show his father’s connections to and openness for leftist ideas and persons, to counterbalance his father’s otherwise mainly right-wing leanings.

5
This is a much higher estimate than professional historians would currently give.—Trans.

6
Presumably a reference to the jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt.—Trans.

7
The full title of the left-of-center paramilitary force supported by the SPD, the trade unions, and the Catholic Zentrum party, among others, was
Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold
(Black-Red-Gold, after the colors of the republican flag).—Trans.

8
This invocation of the most notoriously deadly battles of World War One is often used to stress the bravery, patriotism, and sacrifices of German Jews in that war.

9
The Spittelmarkt was the center of Berlin’s rag trade, in which Jews were very prominent.—Trans.

10
Empress Auguste Viktoria, wife of the last German emperor, was noted for her promotion of church buildings to overawe the godless Berliners.—Trans.

11
Adolf Stöcker (1835–1909) was a Protestant pastor and right-wing politician, central to whose program was anti-Semitism; for some years Stöcker was cathedral and court preacher in Berlin before being removed because of his extremism. Theodor Fritsch was an anti-Semitic journalist and pamphleteer, defender of the rights of small trade, active before and after the First World War; he compiled the
Handbook on the Jewish Question
.—Trans.

12
Ernst Thälmann (1886–1944), German Communist leader who ran for the presidency of the Weimar Republic against Hindenburg and Hitler. The Führer hated him intensely and had him sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1933, where he was executed on August 28, 1944.