Not I (14 page)

13
The “mosque” mentioned above.—Trans.

14
A Horch is the ultimate prestige motor car of the period; Adolf Hitler was driven in one.

15
Paul Linke’s “Berliner Luft” song is to Germans what Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” is to Americans. And the big show
People, Animals, Sensations
was turned into a popular movie.

16
These German schoolboy’s caps of various shapes, in the colors of the school, were normally the only item of uniform worn by Gymnasium students and identified them as such.—Trans.

17
These are major historical maritime battles from the Greeks via the Napoleonic Wars to the First World War; to Germans it is the Battle of Skagerrak, not Jutland.

18
This is an allusion to a children’s song in which all the birds return in spring: “Amsel, Drossel, Fink und Star, und die ganze Vogelschar” (Blackbird, thrushes, finch and starlings, and the whole flock of birds).

FOUR
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Don’t Ever Become Sentimental!

It was an utterly politicized world in which we were growing up. Many conversations and almost all personal decisions were made with an eye to the prevailing situation. Certainly, I know contemporaries who also grew up in Berlin at this time who perceived things differently. Apart from the National Prayer, which in some schools was recited in chorus on National Socialist celebration days, the Hitler Youth uniform, and the youth movement songs like the one about the wild geese sweeping through the night with shrill cries, they were not affected by politics.
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Nevertheless, the traditional rules of upbringing still applied, in our home perhaps even a little more than elsewhere. But they were never talked about, except in the form of the fixed formulas that we heard again and again, but whose cryptic meaning we did not understand until later: Don’t pout!, Don’t make such a fuss!, Children shouldn’t talk without being spoken to! And at table one was not to mention money, scandals, or the food being served. The principles expressed in such rules were never expanded on. No words were lost on them. They were taken as self-explanatory and were considered as basic to proper behavior. Once, when my mother complained about my impudence, my father said, “Just let him be! Let him be cheeky! Here at least. We just have to teach him where the limits are. If he doesn’t grasp it here, then outside he’ll be shown the limit soon enough.”

With all of that, our almost implicit upbringing was the very antithesis of the regime with its anticivic impulse, and today, after the passing of the years, I see it as a kind of story of civil development in uncivil times. Those in power knew nothing of civilized social intercourse, my father assured us, and consequently they were not ruling over a thousand-year Reich, but one that went back at least five thousand years, “deep into the primeval forest.” In a paper on education he noted: “All theories of education derive from a chorus of many voices. It stretches from the Ten Commandments to the moral treatises of philosophy and the great works of literature, and to much else to which whole libraries bear witness. And all of it
is directed at a really quite modest goal: to teach human beings a few self-evident truths.”

Translated into everyday terms these self-evident truths amounted to setting store by “decency” and “good manners” and to showing “consideration.” Apart from which one should not regard formality, as Hans Hausdorf, my parents’ friend, with his love of paradox, once said, “as mere formality.” And my mother liked to conclude her educational epistles with a sentence we had heard countless times since early childhood, whether one of us had cut his knee and my mother was attending to it with her bottle of iodine, or one of us complained about unfair marks or about a referee whom we thought had constantly blown his whistle to penalize our football club SC Karlshorst: “Just don’t get sentimental!”—which for her meant don’t moan, don’t feel sorry for yourself, don’t weep tears for what can’t be helped. Once, when Christa, the wilder of my two sisters, had fallen and sought help from my mother with a bleeding knee, I heard my mother say, while soothingly stroking her, “Don’t cry, my dear! Don’t cry! Weeping is for the maid’s room!” A certain amount of social pride was always involved in the ban on self-pity. But far more important than that was the feeling of being subject to a stricter code of conduct.

Much more often, however, there was the world of untroubled days, on which no homework had to be done, none of our duties—increasing in number as one grew older—had to be carried out, and there were no bottles of iodine to be seen far and wide. The summer holidays were the high point. When July came we regularly
traveled to the Walken, my grandparents’ isolated farm, a couple of miles from the village of Liebenau in the Neumark of Brandenburg. My uncle Berthold had taken it over when he married one of my father’s elder sisters. He was a capable, hardworking man. Everyone feared his strictness; and his mustache, stiffly drawn out when he went to church, further increased the impression of a rough countryman’s temperament. The farm was situated in a landscape of frugal dignity, and the gentle hills across which plow and harrow had to be drawn made cultivation that much more difficult. But my uncle had two sons and two daughters, who were as hardworking as he was and blessed with as practical an intelligence. They were between five and ten years older than us. As far as we were concerned they coped quite effortlessly with a difficult role somewhere between that of minder and playmate. We children were particularly taken by the cheerful Irene. She taught us to swim, accompanied us as we lay in wait for and tried to hunt wild rabbits (usually in vain), and instructed us how to catch field mice, which bit us if they could, on the freshly harvested fields. Authority can often make children flinch, but she exercised it without the least trace of intimidation. We all loved her.

The farmstead formed a square, with a domestic wing, two stable-and-stall wings, and a barn with a threshing floor. It had two gates, one opening onto the sandy road to Liebenau, the other onto a slightly sloping track, which led past a pine wood to nearby Lake Packlitz. The farm buildings with the large inner yard lay at the center of more than
two hundred acres of scattered fields, which demanded at least ten months a year of exhausting work. When we were announced at holiday time, Uncle Berthold hitched up the horses and waited for us at Schwiebus Station twelve miles away. In his good suit, wearing a homburg hat and with an “anointed mustache,” as we called it, he sat on the “throne” of the shiny Sunday carriage. With awkward courtesy he invited one of us children to sit up on the driver’s seat beside him. If it was too hot my mother opened her little parasol, and we children poked fun at her and said she looked like a princess, who on some whim had ordered her liveried servants to climb down and make their way back to the castle on foot. She smiled then and hugged whichever of her children had the funniest idea as the story was spun out further and further. And sometimes, if the child was sitting farther away on the coach seat, she stroked his or her head.

The drive from Schwiebus seemed endless and often took two hours or more. When it was along deep, bumpy, sandy tracks, the flanks of the horses were stained by sweaty foam in the afternoon heat, and the buzzing horseflies circled excitedly around them. Once at the farmyard we used a couple of rags to kill the insects, which, exhausted by their bloodsucking, had mainly settled on the horses’ necks and haunches. Meanwhile, Uncle Berthold changed into his working clothes and with a long peel, which our aunt handed him, drew eight to ten trays of still-steaming cakes out of the oven: crumble-topped
Bienenstich
and apple cake, whose scent spread to the farthest corners of the house.

As a tireless workingman, my uncle had only one blind spot: he could not imagine that beyond work and perhaps prayer there was any other meaningful activity in life. So it was usually already on the evening of our arrival that he allocated our tasks for the next day. “We rise at five!” he said. “That’s normal here, even for city layabouts!” Over the years a running battle developed between him and us boys, when, always at nightfall, he issued his instructions for gleaning, haymaking, or stacking sheaves. Only my sisters, gentle Hannih and boisterous Christa, were spared. In the beginning we asked or pleaded for a couple of hours of swimming in the lake or for time to read. But my uncle simply growled something about “nonsense” and that was the end of it.

We, however, thought as obedient sons: No complaining! Just don’t get sentimental! Every evening, after we had gone across to one of the tiny bedrooms from the kitchen with our candles, Wolfgang, with Winfried and me, elaborated cunning strategies that would enable us to slip away while passing through a wood and gather mushrooms or on a hilly field chase partridges. But soon the cleverest tricks we thought up came to nothing, because my uncle kept an all too suspicious eye on us. Sometimes we also hid fishing rods in a hazel bush and the next morning made our way to the nearby lock, where the fish liked to linger in the bubbling water. But neither the pail with barbels, tench, eels, and puny whitefish we brought back or the middling pike we now and then transported in a second pail were enough to pacify my uncle. We had not obeyed his instructions, he barked.

And our beloved uncle could do no more than shake his head when I once asked him whether in winter he did nothing more than carry out the necessary repairs. Good-naturedly he responded, “Why? Of course, there’s nothing else!” At that I retorted that then he should understand that we had our winter in the summer; that’s how it was in the city! The long holidays were our repair time, as it were. So he shouldn’t be always forcing us to work. There was a long pause. Then my uncle tugged at the tips of his mustache and grumbled, his arms outstretched on the table, “That’s going too far for me!”

My parents usually stayed only a few days, and later I asked myself whether it was only after their departure that we began to “run behind the barn.” During his stay on the parental farm my father worked too, and showed that he still knew how to handle a scythe and a pitchfork, whereas my mother appeared rather lost in a world that was foreign to her. Our greatest love as children was the smithy, in which the horseshoes were made. As soon as the fire was kindled we were allowed to blow air into the embers until the charcoal in the middle of the forge began to glow deep red. Then the iron was placed in the fire until it too glowed, and then, blow by blow on the anvil, it was shaped to fit the horse’s foot. Hammer raised, my uncle stood in front of the hearth and was surrounded by the smell of burnt hoof when he nailed the shoe to the patient animal. And once, in the course of the holiday, usually toward the end, a pig was slaughtered, a process we followed with a mixture of horror and fascination.

The three brothers in 1933 at the Berlin Zoo: (left to right) Joachim, Winfried, and Wolfgang

Despite the constant running battle with my uncle, the Walken was the carefree, much loved playground of our early years. Packlitzsee, by which the farmstead was picturesquely situated as if placed there by the hand of an artist, was a modest stretch of water a couple of hundred yards long and broad. Since its surface lay a little below the woods around it, I remember it as a dark, smooth lake, rippling and glittering only at the edges. I shall never forget the gentle, bluish light above its surface, the scent of the pine woods behind us, and the fine white sand at the bathing place, which always got stuck between our toes. In addition, the sounds of the summer afternoon heat: the gurgling of the waves, the woodpecker hammering away somewhere, the splashing
of the leaping fish and a little further on the cries of the diving birds, which at every call dipped head first into the water. It was as if time stood still. Only the myriad mosquitoes that feasted upon us disturbed the feeling of never-ending holidays.

The greenery of the beeches, birches, and weeping willows which lined the shore of the lake, and whose branches at points trailed in the water, was only broken on the opposite shore. This was particularly evident in the early evening sun. Then the glowing yellow facade of a baroque monastery with two towers stood out. It had been founded in the thirteenth century by Cistercians and later rebuilt in the Silesian Baroque style. With its bright magic it spread an atmosphere of silence and solemnity, which ever since I have associated with this style. The small village behind the monastery, hidden by the trees, bore the name which for each one of us has since that time represented the ideal interplay of natural and architectural beauty: it really was called Paradies—Paradise. It was, indeed, ours.

The other Eden, which began to open up for me at the age of eight or nine—as if at a secret “Open sesame!”—was the world of books. Like more or less everyone else, Heinrich Hoffmann’s
Struwwelpeter
had been read to us before we started school, and we could recite by heart some of the morally intimidating verses. Later, to our insatiable pleasure, came Wilhelm Busch; I remember that his verse stories and pictures—
Pious Helene, Fipps the Monkey
, and above all
Max and Moritz
—were the first texts that I read before starting school, initially with
the help of my finger. We knew nothing, of course, of Wilhelm Busch’s Schopenhauerian pessimism, which sooner or later become obvious to every knowledgeable reader, yet some of his verses still make me happy today, and certain lines took on almost proverbial stature in our family. At every stage of my life, as soon as I set eyes on one of these parables, written and drawn with such a masterly, malicious wit and knowledge of human nature, I have involuntarily read on.
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