Not I (16 page)

Not long after the beginning of the new year, in March 1939, my father called Dr. Meyer to ask why he had not come to tea for such a long time. Dr. Meyer replied that since the death of his wife he hardly went out at all, and also November 9 had seen his worst premonitions come true. He would never have believed how much malice dwelt behind the doors of the apartments
around him. He had had to give up his practice. Now and then he still attended the events put on by the Jewish Kulturbund, but he even found shopping difficult, likewise going to the bank, to the postbox, or the post office. Toward the end of the conversation they agreed on afternoon tea for the following week.

Dr. Meyer came to Karlshorst on an early spring day. Since it was warm he suggested taking tea in the garden; if one wore a coat it was comfortable outside. When he arrived I was in the garden shed cleaning some tools; at a signal from my father I brought the heavy stoneware crockery from the sideboard over to the table, while my mother made tea upstairs in the flat.

Dr. Meyer, who was in his mid- to late fifties, said that his wife had died from “a lack of will to go on living.” He continued to reside in the old-fashioned, somewhat rundown building, by now shabby with age, at Hallesches Tor. My mother, who had accompanied my father there to offer her condolences, told awful things about the state of the apartment: dirty plates lying around; cups half full of greasy tea; clothing thrown everywhere. The sole room in which there had been any effort to impose order was the library, only disturbed by two or three stacks of framed pictures by German Expressionists.
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When she arrived, reported my mother, she had immediately
begun to rinse the dishes lying around and tidy up the most obvious mess. But Dr. Meyer had said that she shouldn’t bother. He spent nearly the whole day in his library, because the window looked out onto the courtyard, where he did not have to see or hear any people.

My father said of Dr. Meyer that he always walked bent forward, as if the medical sounding of a patient’s chest determined his habitual posture. Also, if one looked more carefully, one could discern a slight trembling. He spoke with a somewhat hoarse voice and constantly cleared his throat while reciting his favorite poems, perhaps out of respect or because of a throat problem. My father assured me that he had never had an inconsequential conversation with Dr. Meyer, and so that afternoon, once I had finished work on the tools, my father called me over to the garden table. “Listen,” he said, “to what Dr. Meyer has to say.” The latter was just on the German
poetae minores
, Geibel, Rückert, Gellert, and Bürger, as well as the “wonderful Droste-Hülshoff.” With the exception of Bürger, none of these names as yet meant anything to me.
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But Dr. Meyer had changed the subject and later—to the
accompaniment of more involuntary throat-clearing—made some disparaging remarks about immigrant Jews, who some years before had come to his area of the city; he didn’t belong to them, he said. He had always felt himself to be German. He didn’t even feel that culturally he was a Jew. His parents had already taken a few steps out of that world, only the Nazis had forced him back into “alien Jewishness.” Then he returned to his poets of the second rank: Matthisson, Hölty, Stolberg.
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Curious, I thought, the two men there in the spring light, wrapped in their thick coats, look as if they’re sitting in a waiting room.

In the evening my father related that he had reproached Dr. Meyer for his snobbish attitude toward the Eastern European Jews around Silesian Station. Without hesitation, the latter had admitted that like all Jews he was arrogant. But that one was allowed to make fun of one’s own relations. My father, however, should never dare say anything like it—at least not if he valued their friendship. Then I learned that my father had arranged that I should visit Dr. Meyer every Saturday after school. I had heard, hadn’t I, how tiresome shopping and every postal errand was for him? Dr. Meyer had assured him that he had taken a liking to me and, since he was a highly educated man, the calls would surely do me no harm. Besides, it was the least one could do for people like him. After brief reflection my father continued: he
would ask the Rosenthals if it suited them for Wolfgang to call on Saturdays. In fact, it was a few months before the visits began, because Dr. Meyer unexpectedly raised objections, and my father said he was evidently shying away from allowing an outsider to see how he lived. However, in late summer 1939 I visited Dr. Meyer for the first time and from then on almost every Saturday, while, as far as I remember, Wolfgang walked the ten minutes from his school in Neue Kantstrasse to the Rosenthals about once every four weeks.

For me it was an instructive period, full of ever new discoveries. I usually got to the old Berlin “musty house” at about two in the afternoon. First, I went to the shops in the neighborhood with Dr. Meyer’s list. Unlike him, he told me in the hallway, I didn’t have to have a briefcase in the hand that wasn’t carrying the shopping bag. He always held something in each hand in order to avoid the Hitler salute, with which he, in particular, was repeatedly greeted, even if only with a forearm brought up toward the shoulder. “I don’t even salute with one hand free,” I responded, showing off somewhat, and added, “my father doesn’t even do it with two hands free.”

The chaos in the apartment, which had so disconcerted my mother, hardly bothered me. Naturally, it didn’t escape my notice that Dr. Meyer lived in grand bourgeois surroundings, which had meanwhile become impoverished and dilapidated. In the library the bookcases with their dark wood carving reached up to the ceiling, and although the room was kept reasonably tidy, Dr. Meyer apologized for the mess. He had always only
kept his study in order; everything else had been the responsibility of his wife and, earlier on, of the servants. At some point he began to talk about his last trip to Provence, about meeting his sons, how happy they had all been. But just under a year ago his wife had simply stayed in bed one morning and, after having been urged many times to get up, had explained she was not made for these times and simply didn’t want to go on anymore. Finally, she had put her hands over her ears, mutely shaking her head, and had not taken another bite of food. As he related this Dr. Meyer walked restlessly back and forth in the library. Then he stopped abruptly and said, “On the eleventh day Hilde Meyer was dead.”

I have sometimes asked myself whether it was the memory of the holiday in Nice or the refusal to accept his wife’s death that caused Dr. Meyer to receive me almost every time in a beige summer suit with a red neckerchief. Recently, I remembered again how quickly he spoke. My father said, no doubt rightly, that when he talked, Dr. Meyer was driven by the thought that he didn’t have much time left. When I returned from the errands he began to talk about his wife again, and three sons who had emigrated some time before. Two were, meanwhile, living in South Africa, where, in his opinion, they didn’t belong.

Life permitted itself many mistakes, he continued after a pause for thought. Sometimes, however, people threw it completely off course. He was really a failure. His grandparents had been peddlers plying their trade between Krakow and Lodz, before they had left their
little place in Galicia and landed in working-class east Berlin. Had his family history taken something like a “normal” course, then he or one of his sisters would have got at least to one of the better parts of Kreuzberg, his sons then to Charlottenburg, and their children, in turn, to a villa in Grunewald. Now two of them were living in Johannesburg, one in Mexico. “Life is no longer sticking to the rules,” he concluded. “But why?” He said it in a tone of voice that suggested there was no answer to the question.

Wordlessly, he turned away and gloomily looked across a number of shelves and names in the bookcase. Then he asked me to read him poems from an anthology. I told him about my father, who awarded one mark for ten poems, and for the next occasion Dr. Meyer recommended one or two poems by Heine, Platen, and Rilke.
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Without thinking, Heine’s “I bear no grudge” comes to mind, and Rilke’s “The Merry-go-round, Jardin du Luxembourg.” Once, when I was reciting, I noticed that Dr. Meyer’s eyes were wet. As if it were today I remember that I was reading the Goethe poem “Schlafe! was willst du mehr?”
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I thought perhaps he felt it to be the fulfillment of a last wish of his beloved wife. Later we
turned to prose: I read Fontane’s
Schach von Wuthenow
and some Kleist stories. Dr. Meyer added literary or historical references, then I read some of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s curiously cool stories; on another occasion, Droste-Hülshoff’s
Die Judenbuche
(The Jew’s beech) and Emil Strauss’s
Freund Hein
(Friend death). Dr. Meyer was my school.
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Apart from that he gave me rules to follow in life, some of which I have never forgotten. It is less of a problem for the world if people are stupid than if they have prejudices, was one of his maxims; another: nothing is as expensive as a present one gets. Once he also warned me always to keep my distance. “One shouldn’t embrace people,” he explained, “because the person you embrace all too often has a knife up his sleeve.” “At most one embraces a woman,” and even she often has a knife under her nightdress. At this revelation I must have stared at him in disbelief, because after these words I heard him laugh for the first time: “Just a bad joke!”

Through visiting Dr. Meyer I got used to not going home immediately after school. In early summer 1939 I was almost fourteen. My father had suggested it was now time to take the Italian Renaissance more seriously, and even perhaps to make its study my career. Because if I were to devote myself to history, it would be a good idea not to get any nearer to the present than the
fifteenth century, otherwise I would inevitably come too close to the period occupied by the Nazis. Around this time I discovered Alfred Hentzen’s illustrated book on the Berlin Nationalgalerie on his bookshelves, so I had this additional material to fuel my interests. After classes I often went to the Museum Island in the city center.
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The spacious yet intimate group of buildings, the majestic stairways, the halls and rows of columns captivated me in themselves. In terms of painting, however, I was most taken by the rooms of the Romantics, the Nazarenes, and other German painters who went to Rome for inspiration: Anselm Feuerbach, Hans von Marées, Böcklin, and everything else between late David and Manet. Of the Italian painters from Giotto to Reni, on the other hand, I admired above all their technical brilliance—the tangibly heavy brocade in the paintings of Titian or the beautiful flesh of the nakedly displayed bodies—while simultaneously asking myself why the dramatic turmoil of the times was so little reflected in these pictures. I often talked to my father about it. In the end, our conclusion was that the Italian Renaissance was historically infinitely more brilliant and somber than the idylls of Olevano or Barbizon, and much more attractive as a scholarly and literary subject. Nevertheless, beneath the fogs of Caspar David Friedrich or in the undergrowth and ponds of Monet there
was more life to be discovered than in the paintings of Salvator Rosa or Guido Reni, where saints fought with dragons and other poisonous, hissing monsters. But my father said both were appealing: the intimations of art and the way it transcended reality.

With Gerd Donner or some other classmates I occasionally went a few stops farther on the S-Bahn to the Planetarium at Zoo Station. It was basically an ordinary cinema, except that before the newsreel and the main feature the starry sky of that day was shown on the domed roof and commented upon. My parents were somewhat naive in assuming that a movie theater offering such an instructive supporting program could hardly be showing any second-rate films; and so, undisturbed, I saw at the Planetarium the films of popular stars like Heinz Rühmann, Willy Fritsch and Zarah Leander, Heli Finkenzeller and Heinrich George—in short, everything that was being talked about at the time. My parents would have been a little surprised. Only the fact that—out of instinct and on Gerd Donner’s advice—I avoided all propaganda films would have halfway set their minds at ease.

That summer Emil Lengyel announced that he would be coming to see us. He was a friend of my father’s from his Weimar days and had meanwhile made a considerable reputation for himself in the United States as an academic and a political commentator. In early summer 1939 he had set out on an extended trip through the capitals of Western Europe to investigate the increasingly threatening political situation. In his letter he had written openly about Hitler’s responsibility for the
impending war and described the Nazi regime as a version of the Hungarian dictatorship—which he had fled after the First World War—but established with German thoroughness.
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My mother was dismayed. “I certainly don’t care for any fiery czardas temperament in politics.
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And on top of that an American utterly hostile to the Nazis in our house,” she said at second supper to my father. “Think of your family! They’ll use it against us. Why don’t you just go to a bar?” My father stared angrily ahead and seemed to be thinking that he hadn’t initiated the so-called second supper to have arguments with my mother in front of Wolfgang and me. Finally he replied, “Like you I am thinking of all of us here. But cowardice is not allowed either. You’re forgetting that.” My mother stood up and with her hands on the table retorted quite curtly, “You don’t think about courage or cowardice. You only have your principles in your head.” In all those years it was the only argument our parents had in front of us.

But my father didn’t give way. Lengyel came to Hentigstrasse and we spent, not least at my mother’s prompting, an amusing evening around the garden table with czardas steps and hand-clapping. When night fell, our guest produced five paper lanterns out of nowhere and we continued the fun for a while longer. Then the
insufferable Herr Henschel appeared on his balcony and requested quiet. “Ten o’clock!” he roared. At that Lengyel and my father withdrew to the study.