Not I (20 page)

But nontheological issues were also discussed. For example, whether Protestantism—after the experiences of recent years, and given sermons like the one about the church as God’s SA troop—had a future. My father argued that the German language owed Protestantism a great deal, thanks to Luther, music owed much to Johann Sebastian Bach, and the culture as a whole from Lichtenberg to Nietzsche was indebted to the Protestant parsonage. Protestantism was not yet so dead that it could be unhesitatingly written off. And the Confessing Church should not be forgotten either.
⁸

Leaning on the fence, their arms folded, the two men agreed, in the further course of their conversation, that the Catholic Church, too, had initially not stood the test of the Hitler years without reproach. Once or twice the conversation lost itself in speculation, as, for instance, the question of whether there was music in the Beyond. Certainly not the “utterly heathen” compositions of Richard
Wagner, Wittenbrink objected, almost in fright, but definitely Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert, above all Schubert. My father found such reflections quite misguided. Then what about the suicidal Heinrich von Kleist, he objected, the Goethe of
Elective Affinities
, or the Marquis de Sade with his obsession with sin? He granted a chance of heaven to all musicians, poets, and artists, because the foolishness which they thought up would no longer be of any significance in the Beyond. He personally hoped to hear Paul Lincke or Emmerich Kálmán as well as Schubert over there, and if he had any say in the matter Claire Waldoff would be allowed to perform, too.
⁹

For all the shadows that lay over these conversations, they were tremendously varied and often playful, and years later my father still remembered them with affection. It had been one opportunity, he declared, of establishing a counterweight to the sequence of great impertinences which the Nazi regime had imposed on him. If, from the window of his study he saw the priest coming down the garden path next door, he often hurried straight downstairs to his “academy,” as he sometimes called it, and Wittenbrink, likewise, seemed only too pleased at the opportunity to interrupt his saying of the breviary. For me at the garden table it was a kind of graduate school or at least the antechamber to it. For the first time I became aware of the wealth of topics, the absurdities of the world, and
beyond that of how many questions there were on which opposing opinions could be held. Furthermore, I discovered what pleasure there was in contradiction, as well as in the effort to develop grounds for one’s own arguments and to present them as convincingly as possible. The most important lesson I took from those conversations, however, was that a discussion conducted between friends had certain rules. Sometimes I thought that these “garden-fence conversations” had such an unforgettable effect because no sentence was directed didactically at me. Admittedly, now and then, when it came to political or erotic topics, one or another of the two men cast a worried glance over at me. But I was never told not to listen or to concern myself with the black currant bushes in a remote part of the garden.

On one of those days, in spring 1940, just as I was going back up to our apartment from my place at the garden table, the telephone rang. At the other end of the line was a caller who was evidently speaking from a public phone box, and in a somewhat breathless and plainly disguised voice said, “You’re going to have visitors!” The caller gave no name, did not use any form of address, and did not say goodbye. He simply hung up. From the window I called my father upstairs. “Give me ten minutes!” he replied, but I must have responded with considerable emphasis, “No, immediately! Important!” With a surprised look he threw the spade aside with which he was just digging a vegetable patch and came up. When he asked what was so important, I told him what had happened and wanted to ask what it meant, but my father
was already at the wireless in the living room and turning the dial from Swiss Radio Beromünster to the German Broadcasting Station, before rushing to his study to put the first volume of Winston Churchill’s
Marlborough
, which he had picked up somewhere, back in the bookcase, and then going through each room to check if there was anything “suspicious.”
¹⁰

Before he was even finished hurrying through the rooms, the doorbell rang. Two men, who despite their civilian clothes gave the impression of wearing uniforms, entered the apartment without a word of introduction, loudly giving the Hitler salute. Together with my father they went to the study, and from the living room across the hall I heard calm voices which only rarely rose to a fiercer exchange. After about half an hour the visitors departed unceremoniously, without inspecting the radio. My mother, who had been sitting on the bed in the bedroom, covering her eyes with her hands, rushed to my father. But he was fairly vague. They had nothing in particular against him. There was no need for her to worry. Perhaps that was true. Perhaps he only said it to reassure her. In any case, in the years that followed, we received something like another fifteen warnings of this kind. The announced visit did not always take place. Who the mysterious informant was only came to light after the war, by chance.

The first air-raid warning came at about the same time. Hardly was the wail of the sirens over when my father went up onto the roof of the house with my brothers and me to watch the attack. After an uneventful hour, in which we searched the sky for the signs of the zodiac, we could hear the initially distant hum of engines coming closer, without being able to make out anything in the beams of the apparently randomly scanning searchlights. Only where the fingers of light feeling their way across the sky came together did we see, at their point of intersection, individual silvery aircraft, and shortly after that fiery flashes. But the raid was taking place some way off, over Kreuzberg, Britz, and down as far as Rudow. When the all clear had already been sounded and we were still sitting on the roof duckboards, countless small black particles floated down, and Wolfgang said these were the shrapnel clouds that formed every time a gun was fired. The next morning lessons did not start until ten. And so it went on every few days.

At school the air raids became the dominant subject of conversation. Some spoke of houses close to theirs that had been hit, and everyone began to collect shell splinters. If there had been no air-raid warning for several days in a row, then Gerd Donner got increasingly annoyed. You couldn’t rely on the “old Tommies” anymore, either, he moaned. He loved the air-raid warnings and went down to the cellar as he would to the cinema. Not only because for every hour on alert after 10 p.m. school began an hour later than normal in the morning, but because in his cellar he had made himself a “make-out corner” behind a
stack of laundry detergent cartons, where no one else went, and where for two weeks he had been “having a bit of fun with beautiful Inge from five houses down.” Beautiful Inge was just thirteen and a half, “but with everything in the right place,” he emphasized, drawing curves in the air with his hands. A few days ago he had already got to the third button of her blouse, and just then the all clear had sounded. “But yesterday when I got to my little corner, beautiful Inge was already there, waiting for me, with her blouse already open down to the third button, inviting me, so to speak. ‘Now you can just carry on,’ she said. And what could I say to that? I carried on. Scouts’ honor!” Another boy in the class wanted to show off, and told us that when his father withdrew to the bedroom he always locked the door. “Well, I ask, why does he do that?” he said with false innocence. Gerd Donner interrupted him: “Just stop boring us. I wasn’t talking about my old man, but about beautiful Inge and me.”

That winter my father brought back from his monthly meetings the news that the group of friends could no longer procure money or forged documents for those seeking help. They had destroyed the few pieces of paper with cover names, addresses, and the code. Only in cases of the greatest danger could they still provide help. The inspections were clearly becoming more stringent, the sentences more severe, and recently almost everyone in the group had reported cases of merciless persecution. Listening to “enemy radio stations” was now being punished with prison, and soon, no doubt, with the death sentence; likewise, the mere passing on of political jokes. Concluding
his account with a serious warning to us, my father added that during the lengthy discussions it had been evident how despairing everyone was. In times like these the only thing left was the knowledge that there were a couple of friends nearby. Later, he also reported that—in order to make the law more “flexible” and more suited to “national needs”—leading legal experts were working on a new criminal offense of “conduct of life,” which meant that merely keeping one’s distance from the national community could be made a matter of criminal investigation.

It was about this time that I made a second twenty-five-pfennig deal with Wolfgang. He offered me ten nude photos of French origin, which he had bought from a street trader near the Admiralspalast music hall. As far as I remember, the pictures showed mostly plump ladies in calf-length laced boots, who, one foot resting on a stool, leaned out toward the viewer with lascivious smiles and sometimes also invitingly with outstretched arms. For every week I borrowed them Wolfgang demanded twenty-five pfennigs, so that I had to learn poems again in order to scrape together that amount. I did not find the naked women at all “wicked,” but instead pretty “silly.” Apparently, however, they were part of growing up, according to Wolfgang and all the other friends around me, from Rudi Hardegen to Helmut Sternekieker. Before we came to an agreement, however, I asked him whether with our deal we were not in danger of committing a “conduct of life” offense. He responded that we were enemies of the Hitler people and shouldn’t let ourselves be intimidated by their laws.

The third year of Leibniz Gymnasium, with homeroom teacher Dr. Appelt. (1) Gerd Donner, (2) Wigbert Gans, (3) Clemens Korner, (4) the author
.

Ever since Father Wittenbrink had heard that I was going to see Mozart’s
The Marriage of Figaro
with Aunt Dolly, he called me to the fence with increasing frequency when I was sitting at the garden table doing homework. From a number of conversations I knew that he loved art, especially music. He asked me what I knew about Mozart, which operas I had already heard, whether I knew the term “child prodigy,” and then related the well-known episodes of the composer’s early violin playing and tours through half of Europe with his father and sister. He could not get over the fact that Mozart had, as a child, composed a symphony, and, at only a little more than ten years old, an opera, and that he not only possessed the technical skills to do so, but appeared to know everything about life, and even,
so Father Wittenbrink sometimes thought, something about death as well.

Wittenbrink returned to
Figaro
, which he talked about at greater length. He said that in the opera Mozart presents—in the incomparable manner of which only he was master—a merry amorous confusion. Yet at the end a deadly seriousness breaks through. In the “Italian” operas, at least, such as
Don Giovanni
, the plot of which he related in outline, a stone guest
¹¹
always appears at some point and announces to the frightened characters, “The game is over!” In
Figaro
, he continued, that moment comes when the Countess pulls the veil from her face and the Count sinks remorsefully to his knees: it is the most moving scene in the whole history of opera. Before the performance, he advised me, I absolutely must read the libretto, otherwise the whole bustling plot, which only appears to be amusing, would be incomprehensible to me. And I should never forget that while the melodies of the Mozart operas, which thanks to their combination of grace and attractiveness have been whistled at every street corner, end in conciliation, every knowledgeable listener knows that happiness, even as it is being extolled in song, is already secretly announcing a hidden unhappiness.

The next day Wittenbrink invited me to his apartment. I remember that on the walls of the large room, as it was called, there were two Ruisdaels with their
characteristic trademark of a tree trunk running at an angle across the picture background, also a Jacques d’Arthois, and one or two paintings of the second Italian and first European rank, as he added in explanation. Then we moved over to his record collection, which filled several cabinets and shelves. After lengthy explanations he played me the conclusion of
Figaro
and, because he could never stop when the subject was Mozart, that of
Così fan tutte
as well. Of the supposedly bright finale, he said it is the darkest ending of any opera; only Mozart had the genius to make the C major of these bars sound like cries for help. Could I hear that? he asked. I said no, but that one probably had to have listened to Mozart and much else all one’s life; instead, I always encountered only Herr Tinz and his thundering forte prestissimo.