Not I (21 page)

In the midst of these days spent in the garden—and just as we were finishing Xenophon’s
Anabasis
and going on to Homer’s
Odyssey
at school, and in the history class were hearing about the Turks at the gates of Vienna—burst the already almost forgotten war: at dawn on May 10, 1940, the offensive against France began, which for half a year had repeatedly been postponed.
¹²
Unlike the First World War, the confrontation was decided within a few weeks, and once again my father felt himself torn by the same conflict as in the years before. At second supper,
which now also included Winfried, he remarked that he was glad from the bottom of his heart at the French defeat, but could never be so at Hitler’s triumph. Soon after, when he said at the garden fence that he had rarely felt himself so abandoned by the reason of the world as now, Wittenbrink responded that a “reason of the world” didn’t exist. What we described as such was nothing more than what we retrospectively projected onto pure chance; it was obvious to anyone that for every ten examples of the action of world reason in history there were some tens of thousands of examples of the working of worldly unreason. I could tell from my father’s face how true and depressing he found this statement.

This conversation was perhaps still on his mind when, shortly afterward, Dr. Gans, the father of my schoolmate, came to visit. Since the sky was overcast with dark gray clouds, the two first of all withdrew to the study. My father offered his guest a Boenicke cigar, while my mother made the coffee. I was asked to remain and learned that—with respect to the war against France, which had ended a few days before—Dr. Gans thought that as Hitler now controlled half of Europe, it was necessary for him to consolidate his power. Surely Hitler understood that; in any case, at some point even the greediest person is sated or at least needs time to digest. Hence at the moment there was no threat of a new campaign, Dr. Gans could predict that with some certainty. But the longer Dr. Gans talked and justified his reflections, the more skeptically my father listened. Meanwhile the weather had cleared up, and so the two of them
went downstairs after coffee and sat at the table under the chestnuts.

What he was saying, my father began, resuming the conversation, sounded all very reasonable, but that was precisely why he was mistaken. One should never leave Hitler’s unreason out of the calculation. He had always avoided the obvious. Consequently, there was only one quotation which adequately described the situation. It was from Goethe: “All comfort is vile, / and despair the only duty.” That reflected our situation exactly. After some thought, Dr. Gans’s features brightened and one could virtually see him changing his mind. “Quite right!” he then blurted out, if with some effort. “It may be that I didn’t take sufficient account of the fact that this state is led by a madman.” And after a short pause: “The quote, by the way, comes from the Paralipomena to
Faust
II. I know it, too.” Then, shaking his head, Dr. Gans listened as my father said that he knew the source only as the “Fragments”; at once a kind of philological dispute was under way. Each insisted on his view, and since we were sitting at the garden table, it was too much of an effort to bring the volumes downstairs to look up the quote. They would, they agreed, talk on the phone. When I came home from school the next day it turned out that both my father and Dr. Gans had the same text in mind, even if they had noted it under different titles. The scene has always stayed in my mind as the quintessence of a difference of opinion among members of the educated classes.

That summer my father wrote to Roger Reveille (as the latter told me after the war) that he was glad France
had been defeated; the country had richly deserved it. But the Frenchman should not grieve over it. Borrowing from a German poet, only with a different emphasis, he wanted him to know, “
We
are on a ship of the dead.”
¹³
When I asked my father at the time whether it had not been altogether thoughtless to send such a letter to France, he replied that he had given neither a sender’s name nor a signature, and had posted it miles away in Lichterfelde. Roger had let him know through a third party that he had received the letter. And what, I asked again, if in a difficult situation—that is, under threat of torture—Roger had, after all, revealed the sender’s identity to the Gestapo? At that my father said one would not get anywhere without taking risks, adding, with a smile, that danger had its charms, too.

Perhaps I had taken this and other similar remarks all too literally. At any rate it was about this time that I established a new record in “platform jumping.” Gathering all one’s courage, one jumped from the train as it was coming into the station and allowed oneself to be carried by the momentum the thirty steps past the little stationmaster’s office and as close as possible to the stairs leading down to street level. But I soon got around to more reckless—in fact, foolish—ventures. At some point in autumn 1940 I began to scribble Hitler caricatures on fences, lampposts, and front doors. They consisted of an elongated circle, a line sloping a little to the right, and a hatched smudge: it was always Hitler’s face. As far as I was aware only Wigbert
Gans, who even joined me a few times, knew about it; later I heard that other schoolmates had also engaged in such foolhardy activities, some even with a sketch of a hammer and sickle dripping blood. It helped that recently classes lasted until dusk and were conducted in the morning or the afternoon on alternate weeks.

Our homeroom teacher, Dr. Appelt, was a ponderous man with a flat-featured face, who was permanently sweaty seldom entered the classroom without the party badge. The dark shadows under his eyes testified to the toil of the night hours in which he pored over the syllabus, without ever quite getting on top of it. At any rate, Wigbert Gans several times pointed out mistakes in his calculations in the application of the laws of physics, at which the class jeered and stamped their feet, while he ran to his lectern and handed out black marks and detentions by the half dozen. For reasons which I never understood but may have had to do with my father, he entertained an unconcealed dislike of me, to which I responded with all the impudence of my thirteen years. Usually, it was no more than the obstreperousness of an adolescent talking back—accompanied by the laughter of my classmates—that got me a black mark in the register. More serious, however, was the following piece of recklessness. One morning, quite by chance, I was in school a quarter of an hour before lessons began. Sitting around in the classroom and staring out at the dingy winter morning, I took out my pocketknife and without thinking carved the same Hitler caricature, which for some time I had been scribbling on walls and fences, on my desk.

Luckily, Gerd Donner was the first to come into the classroom after me. Taking one glance at the desk he hissed quietly, and with the instinct for survival of a boy from the back alleys of the East End of Berlin, “Get rid of that immediately!” Without waiting for my reaction, he took out his own pocketknife and began to remove small splinters of varnish from the surface of the desk. Meanwhile, the rest of the class arrived, the room filled up; some came up to the desk and in what was left could just about discern the outlines of the familiar caricature. In the commotion that arose, Gerd Donner threatened that anyone who reported anything would be in big trouble.

Dr. Appelt had barely entered the classroom when, to everyone’s astonishment, one of the pupils rose to his feet and reported me “as duty required” and as he had learned as a leader in the Hitler Youth. When he had finished, the teacher came over to me, shaking his head in disgust, bent over to inspect the desk, was aghast at what he saw, shook his head once more, and finally told me to follow him to the rector after the lesson. There I was subjected to a brief interrogation and the next day questioned by a policeman called to the school for that specific purpose.

It was indeed, as my parents reproached me that evening, an unbelievably foolish thing to have done, and they rightly asked if I had not thought about the consequences the incident could have for our family. Some classmates also conspicuously withdrew from me. For the first time I had an inkling of what it meant to be excluded. Dr. Appelt clearly agreed with the disrepute into which I had fallen, and from then on he seemed to regard every moment of
inattention and every disruption for which I was to blame as the action of a good-for-nothing, who was politically and humanly a bad egg. Soon I had an unbeatable lead over everyone else in my class when it came to black marks in the register and detentions, and when this unhappy course of events showed no sign of coming to an end, my “unfortunate father,” as Dr. Weinhold put it to me, was summoned to the headmaster’s office. Once again there was a stern-looking gentleman present, who evidently represented the school authority and immediately turned the proceedings into a kind of interrogation. I denied any kind of political motive, but admitted the damage to property and asked to be shown leniency, as I had been advised from various sides. After lengthy discussion—in the course of which I got to know my father’s negotiating skills—it was agreed to refrain from the
consilium abeundi
(expulsion) that had originally been decided. But the condition was that I should voluntarily leave the school at the next possible date, Easter 1941; that is, in about three months. “It would be best if you took your other two sons away at the same time!” the gentleman from the education authority advised my father.

After the conference, which had taken place during the last school period of the day, my father embraced me, which was unusual for him, in front of all those present and left the room, tight-lipped, to go back to Karlshorst, while I returned to my class. Among the friends who stood by me were, of course, Wigbert Gans, Clemens Körner, and Gerd Donner. At the end of lessons, Gerd Donner was waiting for me outside in the corridor and, although
I would not be part of the class for much longer, he now frequently accompanied me on the half-hour walk to the station in what was an extremely cold winter. On the first day he had me tell him what happened in the headmaster’s room, and concluded, “So, nevertheless, expelled!” and after a few more steps, “But lucky, too. You should be pleased!” From that time on I counted my relation with him as one of those belated friendships, which turn up in everyone’s life now and then. Whatever we talked about we found those points of agreement that every friendship needs, and the differences that enliven and keep it going, whether the subject was football or film stars, books or radio detectors, friends or many a “beautiful Inge.”

Inevitably, I’ve forgotten the content of almost all of our conversations. But one from just before Christmas 1941 has stuck in my mind, because in the course of it we interrupted our walk and, despite the cold, stopped on the dark bridge over the Spree. Snow was falling heavy and sticky from the wet cold sky, collecting on the railings and melting on the ground. The pedestrians who hurried past, muffled up and often carrying a Christmas tree under their arm, seemed shrunken. We shifted from one foot to the other. A couple of times one of the carts that had recently been pressed into service again came by, the horses slipping and kicking out with billowing clouds of breath.

What kept us there was a conversation about the ultimate questions of life and death. Gerd Donner said that—as an intelligent person—I surely couldn’t believe everything that was said in church. He had nothing against
Father Lauen, our “snappy” religious education teacher, but the fairy tale about the Dear Lord with the curly beard, together with the Resurrection and the “immaculate conception”—he could only laugh at it. And he knew for sure that secretly I was laughing, too. Ice floes drifted past under the railings of the bridge as we talked with steaming breath. Finally, I replied that I even liked to believe what he described as a fairy tale. Perhaps it was all invented. But that just dressed things up for unsophisticated minds, and I was a little surprised to discover that he was among them. What faith, in essence, gave me, was the feeling of having a kind of second, dependable home and of being a match for everything. He would be wise to wait and see! Gerd Donner made a dismissive gesture with his hand and replied that some people needed something like that; he had not suspected I was one of them. At any rate he did all right without the “old beardy up there.” And when, frozen through, we finally set off again, he said, “The people from my street, which you’ve never even seen, don’t need the Dear Lord of the Catholics.” They got the conviction to cope with the world not from the Dear Lord, but from their mother’s milk; or else they were lost. When we parted at Silesian Station we had not moved one inch closer.

One Sunday at the beginning of February 1941, shortly after we had come back from church, two senior Hitler Youth officials entered the building, banging the street door and demanding to speak to my father. They had just found out—one of them shouted from the bottom of the stairs—that none of his three sons had joined either the junior Jungvolk or the Hitler Youth. There
had to be an end to it. “Malingering!” barked the other. “Impertinence! How dare you!” Everybody had duties. “You, too!” the first one joined in again.

My father had, meanwhile, gone down to the pair. “Whoever you are,” he responded, frowning in annoyance, “I have no intention of allowing you to come here, on a Sunday at that, with a lie. Because we have several times been pestered, likewise on a Sunday morning, by your lads. So you haven’t just found out something.” And getting ever louder, he finally roared at them, “You accuse me of malingering and are yourself cowards!” And after a few more rebukes he shouted from the second step over their army-style cropped heads, “And now, will you leave my house? Get out! This minute!” The pair seemed speechless at the tone my father dared to use, but before they could reply he drove them back, so to speak, through the entrance lobby and out the door. The commotion had initially startled the whole building, and several tenants had appeared on the stairs. At the sight of the uniforms, however, they quietly closed the doors to their apartments.