Not I (24 page)

I made contact with others and soon acquired new friends at the Gymnasium I attended. Even Dr. Brühler, the director—to whom we had to introduce ourselves before the beginning of the first school day—made a
cosmopolitan impression, and one involuntarily asked oneself what circumstances could have brought him to this place. In his light gray, double-breasted suit, often with a flower in his buttonhole, he appeared almost exaggeratedly elegant. Although only in his mid-fifties, he had white hair brushed severely back, which curled a little at the neck, and with it an apoplectically red face, which went with an old-school gentleman of his sort. In a high voice, demonstrating a charming self-confidence, he explained to us that it was his ambition as headmaster of the Friedrich Gymnasium to make it the best in Germany, and he very much stood by this aim, despite all the difficulties of the present time. He expected high standards and discipline to be taken for granted. But it was just as important that his pupils understood something of the humanist spirit, without which all learning degenerated into meaningless drill. And—as if he wanted to indicate that he had heard something at least about the reasons for our change of schools—he added that everything else was a matter of complete indifference to him. No doubt we had some catching up to do, as was inevitable because of the air raids on Berlin and the frequent cancellation of lessons. After one year he would decide whether the school wanted to keep us.

Yet catching up with the pupils of the various classes was not very hard for us. Other differences were more evident. Above all, in contrast to the obsession with getting through the curriculum at the Berlin school there was something scholarly about the Friedrich Gymnasium. In almost every field the knowledge we acquired
served simultaneously as material to make connections visible and to test the attraction and difficulty of intelligent questioning—that is, to get to know methods, the rudiments of which I had learned during the garden-fence conversations. An example of that was provided by our Greek teacher Dr. Breithaupt, a tall, hook-nosed man who practiced his profession with enthusiastic earnestness. He had known old Dörpfeld, who had excavated Troy, Pergamon, and other sites of ancient Greek culture.
⁵
On occasion, he brought into class a letter from the scholar, which he held up with his fingertips like a relic of the age of the Apostles, while with glowing eyes he basked in the admiration he read from the faces in front of him. Then he quoted some of the issues raised in the letter, which concerned Dörpfeld at the time, and asked to hear our responses. He also knew Karl Reinhardt and other great names in the scholarship of antiquity,
⁶
names which he pronounced with whispered awe, as soon as he acquainted us with the various scholarly opinions of Minoan or Spartan culture, the route of the wanderings of Odysseus, or the dispute about the applicability of Plato’s ideas of the state.

A further difference was that the political views of the teachers were expressed much more frankly than in Berlin. That was not only due to traditional Baden liberalism, but also to the self-confident Catholicism of
the region. Our natural history teacher openly made fun of “Aryan physics.” In the English class, Dr. Brühler (who would later become a member of the Deutsche Partei in the Bundestag) imitated the actor Otto Gebühr in the
Fridericus
films about Frederick the Great, and, by simply transposing individual sentences into English, exposed the hollow pathos of these performances. After viewing one of the great king’s military defeats he would sigh in English, rolling his eyes, “I am so lonely,” or, blowing up his cheeks, he would say, “But now I am going to victory! Who would hinder me? Me the one and only Frederick—oh no, Otto Gebühr!” In religious instruction, following Bishop von Galen’s pastoral letter, the “euthanasia murders” were discussed in plain terms.
⁷
These were things which were thought of by many of our teachers in Berlin, but hardly spoken out loud.

Only the gym teacher, a man with exaggerated muscles and a low hairline, and even more Dr. Malthan, who taught German and history, were considered supporters of the regime. Yet whereas the former did so in a pigheaded, pompous way which transformed every chin-up and every improvement in the high jump into a contribution to the national physical training program, the other embodied the type of intellectual who had absorbed all the measures of the state into a system of cynical justifications exemplifying the idea of power. Tall, with
thinning hair and a slight squint, he held forth on Lessing’s Philotas, on the German emperors and Prussia’s Frederick, Kleist and Napoleon, Görres and Metternich, and so on to the greater German struggle for freedom—heroism and sacrifice included. He liked to describe the pupils who didn’t measure up to his standards as “poor souls,” before entering a five in his notebook and jeering, “Don’t make such a miserable face!”
⁸
On the red-letter days of the National Socialist calendar one sometimes saw him in the light brown uniform of a political officer. He walked along the corridors with small, fast steps and, because he held his arms stiffly by his side, looked strangely wooden as he did so.

However, Dr. Malthan was very far from a comic figure. He was feared by all because of his scholarly and ideological demands; both our religious instruction teacher and older schoolmates repeatedly warned us about him. One day, as if I had to put his dangerousness to the test, while he was talking about the meaning of the Russian campaign as taking possession of a living space promised to the Germans since ancient times, I asked him a skeptical question. But instead of the anticipated thunderous outburst with which he usually silenced anyone and everyone—often with the despairing but practiced-sounding exclamation “What is that supposed to mean? What on earth?”—Dr. Malthan was merely dismissive in a friendly way, and gave me as an
assignment an essay on “The Economic Importance of the Donets Basin for the Reich.” “When you know that,” he added, “you will understand once and for all how necessary living space in the east is for us.”

Perhaps it was simply the thoughtless folly that had already got me into trouble in Berlin, perhaps also an attempt to make the subject a little more interesting for me: at any rate, I wrote the essay, which carefully noted all productive raw material deposits and the industrial capacity as well as the agricultural acreage of the huge area in a single, tightly structured sentence of about four pages. I was called upon by Dr. Malthan to read out my essay, so I tried to make the text clear and put in a period or a semicolon, where on the page there was only another comma. When I had finished he eyed the class suspiciously. When nobody stirred, he said tersely, “Fine!” and even managed some plain praise: “You are well able to give a talk! Perhaps at some point in future you will be called on to speak publicly in school.” In any case, he would inform the rector’s office about me.

My refuge from the irksome features of the boarding school remained Friedrich Schiller.
⁹
I had taken the volume with the early plays with me to Freiburg, and during the journey had read
The Robbers
, and then the beginning of
Intrigue and Love
. But the absence
of peace and quiet in the compartment—the constant succession of passengers and the conversation starting up anew each time about the little turns of events in their lives thanks to the intervention of a greater fate—hindered my reading. As a result, I started from the beginning again after my arrival in Freiburg, most often in the evening under the blankets in the dormitory, when everything was silent.

It was the elevated tone and the beautiful exaltation that gripped me from the very first line, as it had during the journey. Against all the dark formulations which Schiller often granted his base and vicious characters, at the end bright light or at least its first rays irresistibly forced its way onto the stage. Even today I recall some passages with a feeling of emotion—of happiness and enchantment—such as otherwise only music is capable of arousing. It’s not the almost proverbial lines—with which in those days practically everyone was still familiar—that produce this effect. But the words with which Thekla—who (to her mother’s dismay) has fallen in love with Max Piccolomini (in the drama
Wallenstein
)—explains to a friend why she is late, I find unforgettable, because they sum up the hopeless conflict of emotions in only two lines: “My mother wept so again, I see her suffer / and cannot alter my own feeling of happiness.” Or the outburst of old Miller (in
Intrigue and Love
), with his constantly repeated court toady’s phrase of mocking subservience, “At your service!” And, of course, Wallenstein’s monologue and those passages which stay in the mind because of Schiller’s laconic
brevity—most famously perhaps the conclusion of
The Robbers
. Or Lady Milford’s unaffected but all the more overwhelming retort to Ferdinand’s disparaging torrent of words (again in
Intrigue and Love
): “I did not deserve that, Major!” And so very much more.

And then the pictures of the writer in which (as I thought at the time) he appeared both noble and at ease; and his idea of freedom or his psychological astuteness, which we—as Wolfgang (always one step ahead in his education) explained to me—involuntarily translated into political terms. Who, he said, does not think of the “fat fraud Göring” when he hears the line about the “apes of God”? Or of a gangster figure like Goebbels when the talk is of the “lodgings by the gallows”? And, finally, of the lot of them when the poet talks of the spectacle of strength, which is only despair? Where had Wolfgang read that? I exclaimed, half in annoyance that he already knew that, too. How did he find the quotations with which he was always ahead of me?

At any rate there is a skepticism of human nature in Schiller that also runs through almost all of his plays. The Germans tend to think of him as a somewhat naive and pathos-ridden advocate of freedom; they think of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the embrace of the world in the final choral movement. They think about the limits to the power of tyrants, against whom mankind will reach up into the sky to pull down man’s “eternal rights,” which “are affixed up there as are the stars themselves.” Yet I soon recognized that Schiller was politically much less naive than the nation as a whole.
Certainly, he could praise the dear Lord above the starry canopy, and write the village idyll of the “The Song of the Bell”—but also an essay like the one “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” which has hardly an equal in German for its acute perception.

I sensed at least that on the whole, in the more general texts—that is, the poems—Schiller held on firmly to his optimism about mankind. In the plays, on the other hand, which are closer to reality—in
Intrigue and Love
, in
Fiesco
, or even in
The Maid of Orleans
—the dark hostile powers retain the upper hand.
Wallenstein
is a broadly conceived train of base intrigues and, as I read many years later, Hegel discovered an “abyss of nihilism” in his fellow Swabian: a vast world of treachery, deceit, and broken oaths, of dirty tricks, spite, and cynicism. Schiller has Franz Moor (in
The Robbers
) exclaim that man emerged from the mire, waded through the mire for a while, and created a mire, before fermenting in the mire again: as an image of man it could hardly be more pessimistic.

I read these works throughout the autumn and into the early winter of the Russian campaign, so that for me the name “Freiburg” is always associated with Schiller in an absurdly contrasting fashion to the ice storms and blizzards outside Moscow. In between I read whatever came to hand. As a mark of respect to my father I borrowed Jacob Burckhardt’s
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
from his library; it greatly impressed me and stimulated further reading about the Borgias, the Sforzas, and the Malatestas, about Federico da Montefeltro,
Michelangelo, and countless others.
¹⁰
It was an escape. At the same time, in a muddled alternation I read Rilke, who for a while supplanted everything else; at the time I could recite by heart the wondrous language of
The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke
.

At school it continued to be the
Odyssey
that took the place of this “leisure reading,” as my brothers mocked, but also Virgil and Horace. Even the unloved mathematical exercises were for a while coveted material, but once or twice a week I spent the afternoons with the class in Dreisam Stadium just outside the city. As before in Berlin, Winfried excelled at the short distances and several times ran the four hundred meters in under a minute, which I never managed. And to my own astonishment I discovered a talent for the high jump, at which I got to 1.67 meters, whereas Wolfgang, averse to physical education, as it was called, frequently dodged it and showed an admirable degree of imagination in inventing ever new excuses. Our feeling of solidarity proved itself against our “penal colony,” even if it was no longer “us against the world.” From time to time we went on our “small town walks,” climbed to the top of the cathedral spire—from which on clear days one could see as far as Alsace and the Vosges—and made off for longer than permitted to the Castle Hill or to Günterstal on the southern outskirts of the town, in
order to spend a couple of hours by ourselves or with a slowly growing circle of friends.

In late autumn I read Schiller’s
History of the Thirty Years’ War
, as well as, in one go, his
History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands
. Unlike Goethe, Schiller was a kind of “cultural hero” of the Germans, and Christian Daniel Rauch’s statue portrayed him as an idealized youth in whom the nation liked to recognize itself. After the first attempts at rapprochement between the two, which ended in ill-humor, Schiller concluded that Goethe “generously declares his own existence, but only like a god, without giving of himself.” Mankind should not allow someone like him to emerge among them, he added, in a sentence which was a mixture of awe, admiration, and, admittedly, jealousy.