Not I (25 page)

But then suddenly Schiller wrote (as I discovered somewhere in the small print) the admiring letter to Goethe with—as I judged in my own preference for the former—an utterly mistaken sentence: “You have a kingdom to rule, I have only a rather numerous family of concepts.” I was then completely convinced that rather the opposite was true: Schiller was the regent of the poetic kingdom, while Goethe stood at the head of a large family, but because of countless half-finished life projects, one that included a considerable number of bastards. And to me Schiller possessed a tone, like that of Heinrich von Kleist in
Prinz Friedrich von Homburg
, which Goethe maybe only came close to in the early poems with their warm natural sound and wholeness: the harmony of an ever-greater idea with impulsive emotion and
incomparable beauty of expression. Initially, when the Schiller fever broke out in me again after a few weeks, I had a bad conscience, because I found the
Cornet
and also some of the Rilke poems merely elegant. They were no doubt more than that and even today I am grateful for the various circumstances that blessed me, if even for quite a short time, with a “Rilke fever,” which I never quite got over.

At the beginning of the long holidays we traveled to Berlin. Our stay began with a kind of horror story. Late in the evening, two days after our arrival, there was a sudden shout of “Fire!” from several quarters. Fire engines shot up the streets with screeching tires and all around sirens began to wail, even though there had been no air-raid warning. A fire had broken out in Junker Jörg Strasse, a few houses away, and within a short time the flames had taken hold of the whole building. When we came to the scene, having jumped out of bed as fast as we could, the roof truss was just crashing through the four stories of the house, and the crowd of onlookers standing there, open-mouthed, let out a gurgling groan. At that moment, as if from nowhere, an elderly couple appeared at a window, looking for something to hold on to, but finding nothing; after agitated shouting from the crowd, they jumped, hand in hand, into a safety sheet held out below. Weeping, their feet shuffling, they were led away by first-aid men. Wolfgang, never short of an ironic remark, called out at the circle of onlookers illuminated by the flames: “Why doesn’t anybody shout ‘Lights out!’? And where’s the air-raid warden, dammit?!” A
passerby beside me said, “Brat! He shouldn’t be allowed to say that!”

We remained until, despite every effort, the building had burned down almost to the foundations, and we left only after several summonses from my father. “Come on home!” he said. “You’ll have plenty of opportunities to see something like it.” When Winfried asked what that was supposed to mean, he replied, “That was just a prelude.” A little later, back in our apartment, he took us boys aside and said, “That wasn’t an air raid. So far we’ve been spared that. But at some point they’ll come to Karlshorst, too. That was a portent. Perhaps a guardian spirit wants to tell us, we should get used to it.” When my mother heard that, she stood up and left the room. At the door she said, more to herself, “If only there weren’t these dreadful politics! They simply destroy everything!” And when Wolfgang followed her, she remarked to him that father was only capable of thinking in apocalyptic terms now. “Please tell him, he should at least keep it to himself.”

In order to leave time for some visits, we did not travel to Walken Farm until three days later. As usual, Uncle Berthold was waiting at the railway station with the horse and carriage, but this time we interrupted the ride in Schwiebus to see relatives. Among them was the “other Franziska” (as we called her in memory of our maid) Aunt Cilli, and other relations on my father’s side. After that we drove, as usual, over bumpy village streets and deep sandy tracks to the farm at Packlitzsee. This time I regretted from the day we arrived that my parents
left us behind, as always, after a brief stay. Because in Freiburg I had discovered that, more than anything else, I missed someone who was sympathetically prepared to explain, reply, and contradict. For a broadminded response to even naive or apparently far-fetched questions there was no substitute for my father, and only now did I become aware of the lack. Wolfgang, annoyingly smart as ever, remarked, “You can’t always have clever people around you.” He also added, unnecessarily, as I thought, “You’ve left father’s apron strings behind—or, if you prefer, second supper. Get used to it!”

Back in Freiburg there was an unpleasant surprise in store for us. On the Wednesday—the first so-called
Heimabend
, or home evening, as it was called, after the beginning of the semester—the deputy rector of the boarding school discovered us in the lectern corner of one of the study rooms, where up to then we had passed the Hitler Youth sessions talking quietly or reading.
¹¹
With every sign of dismay he established that we were not complying with a “legal obligation,” and he appeared even more astonished when he heard that we were not even—nor had we ever been—members of the Hitler Youth. He accused us of “irresponsible behavior” and so of endangering “the existence of the whole institution.” That same evening “the Berliners” were summoned to Dr. Hermann, and at the end of the week a
youth leader of about the same age as me turned up and handed us our membership books for the Compulsory Hitler Youth, with the words that no “decent German lad” could be expected to do service in a unit with us.
¹²
“So no need to worry!” he exclaimed. “You’ll be with people like yourselves! But wrap up warm,” he tried to joke. “We make the dandies go barefoot through hell!”

Like Wolfgang and Winfried I wasn’t unhappy in the Compulsory Hitler Youth. While the “decent lads” in the basement of the Friedrich Gymnasium were singing “From gray city walls …” or “The bells rang out from Bernward’s tower …”—and in between listened reverently to the beating of a drum, a so-called
Landsknechtstrommel
which punctuated not only the addresses given and the songs, but also the heroic passages of the war stories that were read out—we had to march around in a circle in the school playground in wind and rain, crawl on our stomachs, or hop over the terrain in a squatting position holding a spade or a branch in our outstretched hand.
¹³

In our group there were, without exception, likable, rebellious boys who undauntedly stood by each other, wore their hair long on top, and described the “swing
sessions” that they organized in parents’ homes as “house music evenings,” in order (as they joked) to carry the Führer’s claim to cultural standards into the world in their own way. Himmler had recently threatened to put the “Swing Youth”
¹⁴
into concentration camps, but he just didn’t know what “German” meant, one explained to me. After two hours of “messing around,” as we called the mindless exercises in the dirt of the schoolyard, we waited for the Hitler Youth leaders, and ostentatiously demonstrated that we were in the best of moods; each time two of our boys were told to have a joke ready, to which the rest of us standing around had to respond with a roar of laughter. In contrast to the boarding school or the school class, no one here took exception to the usually silly adolescent jokes from Berlin, which Wolfgang and I contributed. But no matter how feeble the punch lines, when the Hitler Youth leaders approached we laughed uproariously, and enjoyed their surprised annoyance as they walked past.

At Christmas we were home in Berlin again. After the initial exchange of family news there were long evenings under the tasseled chandelier with endless stories from the neighborhood. Separate suppers had meanwhile been done away with and my two sisters were allowed to be present until their bedtime. We heard the latest gossip about Hausdorf, about the Goderskis, about old Katlewski, who seemed to have faded away since we left, as well as
about the Schönborns; and my father complained that despite repeated invitations Dr. Meyer didn’t come to see them anymore. Via friends the Rosenthals had passed on news that they had reached England poor but more or less safely—alive, at least—and they intended to move on to the United States. “As far away as possible from this terrible Europe!” Herr Rosenthal had said.

Later my father got around to Sally Jallowitz. Recently, after nightfall, they had together buried two suitcases with silver, jewelry, and fine cloth under the garden shed. The ground had been frozen solid, so it had been hard work. It wasn’t everything, Jallowitz had announced, and he didn’t have a wife yet, either. Then he said that he would leave Berlin if he had to, but just for a couple of weeks, and would return on the first train as soon as this Nazi madness was over. And he would return in a first-class compartment, he added, on “thick leather upholstery,” a good wine in front of him and a cigar in his mouth. “And peace at last!” he concluded. “And nice people everywhere. Everything that dominates today will then be far in the past. I can hardly wait!” He had given my father cloth for a suit—“for good services,” he said, “dark blue pinstripe, vest included.” And at the end: “You can wear this stuff in the Hotel Esplanade when we celebrate the end of the war, you and I.”

Dr. Goldschmidt, too, had turned up one day, my father went on. He, however, came with only a small bag, which (again after nightfall) they had buried about three feet deep under the table tennis table. He had acquired only valuable objects, Dr. Goldschmidt had said, but ones
that didn’t take up much room. During his explanations, which gave my father the impression of being a final “testament story,” he kept twisting his smoothly combed-back hair, so that by the end his large head looked quite ravaged. With all that they had lost all sense of time and Dr. Goldschmidt had to spend the night in our apartment, because he was not allowed to be on the street after the curfew hour for Jews; he was now worried that one of the fellow occupants of his house might have noticed his absence and, so as not to make himself culpable, reported it.
¹⁵
To the delight of both my mother and father Dr. Gans had been in Karlshorst again recently, very downcast, because even in his Russian adventure Hitler appeared to be favored by fortune. He at any rate was not ready to say that the obviously failing winter offensive was a turning point in the war. And so on, through the whole familiar
tour des personnages
, as my father put it.

For Christmas my father had come up with a little atonement. Among my presents was Ernst Jünger’s
On the Marble Cliffs
, which had been published a couple of years before.
¹⁶
My father said that while it wasn’t
Buddenbrooks
or
The Magic Mountain
, it wasn’t a book about sea power, either. Even if it was a novel, it was one with “a great deal of hidden reality”; the empty space between the lines was what one really had to read, it was there that one discovered things one knew. He hoped it would please me. This time it was I who gave the hint of an embrace.

Naturally, I went to see Father Wittenbrink shortly after my arrival. He invited me to his home on one of the days between Christmas and New Year’s to listen to music. One day then turned into three. I told him about my aversion to the boarding-school system, the narrow-minded “barracks world” made no more bearable by its Catholicism, and he replied, probably not without reason, that with my sensitivity to discipline I was only making life difficult for myself. Instead of complaining about being unable to find friends, I should think of steps that would make friendship possible in the first place.

I quickly changed the subject and, since we were sitting in front of the gramophone and piles of records, I steered the conversation to Mozart. I had recently read a remark by Leopold Mozart, who said that he had never met anyone, including Haydn, who had not described his “wondrous son” as being “beyond comprehension.” Surprisingly, Wittenbrink did not stick to Mozart, but soon moved on to Rossini and talked enthusiastically about the unique structure of the latter’s ensemble scenes, which, as he roughly explained, created towering and enchanting palaces of music by combining crescendo and accelerando. The conclusions to the acts, as in
The
Barber of Seville
, had always taken his breath away, he said, and he played me one of his new club records with passages from
La Cenerentola
. But, he added, as if suddenly returning to the world, if after all the tumultuous joy one explores the halls of these musical palaces more carefully, then for all their grandiose scale they are curiously empty: the most marvelous earthly pleasure in the middle of nothingness. The Department of Spirituality, Consolation, and Profundity was to be found next door, with the German composers.

Until then, of Rossini’s works I had known only
The Barber of Seville
from the performance to which Aunt Dolly had taken me, and I had hardly anything to say about it. In the meantime, Wittenbrink had moved on to Beethoven. Goethe had remarked that there is no dying in comedies, their aim is always love, marriage, and happiness. But the great exception was Beethoven’s
Fidelio
. For all the jubilation of the union at the end, there was nothing comic about this opera; here, someone whose head is full of the Enlightenment’s trust in the world believes that all suffering and oppression end in pure bliss. That, of course, is not the way things are. Deliverance is the rarest thing in the world. It didn’t even happen in dreams. Not in Father Wittenbrink’s, at any rate. One only had to look around! Then he was on to politics, the war, and the countless horrors everywhere.

For the return journey to Freiburg I had taken Jacob Burckhardt’s
The Cicerone
, from whose chapters I tried to put together a necessarily inadequate picture of the arts in Italy. Later I leafed through
The Greeks and Greek
Civilization
, but my fellow travelers were so bothersome that from time to time I dozed, apathetically. “All Berlin is in flight,” whispered Wolfgang with a glance at the crowded corridor and the piled-up luggage racks. “That business in the winter before Moscow seems to have shown everyone what difficulties we’re in.” Then,
seemingly unaffected by the commotion, he went on reading Dostoevsky.