Not I (28 page)

In 1942 the usual Christmas spirit was absent. I, nevertheless, almost got it going when I expressed my thanks for the successful course of the day, but couldn’t suppress the remark that the only thing I had missed was my father’s usual outburst of anger—and thereby got it immediately. He accused me of taking an improper pleasure in discord, but I retorted that one bit of discord was always part of the Christmas holiday, in our home at least. As my smirking siblings evidently agreed with me, he angrily left the room. But he returned a little later and said, as he tucked the napkin he had thrown down back in the neck of his vest, “Forgotten! It’s not worth getting upset about impertinences!”

The next day was clear, sunny, and cold. My father asked Wolfgang and me to walk to the Seepark with him. He talked about some political impressions of the recent past and then got around to Dr. Meyer, whom he had
tried to call on in vain. He would go to the street behind Hallesches Tor again this week; if he failed to see Dr. Meyer this time, too, one would have to fear the worst. And “the worst” in this case literally meant the worst.
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After a few steps we left the park, because the paths were too icy. On the way back my father went on to say that he still had something to tell us which, to his horror, he had recently heard in a BBC broadcast and which he did not wish to repeat in the presence of our mother.
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One of the commentators had reported at length on a House of Commons debate in which it had been asserted that the Jews removed from Germany were not, as was whispered furtively here and there, dumped in open country, which would have been bad enough, but were murdered by the tens of thousands. It was true that he believed Hitler and his accomplices capable of anything. But in this case he still believed it was one of those horror stories such as the unscrupulous English propaganda had already invented during the First World War. Consequently, he was looking for new, more precisely documented references. So far none of his friends had found them and the subject had not been mentioned again in any BBC broadcast, no matter how many hours he had spent in front of the radio.

He seemed very disquieted and we tried to talk him out of his fears. He prayed that what he had heard was not true, he said. The Nazis would not go that far, he concluded, as we turned into Hentigstrasse. Perhaps one should say more accurately: not for the time being. Because their backs weren’t up against the wall. At that point it would be impossible to be sure of anything. Then the last fuses would blow. I thought of Dr. Meyer and Sally Jallowitz. Later, when I saw my father go to his study, I followed him and asked if he didn’t, after all, know more. He replied that for all his inquiries he hadn’t been able to find out anything certain. Perhaps everyone was afraid to reveal their knowledge. At the end of our conversation I made him promise to tell me when he did discover something.

A few days after our return to the boarding school, I, like the rest of the class, received my call-up papers. Our destination was Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance, which was surrounded by an extensive ring of antiaircraft batteries, not only because aircraft parts were produced there, but above all because of its cogwheel factory. “No war can be fought without cogwheels,” Sergeant Grummel held forth before we moved off, to underline the importance of our deployment. He was a good-natured North German dockworker with an oddly crushed face, and he was responsible both for our appearance in public and for infantry training. As he explained his duties to us, he suddenly shouted “Into the field!” and “Take cover!” Then he led us to the uniform store, where we received the blue Luftwaffe uniform, fatigues, and the
rest of our kit from service cap to boots. Steel helmet and mess tin as well, of course. We had hardly become acquainted with our lockers before we were summoned for roll call by Sergeant Major Knuppe, whom by the next day we were already calling “Knüppel” (club).

After that we were assigned to various functions. The greater part of the three classes that now found themselves together again had to carry out their duty on the 8.8 cm cannon, which were mounted in six-foot-high earth emplacements covered in planking. A smaller group was assigned to the U-Equipment, as it was called, which was housed in subterranean bunkers. The apparatus was used to determine the position of the aerial targets and the information was passed on to the gun crews. I was assigned to the U-Equipment.

The battery was situated amidst blossoming apple trees on a hill above the town of Friedrichshafen. Lake Constance glittered below, and over on the other side, in the middle of a jagged range of mountains, rose snow-covered Säntis. At twilight we saw the band of lights of the towns on the Swiss side and their flickering reflection in the water, while on our side, as far as Konstanz and Lindau, everything lay in silent darkness.

In the course of the first weeks several teachers had followed our class to continue teaching us the more important subjects. We went on learning Latin, history, and for a while also mathematics and one or two of the natural sciences. But the school lessons—entirely subordinated to the military timetable—were almost necessarily peripheral, until Dr. Kiefer turned up. He
appeared in front of the class in an unusual outfit, wearing a black cape and a red scarf loosely draped around his neck.
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He threw his slouch hat onto the lectern and introduced himself with a brief address, which went roughly like this: “I have a story to tell you of German narrowness and provincialism. Also of the preeminence of Italian and French culture, as well as of traveling players who were hardworking but hopelessly backward and were still wandering around the country with their cart when Paris already had several proud theaters and Naples even had an opera house. Until Lessing, the first German writer with a worldwide reputation, appeared. In the hundred years that followed, his genius turned the country into a center of influence of the arts and sciences such as Europe had seen only once before: I’m now talking of Athens, or perhaps at a pinch of the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent.”

The artist’s dress in which Kiefer made his entrance evidently reflected the fact that he regarded the teaching profession merely as a temporary role with which to earn money and basically saw himself as a painter. In the hours when he was not teaching he would roam the terrain around the battery with easel, sketch pad, and folding chair. Sometimes one saw the man, his figure tending to corpulence, among the apple trees, which were meanwhile bearing red-yellow fruit, searching for a suitable
motif, climbing up a rise or down a slope; a few hours later he returned to camp, out of breath, but clearly full of inspiring impressions, with two or three pieces painted in the Expressionist style, and was happy to enter into conversations with us. Quite often he would then pick up the thread of the school topics of the morning.

He could talk without stopping about Goethe and Schiller, about Kleist, Georg Büchner, and also about the Shakespeare translations of Schlegel and Tieck, without once tormenting us with dull subject matter.
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He retold Schiller’s
Intrigue and Love
as a romantic tragedy involving Fred, the son of a senior civil servant, and the daughter of a caretaker who (as far as I remember) was called Irmgard Schönquell. As I wrote to my mother, Lady Milford seemed to have wound up with the name Pamela Grace in Kiefer’s version; my mother thought her “someone who has been around too much for her own good.” Without revealing the origin of the story, Kiefer also transposed
Prinz Friedrich von Homburg
to the present with minor modifications, especially toward the end, which might well have caused him some problems. He did the same with Goethe’s
Faust
. Yet, in conclusion, Kiefer always explained that of course he hadn’t
himself experienced the events he related. Rather, he had wanted to convey to us in a relatively unconventional way one of the great works of classical literature. At the same time he had wanted to show that the widespread fear of the famous works of the poets was quite unfounded. Then he started on the literary interpretation of the text described. What he valued above all was doubt, which at a time of “prescribed faith” he had turned into a kind of idol. “In case of doubt, choose doubt! That should be your motto in life,” he liked to say.

It was probably stories about Dr. Kiefer and some arrogant lines about the soldier’s life that I included in a lengthy, somewhat formal letter to my grandfather in Berlin. At any rate, he replied immediately and informed me in a few words that on my next leave I should “present myself at Riastrasse for tea.” A roommate, who saw the card lying on the top bunk bed, found the tone very funny and asked if I still used the formal
Sie
(you) with my grandfather. I merely responded, “No, no
Sie
and no formality. Simply big city manners!” He then spread it around that I was quarrelsome and ill-mannered.
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As we were cleaning artillery pieces in the barracks square, another roommate recommended the poet Josef Weinheber, of whom I had never heard. He also lent me a volume of poems, which I read with increasing
interest. The title was
Adel und Untergang
(
Aristocracy and Ruin
). It was a noble tone (though I felt it was no match for Schiller) that I encountered in these pages, at times high-flown, heroic, again and again associating life and death, and full of the pathos of the time. He wrote of “holy wanderings,” also of “universal fire,” but already in the next line there were echoes of Expressionism with “soaring embers” and “ambrosian curls”: all aristocracy and ruin, which then again shifted to a classicism that was always a little strained. I was also impressed by his play with rhyme and lines, above all in the lyric cycles. Wolfgang—to whom I gave one of Weinheber’s volumes when we met in Frankfurt on the Oder, where he was doing his basic military training—had only ridicule for the “verbal clamor,” as he called it, and parodied individual passages as a priestly
Dies irae
. I, however, who for a little while longer still considered Josef Weinheber’s “blossom-garlanded brows” and “dream-curving mouths” to be notable poetry, became aware, thanks to this poet (and at a distance of several years), just how easily one can fall in with the spirit of the times, even when one was raised in opposition to it.
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At about the beginning of May 1943 a letter arrived from my father, which related some events in Karlshorst.
He added that he had twice gone to Halle Gate, but had not been able to see our friend Dr. Müller; he had presumably been
assigned for duty
, and we could only hope that he would return home unharmed. Naturally, I had an awful premonition, and in my mind I again went over some poems and Dr. Meyer’s remarks when we had parted and which had consolidated our relationship. In my reply to my father, however, I did not mention any of that. Instead, I concealed my disquiet behind some trivial matters and mentioned that I would probably get leave at the end of June, when I hoped to hear details from him. At the same time I confirmed the arrangement that I would bring two friends with me. We should leave everything else until then. And as a PS I had added:
What can we do?

At the end of June I did indeed travel to Berlin with Helmut Weidner and Norbert Steinhardt. My parents were waiting for us at Anhalt Station. My father again appeared very dejected, and a little later, as I walked behind the others with my mother, she expressed the hope that our visit would cheer him up. We should do everything possible in that respect and avoid any political argument. She was worried, not without cause, and expected my support.

At the beginning our conversations did several times wander into politics, but my mother and I always managed to change the subject, and when Father Wittenbrink turned up in the garden in the morning I was able to say a few words of warning. My friends certainly shared our political views, I said, but no one could say
how discreet they would be under pressure. Also I hadn’t invited them to Berlin to have political discussions, but to show them Berlin with its palace, Unter den Linden, museums, and Alexanderplatz. We wanted nothing else but a holiday from our military duty, I said, to go to the theater and concerts, the bicycle races in the Sportpalast, and, as we deliberately and dismissively put it, to see the “colorful girls” on Friedrichstrasse. I felt something like an owner’s pride as I took them around, most strongly when we went out to Potsdam—to Sanssouci Palace, the Marble Palace, and the Garrison Church—which I had loved since childhood and which was rather deserted these days.

The next morning, when we came down to the garden for breakfast, Wittenbrink was already walking up and down on his side of the fence saying the breviary. Hardly had we arrived when—in view of our prior warnings—he began a conversation about Mozart and how he had appeared in the world as a complete being. When he added that that was almost as amazing as the miracle of Cana, I took the liberty of warning him against the sin of heresy. Wittenbrink merely laughed and answered that luckily there was no Inquisition anymore.
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But since my friends did not really respond to one musical subject or another, he changed to painting. His great preference was for the Italians and the Flemish and Dutch, he assured
us, then he told us about the various schools of painting, of Siena, Florence, and Rome, and from there got to, as he said, “the great Caravaggio,” whom he admired unreservedly, despite his liking for “all-too-naked flesh.” It had always been his dream to own a picture by the great painter, but, given his short life—large parts of which were spent in bars, brothels, and prisons—he had left too little behind. His skill in using light as a kind of cold fire quite overwhelmed the senses; it warmed the viewer and at the same time made him shiver. We must on no account miss the opportunity to look at the works of “the great Caravaggio” in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum.
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