Not I (32 page)

On one of these far too short days we were woken earlier than usual and ordered out to the roll-call square. Three high-ranking officers stood in front of the assembled units. One of them read from a leaflet that an underhand and dishonorable assassination attempt—unworthy of a German officer—had been made on the Führer’s life. The two other officers stood beside him, staring blankly into the distance. The deed, continued the reader, was all the more reprehensible as the Reich, since the invasion of Normandy, was also threatened from the west. Then several measures to improve our readiness for defense were read out.

Our superiors took the July 20 assassination attempt as an excuse to intensify the drilling, and several times fetched us out of bed in the middle of the night for an exercise. “If drill and increased imbecility are the only
result,” said one of our comrades, who until that point had hardly been conspicuous for his political remarks, then he regretted even more that the assassination had failed. Almost everyone found the abolition of military salutes, which was announced at issue of orders a few days later, and their replacement by the Hitler salute just as annoying. He felt like a monkey, Buck said in the circle of his comrades, and I added that I had recently seen a picture of a historical Berlin masquerade in which some of the masked were walking under a grotesque pig’s or donkey’s head. That’s just how we must appear to others, interjected Buck, only they had done voluntarily what we were forced to do. He would have to think hard as to which of the two looked more ridiculous.

In retrospect the frankness with which this group of Gymnasium boys (which is what the majority of us were, thrown together from all over) declared their opposition to the given conditions is astonishing. No one, of course, wanted to make a show of courage. Everyone simply knew at a first or second glance whom he could trust and when caution was called for; and, without a word of conversation, anyone with even a bit of intelligence had a feeling for what could be said in front of whom and what it was better to remain silent about. Because at this late stage of the war there was hardly any doubt that even innocent-sounding remarks could be life-and-death matters.

So the days, which granted us an unexpected friendship, drifted by. But they didn’t last long. In the second half of September the unit was lined up for roll call and after a few phrases, which were supposed to rouse us,
we were divided into two groups. Then a clerk took the names, and as the trucks had already arrived at the barracks, the sergeant gave us half an hour for “regulation packing.” To my dismay Buck and I found ourselves in different sections. Since this departure, too, took its course with the usual military waste of time, we were at least able to get a few moments to say goodbye to each other and some other comrades. I said something to Buck about the musical insights I had got from him, and that we should stay in touch. He replied that he must return the compliment, because only thanks to me had it become clear to him how much time he had frittered away in German and history classes. Now a couple of things had dawned on him, and on the whole he wanted to say that never in his life had he felt as free as in our conversations. “And that as a dumb-ass private! Who can make sense of the world?”

As we were taking our last steps a little way from the rest, Buck told me how, as a seven-year-old, he had dug up cobblestones in front of his parents’ house on the marketplace of Radolfzell and put them aside. When a passerby asked what he was looking for, he had replied, “For the Devil, of course. Someone has to find him.” And if he didn’t exist, he wanted to discover what the secret was and what was hidden under the stones instead of the Devil. A little later he wrote to me in a letter that we had come a tiny bit closer to the market-square secret. When this “utterly stupid war” was over, we should start looking again as soon as possible. It was convenient that Freiburg was such a noted center of music.

Then we saw the trucks driving up, and out of the crowd of NCOs zealously hurrying around one shouted over to ask why we were walking so far away. An hour later the convoys moved off. A destination was not named, but we soon discovered that we were traveling north. In Aachen the two units separated, and about three days later, after numerous further interruptions and an interim halt in Tilburg, we reached a military camp near the Dutch town of Eindhoven. Even as we were getting down from the trucks the news spread that we were not going into action, because the British airborne troops that had landed a few days before had already been wiped out. At Arnhem and Nijmegen Montgomery had wanted to attack the Germans from the rear and capture the Rhine bridges, but the operation had failed. So there was once again time for practice in military mindlessness. At the arrival roll call the sergeant major addressed the column with the words: “Soldiers! My name is Neuber. I am the sergeant major. On duty I am—to the best of my ability—a bastard, but off-duty I’m a pleasant fellow. You will get to know both!” And then, suddenly bellowing with all his might: “All men, take cover!”

At the beginning of October 1944 our unit was transferred to a small town on the Lower Rhine. There we were trained in duties as sappers, in building pontoons and in moving bridges. A new friendship arose with our company commander, Lieutenant Walter Kühne, who summoned a few chosen comrades for an interview. After some words about my parental home and education, he asked me, almost without a transition, about Rilke and
I recited the first three or four sections of
Cornet Rilke
until he signaled it was enough. As I later found out, he asked others about Kleist, Fontane, or Stefan George and with the four or five boys who had satisfied his demands he formed a circle of lovers of literature. He was probably not much liked by his brother officers because of it. Any rate, I overheard two officers say, “Kühne’s crazy! He should be kicking ass. Instead, he tries to make himself interesting by being highly educated.”
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One evening at this time I heard over the crystal set, though with a great deal of interference,
The Marriage of Figaro
. Once more I regretted that Reinhold Buck wasn’t there with me. In the end, I thought, literature could hardly replace music.

As the month drew to a close, news of death came in from all sides. Once, on a single day, four comrades whom I had felt close to were reported killed in action, and I heaved a sigh of relief at every day that ended without terrible news about relatives or friends. Shortly after this I received a letter from Wittenbrink, which he had given to a parishioner who belonged to a signals unit. Wolfgang was not well, it said. Lieutenant Kühne moved heaven and earth to find out more. In mid-October he told me that Wolfgang was seriously ill and had been taken to a hospital in Beuthen in Silesia. My mother had rushed there from Berlin when she heard the news, and was with him day and night. My father, too, was trying
to get special leave. Both were terribly afraid and my mother, in particular, was in despair—that was the message Lieutenant Kühne had got from a medical orderly, who had scribbled it down on a piece of paper. Blinded by tears and with nothing to hold on to, she often lost her way in the unfamiliar surroundings, Kühne read to me. “She admitted that to a stranger?” I asked. I couldn’t believe it. “You’re right,” he said, “here on the piece of paper it says only that she couldn’t get her bearings at all in the town, and prayed to God to spare her son. Then it says that because she was weeping all the time she found it hard to carry out the simplest tasks. And at the end it also says that it is very important to her that Wolfgang’s brother is told everything.”

The news struck me like a thunderbolt. Probably, I thought later, because it was utterly unexpected and it made my worst fears come true. Of the friends I had made and lost in the course of the years, it was Wolfgang to whom I was closest. Not only had I always been able to talk to him, but we had discussed many things of lasting importance. Even when we had arguments or differences of opinion, there always remained an indissoluble bond. Free from the usual jealousy of younger siblings, I admired his wit, his independence, and his pride. Almost ten years before, when the second supper had been inaugurated, he had told me (giving my chest a nudge) that now it was we two against the world, and at the time that high-flown phrase had been quite incomprehensible to me. When it became clear what he had meant, I realized why our arguments, which might have destroyed other
friendships, resulted in no lasting offense between us. In a way I thought him invulnerable. Only now did I begin to have a presentiment that the world was stronger than we could ever be.

An endless week—in the course of which I again and again tried to find out more news, and several times applied in vain for short leave—passed without further details. I often went for a walk in the evening, and to distract myself asked one of the comrades from the Kühne circle to accompany me. We stumbled over the uneven terrain. I avoided all reminiscences. Instead, we talked about books, films, or actors, as well as the discovery of those years, Georg Trakl, and also Stefan George.
⁵
At times I suspected that my companions—no matter what the subject—wanted to talk me into having a confidence, which I myself could no longer summon up.

On a bright November day, as I’ve never forgotten, there came certainty. Wolfgang had already died in the middle of October 1944 in the hospital in Upper Silesia, exactly one week after his twentieth birthday. Slowly, thanks to communications from my mother, which often reached me by surprising routes, I found out more details. In the course of a military operation near Riga, on the Baltic front, he had contracted a lung infection; summoning up all of his strength, he had been helped to battalion headquarters by two comrades. There his
commander had first of all shouted at him for being a “malingerer,” then driven him back to the front line with his drawn revolver. Two hours after arriving at the makeshift dugout, he had collapsed, lost consciousness, and been taken to a hospital. A few days later a train carrying the wounded had brought him to Beuthen.

When my mother got there, Wolfgang had passed the night with a high temperature and had difficulty breathing. On October 13, his birthday, he said to her, “Today death was with me. We came to an agreement. He granted me another postponement.” After two earlier operations he had to endure an operation on each of the following seven days. “They don’t have any anesthetic and painkillers here anymore,” he groaned after the fourth operation. “I can’t bear it much longer.” On October 19, after overcoming endless difficulties, my father got to the sickbed while Wolfgang still had moments of clarity. Ten hours later profuse perspiration set in and Wolfgang’s face was covered in glassy beads of sweat. Abruptly recovering consciousness, he begged our parents, “Please don’t write ‘In deep sorrow.’ ” Then he lost consciousness again, and minutes later, with a last movement of his hand, he died. According to my mother, he had replied to the devout consolation that she uttered, “Don’t worry! The little bit of life I had didn’t leave me any time to get up to much mischief.” And after a pause in which he fought for breath: “I liked it.”

Wolfgang’s death was an unspeakable misfortune for our family. My mother had always said as long as we were all alive she would not complain. Now that pillar
of stability had broken down. In the almost twenty-five years that remained to her, whenever Wolfgang’s name or an episode involving him was mentioned, she rose from her seat and left the room. I was there on some occasions and followed her. Each time I found her in one of the other rooms, where, her head in her hands, she tried to compose herself. Once in the mid-1960s, when I inadvertently talked about Wolfgang, she simply looked at me and with an imploring “Please!” left the room. Later, she said that after everything else, Hitler had also taken her son and she hoped, quite without Christian magnanimity, that he would never be granted forgiveness for it.

At the news of Wolfgang’s death all the lordly manner of my supposedly unapproachable grandfather collapsed. His villa not far from the Seepark had already been destroyed in an air raid, and with my grandmother he had moved into my parents’ apartment, half-empty now, since my sisters, to avoid evacuation, were at a girls’ Gymnasium in the Neumark east of Berlin. He had locked himself in his room for two days, not let anyone in, and answered all pleas with a dismissive blow on the door. My two sisters, who liked to call him “hardhearted,” later related that when he silently returned to the family table his eyes were red from weeping.

For me, too, the death of my brother was a profound break. I had once said to Reinhold Buck that in his life each person has four fundamental experiences: first, being overwhelmed by a perfect musical work; then, reading a great book; then, first love; and then, the first irreplaceable loss.

Wolfgang Fest just before his call-up to the army in 1943

Among the viler Nazis in our unit was a Medical Corporal Schneider, a man of about forty, a male nurse by profession, who (as he often boasted) had joined the party in 1933. Some of us suspected that he had been assigned to our company of mainly middle-class school-leavers as an informer. At any rate, we called him “the Ear,” because he was constantly eavesdropping and treated everyone he met with the mistrust of the born spy. Someone had evidently told him that I had spoken with disgust of the death of my brother, and in particular of the battalion commander who had forced him back to the front line. Without hesitation, Schneider formally reported the “incident,” and, together with the overzealous Sergeant Major Mahlmann, tried to submit it directly to the court-martial to whose sphere of responsibility the regiment belonged. Lieutenant Kühne, however, asserted his superior rank as company commander and—feigning outrage, he stated in the presence of the sergeant major—he had come to a provisional decision. I was given a “final warning,” but given the difficult military situation I was declared indispensable for the time being. After the foreseeable final victory, however, which I also impatiently anticipated thanks to my trust in the Führer, continued Kühne, I would certainly be placed before a court-martial and, should the accusations made against me prove well founded, be punished by the full force of the law.