Not I (36 page)

The following day when I encountered this corporal on the camp street, we talked about the incident. He proved to be altogether entertaining and ended up inviting me to his one-man tent. As a painter and sketcher, he
said, he was by profession, so to speak, always “a couple of steps” out of the world. But the madness of this war was something he could never have thought up. It was sometimes said of the Germans that they had no relation to reality: he thought it was a fairly stupid cliché, but Hitler had made it true. And the stupidity, as well. Against the whole world: he would never understand what had got into the Germans. And the Germans themselves hadn’t understood it either, as the previous day’s row had made clear.

His views were food for a good many more conversations. Since he was incessantly painting or drawing our American guards—or their wives, children, and sweethearts from photographs—he benefited from numerous privileges. In between, he painted camp views, landscapes, or flowers on small plywood panels. He came from the Bergisch Land, the hilly region south of the Ruhr, and his name was Alfred Sternmann. Among his privileges, apart from his own tent, were a proper cupboard instead of a metal military locker, two easy chairs, and a kettle and a water container to make tea. He also had a divided-off studio. So whenever my duties permitted I spent the afternoons with him, drinking tea.

To improve my linguistic skills I got a GI at headquarters to procure more books from the Pocket Library for me.
²
I read the adventures of Tom and Huck for the second time and, apart from that, got some other titles
from Lieutenant Dillon—who had some knowledge of literature, but only came out with it reluctantly—among them Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
. A little later a corporal on the headquarters staff introduced me to the author whose works then accompanied me for the longest time during my imprisonment: W. Somerset Maugham. Perhaps influenced by my father’s prejudice against novels, I was rather skeptical when I began to read
The Razor’s Edge
, the tale of a restlessly driven man. But as soon as I finished it I immediately began
Of Human Bondage
, the story of an inexorable decline; and was finally able, with some difficulty, to get hold of
The Moon and Sixpence
. It was impossible to obtain more works by the writer, except for a volume of novellas, which mostly contained sharply observed love stories coming to a dramatic crisis.
Astonishingly, no one recommended Steinbeck to me or Dos Passos, who had already been famous for a long time by then.

The city of Laon, seen from the POW camp in which the author spent almost two years (oil painting on wood by Alfred Sternmann)

In the course of the months in which I was studying Somerset Maugham, I never came across a single awkward or even boring line. My reading, together with that first conversation with Captain Donaldson, also brought home to me that my knowledge of literature had so far been too much dominated by classic German works, that I knew neither Musil nor Heinrich Mann nor Thomas Mann, nor Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, or the great Russians: all of them names that frequently came up, but which meant very little to me. Beyond that, I got to know, through the periodical
Die Brücke
(
The Bridge
), which was produced especially for the American POW camps, the names of contemporary German authors like Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Reinhold Schneider, and Romano Guardini; I was particularly impressed by the poems of Erich Fried.
³

The relaxed behavior of the American soldiers toward each other continued to surprise me. Between the higher and lower ranks there was no “Attention!”; only
when orders were being issued was there any standing at attention with the arm stiffly angled to the edge of the cap. Even senior officers were friendly to privates in an unaffected way and during discussions one often saw both squatting down together. The security measures were quite relaxed as well. The work parties leaving and entering the camp were merely counted; as a result, it became customary that on some evenings four or five prisoners stayed in Laon and in their place the same number of prostitutes came into the camp disguised in work clothes. Then in the morning the two groups changed places. First Sergeant Driffel once told me that he had long ago seen through our trick: “You Germans think you’re damned smart. But we’ve known for a long time that you’re hanging around in the brothels in town.” He would, nevertheless, take no action. Because in the same situation they would have done exactly the same. As long as no one goes missing.

As my relationship with Captain Donaldson became closer I was able—with the support of some fellow prisoners—to earn a few privileges. So we expanded the handball and soccer tournaments, which had been at first only camp championships, to other nearby camps in Rheims, Soissons, and Saint-Quentin. We also proposed that a group of those interested be given classes in politics, in particular on the rudiments of democracy. Captain Donaldson was indeed able to get hold of a kind of educational officer, whose possibly all-too-high-flown expositions the majority of the participants met with their own hard-boiled irony. Nevertheless, the classes
of the “Commanding Professor,” as Captain Grey was mockingly called, were not without their effect. The biggest surprise was that he not only put up with objections from his listeners, but encouraged them, and a first lieutenant from Hamburg, with whom I soon had quite a few conversations, said after one of these debating sessions, “The good man is very convincing. But the Americans are just guileless people. A man like that doesn’t know that freedom always goes wrong in the end.”

But above all, working with some other prisoners it was possible to get surplus food supplies into the French camp in the fortress of Laon. The Americans regularly drove all foodstuffs that had not been used to a nearby rubbish dump and left them in a moldy heap to be fed on by rats, mice, and other creatures. In the French camp, however, about four thousand German prisoners were incarcerated in wretched conditions. One of them whispered to me during a visit that they would dearly love to have the stacks of loaves, the sacks of milk powder, the dried eggs, and the corned beef that were left over every day in our camp. It didn’t take many words to convince Captain Donaldson of the absurdity of this situation. Nevertheless, military bureaucracy took a couple of weeks to comply with the request.

When I passed through the fortress gate on the hill, riding on one of the first trucks, emaciated figures silently began to unload the sacks and boxes. We were strictly forbidden to speak to the fortress prisoners, but one or two of us managed to exchange a few words with them, and we heard about hunger, dirt, and atrocious sanitary
conditions. The deliveries were then repeated and a few of us were slipped the message that the French guards passed on only a small part of the provisions to the prisoners, while the larger part of the consignment ended up on the black market.

The handball team of Laon Camp: the author and fellow escapee Wolfgang Münkel are fifth and sixth from the left, respectively

In autumn 1945 Hubertus zu Löwenstein—my father’s friend who had emigrated to the United States—tried to get me released with the help of his influential contacts. But his efforts were just as unsuccessful as the calls made by the academic Emil Lengyel, another of my father’s friends, who had visited us several times during the Hitler years. However, they could at least inform me about the fate of the rest of my family. They let me know that my mother and my two sisters had survived somewhere in Berlin. About Winfried I was told, somewhat
mysteriously, that he had “escaped the bloodhounds at the last moment,” while all trace of my father had been lost somewhere in East Prussia. At the end of a letter Löwenstein wrote that he would have liked to send me food but, after making inquiries, found out that it was not allowed. Lengyel wrote me the same thing.

It was now that I began to keep a diary. A world, I thought, in which nothing happens, must be made more exciting through ideas committed to paper. I noted my conversations with Captain Donaldson, no matter how little there was to them, or the problems with Lieutenant Dillon, who evidently believed that a certain amount of bad temper went with putting on a uniform. But I also wrote down the arguments of the lower ranks with each other or with the Polish detachment that had recently arrived, as well as conversations with a slowly growing circle of friends.

The figure at its center was Erich Kahnt, a tall Saarlander, proud of his chubbiness, who liked to busy himself as cook, poet, and conversationalist; also part of the group were Wolfgang Münkel, who was devoted and sensible, and Klaus-Jürgen Meise from Hamburg, who, as one of the Swing Youth, had been imprisoned by the Nazis and covered every inch of his tent corner with colored pinups. And, of course, the close relation with Alfred Sternmann continued. There was almost nothing in my notebooks about Berlin; because of the censorship, the three or four letters I received from home reported only the inconsequential:
Thank goodness, you’re still alive! We survived, too. How are you? Do you get enough to
eat?
 … and so on. Longer and more substantial entries were given over to the Commanding Professor, who, as ever, always came back to the habeas corpus acts and the Bill of Rights. When one of the participants in the course complained about Grey’s eternal repetitions, our teacher was ready with a disarming explanation: these two documents were not only of fundamental importance, but he had simply loved them ever since he was young. “Yes!” he insisted, “ ‘Love’ is the right word.” And for the sake of our country, that should be exactly our attitude, too.

I also wrote down what I thought worth recording about the camp handball team, of which I was soon a member, and the tournament trips, as well as my impressions on the way. It was not long before this had developed into a penchant for describing landscapes as precisely as possible, but also for capturing each human figure mentioned in a vivid portrait recognizable to the reader by at least the third sentence. Several years before, when I described the two sides of Hans Hausdorf—the serious and the punning—my father had accused me of a lack of respect, and to my response that I was merely describing reality, he had objected, “Then don’t look so carefully! One can draw people more gently, more understandingly, if you’ll permit the word!” Now, however, it was a matter of looking carefully. When I read Sternmann the three pages in which I had tried to portray him, he picked up his drawing block and began, even as I was still reading my text, to put down the first strokes of a drawing of me.

At about the same time I resolved to write down what I had learned about the Renaissance over the years. I did
not know the exact dates of the persons and events, but I had committed to memory many episodes in the lives of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Verrocchio, and Alexander VI, Pico della Mirandola, Michelangelo, and Julius II, Guicciardini, Botticelli, and the unforgotten “great Caravaggio.” Driffel got hold of a bloodthirsty, inventive potboiler about Lucrezia Borgia for me. It was called
Love, Power and Daggers: All Red as Blood
and the name of its author has disappeared from the world, as it has from my memory. Finally, with the help of this muddled and colorful material, which I spread out on my desk at headquarters when I was on night duty, I tried to write an essay.

Although I was aware of the gaps in my knowledge, I got so much pleasure from a subject that was in every sense human and splendid that I soon began to write a biographical sketch about the Luccan condottiere Castruccio Castracani. For weeks I had searched for biographical data about this contemporary of Machiavelli’s but given our conditions at the time, I had been able to gather only a few haphazard references. As a result, I did not know much more about him than his origin as a foundling, which, possibly for propaganda reasons, was surrounded by mystery, as well as the notable connections which, with astonishing farsightedness, he had already made as a young man.