Not I (43 page)

Peter Schulz had great hopes for Communism and held that nothing more than a pretty illusion was being presented of the capitalist West. “They’ve got their experts for that!” he often repeated. The future, at any rate, belonged to the East: “That’s where the sun rises!” In six or eight years at the latest, socialism would be ahead in all respects. “And freedom?” I asked. “That comes after,” he said. Freedom was only a consequence of affluence, not its precondition. Freedom first was “one of the lavatory wall slogans of capitalism.”

We often spent whole evenings on such questions, and with Peter Schulz I for the first time discovered that stubborn, conventional people frequently utter nothing but commonplaces with respect to everyday life, but as soon as the conversation turns to political questions, they not infrequently express fantastically foolish ideas. In the West, too, it was the dreariest philistines who could be won over by almost any eccentric craziness.

When I asked him what he would do if things did not turn out the way he anticipated, he made a dismissive gesture. Very simple, he responded. If he remained in West Berlin and the Russians took over the city, they would
send him to the mines. “Finished. Lights out!” But if he went over to the East and it was taken over by the West, then at most he would have to attend a “reeducation course,” perhaps two. Then he would come out again as a model democrat. And, after brief reflection, he added, “I’m not indulging in any dirty tricks there. Although I learned them in the Hitler Youth. Understand?”

“Well,” he asked me shortly afterward when I made my farewell visit, “have I learned my lesson for idiots, in your opinion?” I shook my head. “Only the wrong one!” I retorted. No doubt Peter Schulz successfully worked his way up. But despite some efforts, no one in the family or any friend ever heard of him again after the end of 1948, when he moved to the Soviet Occupation Zone.

Someone else who belongs in this gallery of brief Berlin acquaintances is Otto Zarek, who had returned to his “once-loved Berlin”—“just to take a look around.”
²³
He had been a well-known author in the 1920s and now wanted to get to know a young German. He was introduced to me through the good offices of a committee member of the Christian-Jewish society. We met in the restaurant of a French officers’ club, which was reputed to have a kitchen of an international standard. Zarek had brought a promising author with him called William Golding, who would later have a worldwide success with
Lord of the Flies
and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Both were amusing, intelligent, and tireless in their English malice about colleagues, whether they were talking about George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, or Christopher Fry. But more extravagant was Otto Zarek, who evidently took English eccentricity all too literally. He interrupted even the slyest anecdotes with long-winded digressions on the best restaurants in the world, which is, of course, one of the dullest conversational topics in existence. After flight and terror, explained Zarek repeatedly, he now only patronized “select establishments,” and without exception drank renowned Italian white wines or a classic Bordeaux.

Nevertheless, in the course of the evening I couldn’t get rid of the impression that neither the dishes nor the vintage Bordeaux meant anything to Otto Zarek. To my astonishment he hastily shoveled down each course on the menu as it came and, after a ritual connoisseur’s glance, poured glass after glass of wine down his throat. I thought during this display of gluttony, which William Golding also observed with surprise, that Zarek was unable to enjoy anything anymore. Instead, he only wanted to prove that the years of terror were over. Later on, after he had become Boleslaw Barlog’s dramaturge at the Schiller Theater in Berlin, we became close friends.

At the end of my weeks in Berlin, when I had already packed my suitcases, Walter Kühne turned up from his seclusion near Lüneburg. He had prevented court-martial proceedings against me thanks to a fairly
transparent dodge and wanted to meet my parents, from whom he had received a report about my brother Wolfgang’s death, which he had passed on to me. Now he brought me Thomas Mann’s novella
Death in Venice
and remarked, glancing at my father and appealing for understanding, “You’ve probably got over and forgiven Thomas Mann by this time!” My father replied with a somewhat forced smile, “Got over, yes; forgiven, no.” For all its limits, the book opened up for me further doors to the literature of the first half of the century. In the years that followed, I found my way to Gide, Rudolf Borchardt, Henry James, and even Oswald Spengler.
²⁴
The latter’s tone irritated me, however; always a little too much enamored of doom and seeming to address the reader from the parapets of the universe. As in those infinitely remote prewar days, we then went out to Potsdam, encountered further restricted areas, talked, drank watery lemonade (more for the sake of memory than anything else), and walked back past Kleist’s grave to Wannsee Station. That was the first time that life seemed to be gradually returning to its familiar pattern.

Arriving at the station in Freiburg, I came upon Dr. Kiefer, who had taught me when I was stationed with the antiaircraft battery in Friedrichshafen, consulting the departures board. He was still corpulent, engaging, and
exuberant. Every Wednesday, he said, he had a
jour fixe
for particular friends in his apartment in Jacobistrasse, and since I had been one of his favorite pupils he would be very pleased to invite me. I could get all the details from Willibald Knecht, the publisher’s son, who had also been invited. “Willibald Knecht was killed in action,” I interrupted Dr. Kiefer, but there was no stopping him, and he talked about the professors, journalists, and writers who would be there, even some artists. “Well, you get the idea! So, till Wednesday!” Furthermore, he shouted over from the station doors in a voice loud enough to be heard by everyone, he had recently invited the great actor Martin Held, who would shortly be appearing in Freiburg in a lead role.
The Devil’s General
. Had I heard of it?
²⁵

So I was again drawn into contact with Dr. Kiefer, who had indeed assembled a notable circle. We talked with unusually objective and personal frankness: about the largely undiminished reputation of Freiburg University; the musical life of the city; the affectations of the French occupation authorities; and whatever was happening at the time. But the unmatched attraction of the evenings was Dr. Kiefer’s daughter Juliane, whom the junior academics and even more so the older professors crowded around. She looked as if she had just stepped out of a painting by Raphael and I have forgotten neither
the envious nor the reproving glances when the beautiful Juliane, as happened from time to time, invited me to sit beside her.

These evenings, too, confirmed the impression of normality. Basically, I had spent the past twenty years outside the sphere of normal life: whether under the pressure that had constantly borne down on my parents, or at school, or the boarding school, or in the army, or as a prisoner of war. We children never complained about the difficulties the Hitler years had imposed on us; in fact, protected by our parents, we experienced them, rather, as a happy and never-threatening adventure. But was that life?

I was inclined to study law, possibly to balance my amateur’s preference for the Renaissance. At least, so it sometimes seemed to me, the Berlin visit and the conversations with my father had brought me closer to reality. “The Weimar Republic foundered not least because of dreamers who were running away from the world,” he once said. “Stick to Italy! That way you’ll learn to understand the present. But don’t forget Berlin.” And later on: “The closer you get to political reality, the more you have to leave behind. Unfortunately, you also will lose what Wolfgang once called—I’ve never forgotten it—your romantic quirk. Reality will never make you entirely happy! But there’s no choice if we want to avoid another shipwreck.”

When I asked why the two could not be combined, the Renaissance with the political here and now, he said carefully that he did not believe I had a vocation for
politics in the narrower sense; he would set aside the self-evident responsibilities of all citizens. I was intellectually too curious and too interested in new things. Democracy, on the other hand, if one approached it responsibly, was rather boring. The great designs had already been formulated; there was no opportunity for anyone to be original anymore. One had to be destined for it. Or one should rather let it be. Then, he concluded, “You can leave a door open for yourself. That would mean that you don’t study medieval history but law. If you study that, then everything remains possible.”

So—on my father’s advice and halfway seeing sense—I began to study law. Friends encouraged me in this decision. During the many intervals between law classes I attended lectures by Gerhard Ritter on modern history, by Gerd Tellenbach on medieval history, by Hugo Friedrich on Montaigne, and the Germanist Walther Rehm’s quite unique lectures on images of modern European man from Don Quixote by way of Hamlet and Faust to Don Giovanni. He was indisputably the most admirable university teacher I encountered.
²⁶
Overall, the university was something of an Arcadia. In addition, there were new contacts, visits to the theater and to concerts, as well as dates with Marcienne, an enchanting exchange student from Paris, and bicycle tours in the Black Forest.

All of these things were facets of a longed-for normality. But the longer the new experience went on, the more it felt like a shock. I found normal life infinitely lacking in excitement and looked for distractions, but did not gain any particular satisfaction from them. Not until one evening toward the end of my studies in Freiburg, on hearing the encoded quotation of the Eroica motif in Richard Strauss’s
Metamorphoses
at a concert, did I feel myself understood and could I understand the elderly, disheveled man sitting next to me. His eyes wet, he abruptly turned to me and said that from today he would never attend another concert. Not for the rest of his life! He didn’t need to go to the concert hall to weep! He could do that at home. At his age, anyway. And he couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. It had started with an adagio, he explained, but now any musical perfection made him lose his composure. He asked me to excuse him. With increasing age, I would become familiar with these tears.

The next day I called on Fritz Werner at his bookstore. He came toward me, beaming behind the thick lenses of his glasses. “At last!” he exclaimed. “Good news for you! Two books at once. First the titles: one is Thomas Wolfe’s
Look Homeward, Angel
; the other, Hemingway’s early novel
The Sun Also Rises
. Both cloth-bound. And now, put on a happy face!”

I thanked him and went down Salzstrasse to the former Adolf Hitler Strasse, which was now called Kaiser Joseph Strasse once more. When I reached the intersection I was struck by the thought that now things are as they should be. For the first time in your life, you are
free. You go to the bookseller and without making an application or getting a special permit simply buy—for about twenty marks, which is all they cost—two works of American literature. But then the next thought is already there: Are you really free? All I did was buy books. Perhaps normality is harder than freedom. It begins now. Would I be able to cope with it? And, if so, how?

1
A large part of the district of Karlshorst—relatively undamaged in air raids and fighting—was taken over for use by the Soviet military authorities and until German reunification remained an area to which German civilians had only limited access.—Trans.

2
General (posthumously Marshal) Jean de Lattre de Tassigny (1889–1952), an early adherent of Charles de Gaulle, commanded the French troops occupying Germany in 1945; in 1950–52 he commanded the French Expeditionary Forces in Indochina (Vietnam).

3
Many German cities are still ringed by small allotment gardens called
Schrebergärten
(Schreber gardens), named after Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber (1808–61), who wanted the industrial worker to retain some connection to the soil. Many of these gardens contain a small building.

4
July 14 is, of course, Bastille Day, when good German democrats celebrated the ideals and ideas of the French Revolution—before it descended into the Terror.

5
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, whose reach extended far beyond academic philosophy; while banned from his university post after 1945 because of perceived connections to National Socialism, he would still occasionally descend from the mountain to give extremely popular lectures.

6
In the West, German democratic parties, outlawed and persecuted under Hitler, had to be either re- or newly established, like the two major parties of the left and the right, the SPD and the newly formed CDU, based on the former Zentrum membership but now expanded to include Protestants as well. The Free Democratic Party (FDP) initially represented the old Liberals of the German Southwest and would join coalition governments with either the CDU or the SPD. A number of other parties, one representing the millions of refugees, would eventually dissolve, leaving mainly the three parties described here. In the East, the old SPD and the Communist Party (KPD) were merged into the ruling Sozialistische Einheits Partei Deutschlands (SED).

7
Freiburg im Breisgau belonged to the French Zone of occupation, like most of the Black Forest area at the time. French plans to annex these parts of Germany were foiled by the other Allies.

8
To Germans, Carl Spitzweg (1808–85) was a beloved painter of humorous portraits and scenes from the everyday life of his time—comparable for Americans to Norman Rockwell and his paintings.