Not I (7 page)

Looking back at the major events of those years, a contemporary (as my father later remarked) might believe that he was not resisting a political movement at all, but rather the “Spirit of the Age.” Today he knew, my father once said, long after the war, that one has already lost the battle the moment one accepts such a notion. His only compensation was the knowledge that he had been on the right side.

With Papen’s Prussian coup of July 20, 1932, the Republic of Weimar had been destroyed, my father often said;
⁴
he and his political friends—the Riesebrodts, Mielitz, the Fechners—had all been in agreement on that. When a department head in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, who likewise belonged to the Reichsbanner, begged for understanding that they would find
it difficult to act unconstitutionally, my father had for a moment lost his self-control, and as he left retorted: “Ever since the republic came into existence I wished it would have enemies as short-sighted and timid as we are. Then it would have survived. Now everyone knows that this state does not have the will to assert itself against its declared enemies.” Many had responded that he should wait and see, that defeatism was no help, either. But he had not been defeatist; he had merely opened his eyes.

So the weeks passed in the timeless openness of childhood. We spent the summer largely in the garden, the winter with sleds and nailed boots in nearby Wuhlheide or then again in the neighboring sandhills and, ignoring my mother’s worries, shot straight down ever steeper slopes. The skating rink was just behind the station. It was there that we attempted our first shaky steps wearing skates, fell, got up only to slip again, at last took three and then ten steps, before finally managing whole sequences of steps until we were counted among the “speed terrors.” Outside, in the meadows at the edge of Karlshorst, we at first aimlessly kicked a ball around; then six or eight friends came together to form a team, which first played against another street and soon after that against another part of the district, with branches stuck into the ground serving as goalposts. On Hentigstrasse, refereed by “Motte” Böhm, we carried out bitterly fought games of dodgeball up and down the street. And anyone who complained about a ball thrown too hard or, like Helmut Sternekieker, cried because of the pain, was barred from one to three games.

Our garden was at the back of the house. It was about thirty yards long and overshadowed by trees. One reached it by crossing the small fenced-in yard and then going down a path lined with flower beds. In the middle was the big garden table and a little distance away to the right was a lower one for table tennis. About five yards to the left one came upon the horizontal bar, and beyond that was the tumbledown toolshed which my father knocked down in 1935 and with our help replaced with a simple little garden house made of planks. Right in front of it was the pool with its steps and a little fountain. Once, in executing a daring leap over several steps, I slipped and knocked an almost penny-sized hole in my left cheek on the pipe of the fountain and lost a tooth. The rest of the plot was divided into beds for flowers and herbs, carefully separated by large stones.

In retrospect the garden and what grew in it takes on giant proportions. The roses bloomed all summer long, the bushes bore fat berries, and the three or four trees in the middle of that modest magnificence were likewise weighed down with fruit. One autumn day at any rate—I was probably seven—my father said each one of us had his duties, and I was no exception. Wolfgang had to look after the rosebushes and keep the soil damp and loose, and from now on I was responsible for the just-harvested strawberry beds. “Could’ve told me before,” I am supposed to have said; for this year all the strawberries were gone. All polished off! My father, however, had replied that success always starts somewhere.

I only remember January 30, 1933, because of stories later told in the family, but the days and weeks of shock that could be felt in our house ate deep into my consciousness.
⁵
As I later found out, on receiving news of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of the Reich, my father had immediately left his school office in Lichtenberg and gone to a meeting in the city center. He had not come home until about midnight and had talked with my mother until the early hours of the morning. He entertained none of the delusions to which so many politically informed minds fell victim at the time: that Hitler would become more reasonable, be moderated by success, or that, charlatan as he was, he would be a failure.

Engraved on my mind forever, on the other hand, amidst so much that has faded, is February 28, 1933. That day my father came down to the garden, where Wolfgang and I were playing table tennis, at about midday. “We’re going into town now,” he said. The order sounded at once stern and conspiratorial, and on the way to the station we tried to find out what this unusual excursion was about. At first my father remained tight-lipped, and only once we had sat down in the empty “cattle truck” (a third-class carriage on the S-Bahn) did he mention that we were going to see a burnt-out ruin. Had the fire already been extinguished? we asked. Had the fire brigade arrived? Would there be dead bodies? My father said nothing. Instead, when some other passengers got on at Ostkreuz Station,
he indicated that we should keep our voices down. And (so we later felt) during that journey he frequently talked about things we did not understand.

To our disappointment we didn’t then go to the burnt-out Reichstag, whose importance my father meanwhile attempted to explain to us on the platform at Bellevue Station. He later related that while I had looked at him attentively as he spoke, it was obvious that I hadn’t understood a thing. But that had, in fact, not been important to him. He had wanted above all to make us aware of the “gravity of the hour.”

Instead of getting off the train and walking over to the building, from whose ruins a few pale trails of smoke were still rising, we traveled several times back and forth on the railway viaduct between Friedrichstrasse and Bellevue, and I probably paid more attention to my father’s serious face than to the cityscape flitting past the train window. Repeatedly, I heard him utter the mysterious word “war,” although I was unable to make sense of what he was saying. Years later, when I asked him if he had meant the Second World War, he denied it with a smile: no, he hadn’t been as far-sighted as that. He had meant, rather, civil war. The Reichstag fire, he thought at the time, obviously signaled a settling of accounts with the now defenseless enemies of yesterday. And yet he had hoped that the fire would, at the last moment, still trigger the uprising, which he and others in the Reichsbanner leadership had constantly argued for, to no avail.

Indeed, those in power—now in possession of every power available to the state—began a new kind of civil
war that same February 28. My father, too, found himself in trouble. One month after the Reichstag fire there were more and more signs that the regime suspected him of “subversive activities.” He was twice summoned to the local education authority, and then later to the ministry, and questioned on his attitude toward the Government. He had not moderated a single word, he assured us on his return. He saw no reason to alter his judgment on the whole “rabble.” My mother, who had put her hands in front of her face during his report, rose at the end and said with an unusual tone of reproach in her voice: “You know that I have always supported you in what you believe to be right. I always will. But have you thought of the children and what your obstinacy could mean for them?” When my father remained silent, she left the room without a word.

The decision came a few days later. On April 20, 1933, my father was summoned to Lichtenberg Town Hall (Karlshorst is part of the borough of Lichtenberg) and informed by Volz, the state commissar responsible for the exercise of the business of the borough mayor, that he was suspended from public service, effective immediately.
⁶
When my father asked what he was accused of, the official responded in a sergeant-majorish manner: “You will be informed of that in due course!” But he was a civil servant, objected my father, to which Volz replied, “You can tell our Führer that. He’ll be very impressed.” And then, in a derisive voice: “Look on the suspension as
a present! You’ll be making the Führer happy! Because today, as I’m sure you know, is the Führer’s birthday.” According to my father’s account, he had then responded that he had no part in it and Volz retorted, provocatively, “You can go now. I even urge you to do so!
Heil Hitler!
”

As he was on his way to the exit, all at once the building he knew so well seemed unfamiliar. It was the same with the staff, some of whom he had known for years; suddenly, one after the other, their eyes were avoiding his. At his school, to which he went immediately, it was no different, even in his office; everything from the cupboards to the stationery already seemed to have been replaced. The first person he bumped into was his colleague Markwitz, who had clearly already been informed. “Fest, old man!” he said, after my father had spoken a few explanatory words. “Did it have to be like this?” And when my father replied, “Yes, it had to be!,” Markwitz objected: “No, don’t tell me that! It’s something I learned early: there’s no ‘must’ when it comes to stupidity!”

On April 22, a good two weeks after the passage of the Law for the Restoration of a Professional Civil Service, my father was summoned again. Remaining seated and without offering my father a chair, the temporary mayor, reading from a prepared text, formally notified him that he was relieved of his duties as headmaster of the Twentieth Elementary School and was suspended until further notice. Given as grounds for the suspension were his senior positions in the Zentrum party and in the Reichsbanner, as well as his “public speeches disparaging the Führer” and other high-ranking National
Socialists, and in particular the “martyr of the movement” Horst Wessel. Under the circumstances there was no longer any guarantee that he would “at all times support without reservation the national state,” as the law put it. “Is the authority aware that this is a breach of the law?” asked my father, but Volz retorted that he couldn’t discuss legal matters with every man who came in off the street. “Because from now on you are not much more than that, Herr Fest, and no longer any colleague of mine!” As he spoke these curt words, he continued leafing through my father’s file and one of the pages fell to the floor—no doubt intentionally, thought my father. Volz clearly expected my father to pick it up. My father, however, remained motionless, as he later reported; not for one moment did he consider going down on his knees in front of the mayor.

Volz then continued in a noticeably sharper tone. As well as being summarily suspended, my father was required within two days to formally transfer charge of the school to his successor, Markwitz. He would be informed in writing of the details. With a gesture that was part dismissal, part shooing away to the door, the provisional mayor added that for the time being my father was not allowed to take up any employment. Everything proceeded as if according to a plan, said my father, when he came to talk about what had happened.

To us children the effect of the event was at first hardly noticeable, although (as I am supposed to have remarked to Wolfgang later on) it made a boy’s nightmare come true: one’s father is a teacher and is at home the whole
day long! At any rate the change, the mere presence of my father, gave the beautiful irregularity of my childhood a center and (as I thought) an annoyingly firm structure. Unusually, he even joined my mother a little later when with satchel, slate, and dangling sponge I set off for my first day at school, and it was he who handed me, after we had said goodbye, the colorful, shiny school cone.
⁷
After that he began to ask, as time passed, questions that he had never asked before: about homework, friends, pastimes. Also about my impudently answering back some neighbor, which I had long forgotten about, and once about a broken window pane.

At the end of April our nursemaid Franziska left. After our mother, she was the dearest person to us. To prevent her from leaving, my younger brother Winfried had even made her an offer of marriage; Hannih, our eldest sister, had declared herself willing to be a bridesmaid, and Fräulein Scheib, who helped out at the priest’s office, had promised to make the little side chapel of the church available. A few days later the cleaning lady also stopped coming. From the beginning, anticipating a large family, my father had also taken the two neighboring flats, so that we occupied the whole second story. Now, one after the other, the two adjoining apartments were given up. Workmen came and walled up the connecting doorways. From now on there was no longer a playroom or the children’s hall with the four rooms off
it. Instead, we three boys all slept together in one of the larger remaining rooms, in which, apart from the three beds, there were two bookcases and, facing the balcony window, a desk as well. Our two sisters were allocated the room which had previously belonged to Franziska.

The new room shared by the boys had one advantage. It was next to the drawing room, in which guests were received and where our parents sat together in the evening. If we pressed our ears to the wall we could hear every word. Much talk about politics, of course. But what preoccupied us more was that little Lena with the unpronounceable Polish name, who lived on the estate behind the racetrack, hadn’t come home for three nights now. Yet she was only fourteen, as my mother said, and was considered to be the prettiest and cheekiest thing. “Exactly!” interjected my father drily, but my mother had already moved on to the always forward Rudi Hardegen, who had recently shown off with the “impossible” assertion that “womenfolk” should be given a good hiding once a day, then all marriages would be happy ones. A little later we heard that Herr Patzek, who lived a couple of houses along and already had six children, had almost apologized to our father because his wife was pregnant for the seventh time; he could hardly conceal the fact that he was already fifty, he said. At that age it was improper to show off one’s lust, not least for the sake of the reputation of his dear Magda. We were in early puberty at the time and we slapped ourselves so hard on the shoulders at this story that I fell against the wall and we heard our mother say, “What was that?” In an instant we buried ourselves
in our pillows and, as she looked in at the door, Wolfgang even managed a couple of sighing snores as if fast asleep.