Not I (9 page)

In the evening, when we had gone to bed, our father told us stories about his schooldays and youth in the Neumark; how he had gone hunting rabbits with ferrets, or in winter had broken through the ice of Packlitzsee Lake while angling for carp. Later, he read to us from Schwab’s
Heroic Legends
. I also remember the tales of the Grimms and of Hauff. “The Seven Swans,” “Dwarf Long-Nose,” “The Severed Hand,” and “The Cold Heart,” and how they filled our imagination and even our dreams with knights and princesses, witches and dwarves.
¹²
Next came the stories of Hector and Achilles and the adventures of Odysseus, whose traces, my father said, were still visible in Sicily today: for example, he had
seen the boulder which the blinded Polyphemus hurled after Odysseus and his companions lying in the water near Syracuse.
¹³

Early on the reading and the “told stories” (as we called them) became a firm feature of every evening, though they became progressively more sophisticated. When we were one or two years older my father read us pieces by Johann Peter Hebel, then a children’s edition of Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels
; later also writings by Ernst von Wildenbruch or Christian Morgenstern. And so on through the years to Heinrich von Kleist’s novellas or to Ricarda Huch, whose stories, insofar as I got to know them, were mostly set during the Italian Renaissance and were read so often possibly because Italy was the country my father particularly liked, and so, imperceptibly, we did, too. Yet Huch’s most impressive story had the title “The Last Summer” and was set in prerevolutionary Russia in 1906. Even today it still takes my breath away, when I think of the end of the story: how the typewriter literally flies into the air in the middle of a word, bringing both the scene and the tale to an abrupt end.
¹⁴

Naturally, we had countless questions about what was being read to us, but before my father gave us any answers he turned off the little reading lamp, and it is these explanatory sessions in the twilight or darkness which over the years, more than anything else, meant home to me. After that the evening prayer was said, following which no more talking was allowed. From the street came only the suburban silence: echoing steps that drew closer, combined with a couple of voices as they passed, and then were drowned out by the goodbye shouts of some customers at the corner pub. Soon I discovered that Wolfgang was continuing to read with a flashlight under the blanket. He was always one step ahead. When I was reading Mörike’s
Mozart’s Journey to Prague
, he was already on to Wassermann’s
The Maurizius Case
; a few years later, when I told him about Stefan Zweig, he merely smiled and said one had to read Nietzsche.
¹⁵

Despite so many things continuing unaffected by current events, it was sometimes possible to discern signs of the strain being placed on society. From the end of 1934, a few months after the so-called Röhm Putsch, following which Hitler raised himself to unchallenged leader, the powers-that-be visibly intervened in everyday
life.
¹⁶
Already six months earlier, one or two petitions by my father for reemployment had been turned down. Then he had brought home from conversations with friends the information that the subject of “racial science” had been introduced in schools, and that air-raid drills in anticipation of war had begun. He also came back from his monthly meetings with news of the imminent ban on Neudeutschland (New Germany), the Catholic strand of the youth movement. Soon there were no more hikes on which, as part of a group, we watched the fire burn down in some clearing as night fell; without much fuss, the Hitler Youth took over the songs of the old youth organizations as if they had always belonged to it.

In the summer of 1934 my father was once again summoned to Lichtenberg Town Hall. A counter clerk told him—in a voice loud enough to be heard by the half dozen other people waiting—that the ban on employment imposed on him was comprehensive. It had come to the knowledge of the authorities that he was giving private lessons. He was therefore informed (and in relating this episode my father imitated the official’s deliberate pauses) “as—a—final—warning—that—he—was—also—forbidden—to—give—private—tuition.”

In the course of the autumn, my grandfather, then seventy years of age, went back to work. He had been a
wealthy man for most of his life until the war loans took half of his fortune and the currency devaluations of the postwar years eliminated the rest. He no doubt had a pension, but his own needs and, above all, his desire to help my parents in the difficult position they now found themselves, caused him to become active again. Although as managing director of a private company he had had no professional training, the Köpenicker Bank, simply on the basis of the respect he enjoyed, offered him the opportunity, after a short period of training, to work for them. And so, only a few months later, as manager of the Karlshorst branch of the bank, he went to work every day as an employee, which was something he had never done before.

Personnel file card for Johannes Fest, with entries on his suspension and later dismissal in April and October 1933

One momentous, never forgotten experience of the year that was drawing to a close remains to be mentioned. I no longer know what I expected after its announcement; at any rate I could hardly wait—given all the mysterious hints, of which I tried to make sense—for Aunt Dolly to take me to the opera for the first time. Weeks beforehand she asked to speak to me and demanded a clean collar and polished shoes for “our great evening.” Apart from that she emphasized that I must read the libretto, and two weeks before the performance quizzed me about scenes and arias. I am grateful to her to this day that she chose for me (I was not yet nine years old) Mozart’s
The Magic Flute
as my entry to the magical world of music. For all my reading efforts and Aunt Dolly’s additional explanations I didn’t understand a word of the meaning of the thing, of Sarastro’s order of priests, the Queen of the Night, or the
Trial of Fire and Water, and only Papageno made sense to me, even though no one could tell me why Papagena appeared as an old witch for so long and only toward the end of the piece, when Papageno played his magic music, as an enchanting maiden. But the music has stayed with me all my life. “And once again: no Berlin accent!” Aunt Dolly admonished me as we entered the theater; theaters were “hallowed halls” and she hoped I knew where the term “hallowed halls” came from. In fact, if I remember rightly, it was merely the foyer of the Rose Theatre.
¹⁷

But overall, the performance was an overwhelming experience. I am even supposed to have asked whether we couldn’t see the opera again the next day. Aunt Dolly merely laughed. But when she realized what a success her invitation had been, we saw Lortzing’s
Zar und Zimmermann
only five weeks later, then
Il Seraglio
in a local hall, and later
Der Wildschütz
, also by Lortzing.
¹⁸
After many other performances we finally applauded, shortly before my departure from Berlin,
The Marriage of Figaro
, as well as (so my aunt said) its textual precursor and musical continuation
The Barber of Seville
. These early opera visits with an “aunt intent on higher things” awakened my taste for all music and gave it a solid foundation.

In early 1936, from our place by the wall, Wolfgang and I eavesdropped on a rare argument between our parents. There had been a strangely irritable atmosphere all
day. My mother evidently started it, reminding my father in a few short sentences what she had put up with, politically and personally, in the last three years. She said she wasn’t complaining, but she had never dreamt of such a future. From morning to night she was standing in front of pots, pans, and washboards, and when the day was over she had to attend to the torn clothes of the children, patched five times over. And then, after what seemed like a hesitant pause, she asked whether my father did not, after all, want to reconsider joining the party. The gentlemen from the education authority had called twice in the course of the year to persuade him to give way; at the last visit they had even held out the prospect of rapid promotion. In any case, she couldn’t cope any more … And to mark the end of her plea, after a long pause she added a simple “Please!”

My father replied a little too wordily (as I sometimes thought in the years to come), but at the same time revealed how uneasy he had been about the question for a long time. He said something about the readjustments that she, like many others, had been forced to make. He spoke about habit, which after often difficult beginnings provides a certain degree of stability. He spoke about conscience and trust in God. Also that he himself, as well as my brothers and I, could gradually relieve her of some of the work in the household, and so on. But my mother insisted on an answer, suggesting that joining the party would not change anything: “After all, we remain who we are!” It did not take long for my father to retort: “Precisely not! It would change everything!”

My mother evidently hesitated for a moment. Then she responded that she knew that joining the party would be to lie “to those in charge,” but then let it be a lie! A thousand lies even, if necessary! She had no qualms in that respect. Of course, such a decision amounted to hypocrisy. But she was ready for that. Untruth had always been the weapon of the little people against the powerful; she had nothing else in mind. The life she was leading was so terribly disappointing! Now it seemed to be my father’s turn to be surprised. At any rate he simply said, “We are not little people. Not when it comes to such questions!”

Head next to head we pressed our ears to the wall in order not to miss a word. But we did not find out what happened in the longer intervals, amidst the clearing of throats, the adding of fuel to the tiled stove, and, if we really did hear it properly, occasional sobs. My mother said something about the reproaches of many friends, according to whom my father was too inflexible and only thought of his principles. My father, however, replied that he could not go along with the Nazis, not even a little bit. That, exactly that, was how it stood. Even if their expectations of life had been disappointed as a result. It happened to almost everyone that their dreams ended up on the rubbish heap. Once again there was a pause, before my mother replied, “My dreams aren’t in danger. I’m not talking about them! They were shattered long ago! Don’t fool yourself!” Both of them knew that nothing would change in their lifetimes. They would never get rid of Hitler again. And at the very end, after another
of those long delays which were impossible to interpret: “It is just so hard to make that clear to oneself every day.”

Years later, after the war, when I asked her about this argument, my mother remembered it immediately. She had considered every word for some time and had to gather up all of her courage to speak, since she knew what the answer would be and that my father would be in the right; it had taken her a while to get over it. The ten years of their marriage before that had been untroubled. Then from one day to the next everything had turned “dark.” She had only been in her early thirties. The argument I was talking about had been the beginning of a second phase in her being-in-the-world. After her eternally beloved young days with boarding school, piano and Eichendorff poems, and the early years of marriage, she had been forced to learn that life showed no consideration; more or less from one day to the next everything had been turned upside down.
¹⁹
For her girlish mind it had been a catastrophe. Sometimes she had thought the rupture would destroy her life. “But we saw it through,” she said after a pause, which I did not interrupt, “even if to this day I don’t know how we managed it.”

On that February day Wolfgang and I became aware for the first time of a serious difference of opinion between our parents. It was a cold winter evening; there was snow on the balcony in front of our room and layers of ice had
formed at the edges of the window panes. Only when the conversation ebbed away and we climbed down from the desk did we notice how frozen stiff we were. Wolfgang took me into his bed so that we would warm up and said, finally, “I hope it turns out well!” I responded that it had turned out well. What did he mean?

Once I was in my own bed again, our parents came into the bedroom to check that everything was all right. They whispered something I couldn’t make out. When they had gone I said to Wolfgang that now he could see that I had been right. He replied in a questioning tone, which to me at the time seemed exaggerated, “Perhaps.”

1
Karlshorst was a planned community laid out by architects using grids with geometric patterns, an unusual origin for a European settlement.