Not I Read online

  ALSO BY JOACHIM FEST

  Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich (2005)

  Speer: The Final Verdict (2002)

  Plotting Hitler’s Death:

  The German Resistance to Hitler (1996)

  Hitler (1974)

  The Face of the Third Reich:

  Portraits of the Nazi Leadership (1970)

  The author with his father in early 1941

  Copyright © Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, 2006

  Originally published in German by Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, Germany, in 2006 Translation copyright © Martin Chalmers, 2012

  First published in English in Great Britain by Atlantic Books in 2012

  Introduction and footnotes copyright © Herbert A. Arnold, 2013

  All photos reproduced here are the property of the Fest family, except for the photo on 6.1, whose copyright owner is unknown.

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Fest, Joachim C., 1926-2006.

  [Ich nicht. English]

  Not I : memoirs of a German childhood / by Joachim Fest; Translated from the German by Martin Chalmers; edited by Herbert A. Arnold.

  pages cm

  “Originally published in Germany by Rowohlt Verlag GmbH in 2006.”

  ISBN 978-1-59051-610-2 (hardcover) —ISBN 978-1-59051-611-9 (ebook)

  1. Fest, Joachim C., 1926-2006—Childhood and youth. 2. Anti-Nazi movement—Germany—World War II—Biography. 3. Historians—Germany—Biography. 4. National socialism. 5. Germany—National socialism—Biography. I. Chalmers, Martin, translator. II. Title.

  DD86.7.F47A313 2013

  907.2′02—dc23

  [B]

  2013018230

  v3.1

  For my parents

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Preface

  1. How Everything Came Together

  2. The World Falls Apart

  3. Even If All Others Do …

  4. Don’t Ever Become Sentimental!

  5. Leave-takings

  6. Alien Worlds

  7. Friends and Foes

  8. Of the Soldier’s Life and of Dying

  9. The Escape

  10. Not Home Yet

  11. Retrospect and a Brief Look Ahead

  Postscript

  About the Author

  Introduction

  BY HERBERT A. ARNOLD

  This is a quite unusual memoir in several respects, yet it is a memoir all the same. Ever since St. Augustine’s Confessions, the genre has been defined as an ex post facto ordering of selective parts of a person’s past, to explain how he or she became who they are at the moment of retrospective. Achievements of adulthood tend to dominate, while childhood and youth are often underreported. Not here. Fest insists in his subtitle and in his book on describing in considerable detail his early years, between his birth in 1926 and the early postwar years; he leaves out altogether the adult achievements for which he is actually known, and ends with a brief postscript about his reaction to the unification of Germany in 1989–90.

  Moreover, instead of focusing on his own life, he chooses to devote an extraordinary amount of attention to his father, of whom he presents an astonishing portrait. The other emphasis is on the times as experienced by an intelligent but naive youngster and his education, both formal and informal. And they are unusual times, indeed. Born into the Weimar Republic and its social and political turmoil, Fest has just begun school when the Nazis come to power in 1933. They and his family’s firm and costly refusal to cooperate with the new regime will shape the narrative until near the end of the war, when young Joachim is drafted, survives the battle at Remagen, and is captured by American troops. He returns to Berlin, the city with which he identifies most strongly, and begins his work as a journalist and, eventually, historian of recent German history.

  What makes this book so remarkable, however, and may well explain its extraordinary success in Germany, where it became a best seller with staying power, are the portraits of his family, of fellow Germans, and of the times. A major part of that success lies in the complexity, the contradictions, and the conflicts endured by the characters in this memoir. No simple black-and-white picture, good and evil, right and wrong conflicts—although they are there, of course—but the conflicted and sometimes self-contradictory nature of the protagonists makes for compelling reading. Here are real and not always likable people trying to live a life guided by principles which are in direct and consciously maintained conflict with the prevailing political and social environment. And here is the record of their battles, their survival, and the cost of refusing to collaborate with a state and a regime they recognized as evil earlier than most.

  Focusing on the father, as the author does, demonstrates these contradictions most tellingly—and is a clever narrative stroke by the author, who clearly knows about his own internal contradictions, which he only touches upon on occasion. Johannes Fest is a bundle of just such contradictions. An upright conservative Catholic head of a primary school in predominantly Protestant Prussia, he is active in the Zentrum, the political arm of Catholicism in the Weimar Republic. He is also an active member of the Reichsbanner, a conservative paramilitary organization set up to combat the corresponding groupings of both Communists and Nazis, with whom they engage in bloody street fights.

  Such associations normally clearly identify a right-wing conservative, middle-class radical, tailor-made for a career in the NSDAP, the National Socialist Workers Party, and the new order. Instead, and quite startlingly, he is a staunch supporter of Weimar democracy and intrepid opponent of the Nazis. He continues in this opposition, much to the consternation of his wife and to the detriment of the family, even after it costs him his job and social position and after the authorities try to tempt him to reverse his stance. Indeed, he revels in his outsider status, as does his son. That is the reason for the title, supposedly based on the Gospel of Matthew, and for the motto of the family: Us against the world. Again a contradiction, since this echoes Viel Feind, viel Ehr (Many enemies equals great honor), a popular saying of German right-wing conservatives and militarists. Yet here it means the inner emigration of the family unit, the mutual support, and the rejection of the dominant spirit of the times.

  The father’s life also demonstrates how ineffective even the most determined opponents of Nazism were in practice—and how conflicted. Every time Hitler achieved one of his early coups—the annexation of Austria, the defeat of France—Johannes Fest was torn. He had wanted the union with Austria for the Weimar Republic—but not for Hitler and not as annexation; he reveled in the defeat of France as a justified revenge for her intransigence and spitefulness toward Weimar—but not as a victory for Hitler.

  The German patriot and the antifascist were in constant conflict with each other, a situation that would become even more serious as the war progressed and the first inklings of the Holocaust became evident. Here Fest—both the father and the son—depart most clearly from many other Germans who have argued ignorance after the war. The Fests insist that information was available, even if not easily corroborated
, and that the nature of the regime and its deeds were clearly visible to all who wanted to see. They would therefore also not accept what they saw as the paroxysms of guilt after the war—and thus, once again, found themselves at odds with their society and their countrymen. It is this outsider status Fest sees as the distinctive characteristic of his family, a tradition honed under Nazism but proudly maintained throughout: they are mavericks, outsiders, not unlike the characters of Thomas Mann’s narratives, which Joachim admires and his father condemns because of Mann’s earlier “nonpolitical views.”

  There is another major influence on Joachim Fest’s youth: the introduction to German and European culture, especially its music and literature, which are made available by both his home and his schools, but even more so by friends and mentors, who provide him with an academy of learning and questioning outside the confines of formal education. Whether it is an aunt who takes him to his first opera, a neighboring clergyman who loves Beethoven’s Fidelio at least as much as disputing theological conundrums, or his older brother Wolfgang, who always seems a step ahead in his reading—young Joachim is a sponge and a classic example of the German Bildungsbürger, the broadly educated bourgeois who has gone to a Gymnasium.1 They constitute a quite unselfconscious elite with an ethos derived from German idealist philosophy and popularized by the great German writers and thinkers of the past century and a half. This ethos is also shared by most of the Fests’ many Jewish friends who populate this memoir. For many of them it became lethal because it kept them from leaving Germany in time to escape the Holocaust. Many of them argued that “their” Germany could never succumb to the rule of something as crude as Nazism and ignored the warnings of their friends like the Fests.

  Few of them are still alive, therefore, during the postwar years, when Joachim makes his career in radio and television journalism and as a historian of the Third Reich. That adult portion of the author’s life is totally missing, but it must be taken into account when one assesses the success of this memoir in Germany, because it is this public Joachim Fest—the conservative critic of the predominant cultural left in the Federal Republic of Germany—whose origins are here revealed. After two years as a prisoner of war and privileged by the known antifascist past of his family, he—as he recounts in these pages—more or less accidentally wound up researching and making public the Nazi past through his early work at Radio im Amerikanischen Sektor (RIAS, Radio in the American Sector of Berlin). His dream had been to become a Privatgelehrter (an independent scholar), working on obscure aspects of the Italian Renaissance, preferably supported by a beautiful and rich wife, while residing in some palazzo. Instead he was asked to work up portraits of some of the Nazi bigwigs for a radio series as a part of the American effort in reeducating the Germans after the war. These radio portraits led to books on Hitler, Albert Speer, the German resistance, and the end of Hitler, among others.

  After rising through the ranks in radio and on German television to become editor in chief of Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), the North German Broadcasting Network, Fest became responsible for the major political magazine Panorama, from which he resigned for political reasons. He then proceeded to write and publish his biography of Hitler (1973), the first by a German author, and aided Albert Speer, Hitler’s protégé and armaments minister, in the publishing of his autobiography, before being invited to become coeditor of Germany’s most prominent conservative newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), whose cultural section he edited from 1973 through 1993. From that public platform he participated in the so-called Historikerstreit, a dispute initially among German historians about the nature of the Holocaust. At stake was the claim of the singularity or uniqueness of the Holocaust when compared to other mass atrocities of modern times, such as the Khmer Rouge’s mass killings in Cambodia. The predominant view of the mainly left-leaning German historians, most of whom were social history adherents, was challenged by Ernst Nolte, Fest, and others. Jürgen Habermas, Eberhard Jäckel, and many others responded and a lengthy battle ensued, in which many non-German historians became embroiled as well, because of the historical and moral sensitivity of the issues involved. The current memoir allows the reader to see where Fest’s skeptical and pessimistic challenge comes from: a dim view of human nature in general, pride in being an outsider to prevailing majority opinion, and a skeptical rejection of historical generalizations—all of which permeate the pages of his memoir. These are lessons, he insists, instilled by his father, the Nazis, the war, and postwar experiences upon which he has based his Lebensregeln (principles for life), as he likes to call them.

  This memoir is unusual not just by focusing more on the father than the author, by leaving out major parts of the story, and by emphasizing contradictions rather than linear narrative. It also takes certain liberties with the conventions commonly observed. It is customary to report only what is verifiable while indicating what is conjecture, since few memoirists, if any, can recall exact words or too much vivid detail. But Fest has decided to include direct speech, especially of family members, aided—he says—by notes taken in the past and consulted for this purpose. He thus imparts a distinctly fictional, highly literary tone to his narrative, which renders it both lively and rather unreliable. But he delights in language, especially the patois of Berlin which he likes to reproduce in the puns and cheap wordplays popular among schoolboys—all by way of creating an atmosphere which, however fictional, is very convincing and familiar to anyone who lived in Germany through those years. The reader must decide how much of this comes across in translation, which is not just one of language but also of cultural ambience. One example may suffice: he talks of cigarettes as the most valuable “currency” after the war—immediately recognizable to contemporaries—because the official currency was worthless and so was the “official” economy. Everything was available only through a universal black market with direct exchange of goods or services. His descriptions of the general blackout on the German side of Lake Constance contrasting with the blazing lights of neutral Switzerland on the other not only refer to the obvious realities of the air war but are also intended to contrast the darkness holding Germany in thrall as opposed to the bright lights of freedom outside. Echoes of famous and well-known sayings and precepts abound in the German text, ranging from allusions to Ranke’s admonition to the historian to show things as they had actually occurred to Goethe’s dictum that man (in the abstract) ought be noble, helpful, and good. In short, there is a quite self-conscious attempt at a literary shaping of the personal and historical subject matter, which is as much a part of who Fest is, given his education and background, as it is a recognition by a skeptical, practicing historian that there are distinct limits to the objectivity of the writer and the accessibility of all historical subject matter.

  Amazingly, Fest manages to present himself—a wisecracking youngster who likes to have the last word—and his family, from choleric father to long-suffering mother, in vivid detail, embedding all of them in their frailty and humanity in terrible times, trying to keep their values and principles intact, even if it meant becoming and remaining isolated, outsiders, mavericks.

  All footnotes throughout this work are by Herbert Arnold, unless indicated otherwise.

  1 A Gymnasium in Germany is a secondary school that prepares students for university or graduate studies; its final exams, the Abitur (a secondary-school certificate), are a prerequisite for admission at all German universities.

  Preface

  One usually begins to write memoirs when one realizes that the greater part of one’s life has been lived, and what one intended to do has been achieved more or less well. Instinctively, one looks back at the ground covered: one is startled at how much has sunk into obscurity or has disappeared into the past as dead time. One would like to capture what is more important or save it for memory, even as it is fading into oblivion.

  At the same time one comes face-to-face with the effort required in calling up the past. What was it my fathe
r said when my mother reproached him for his pessimistic moods, when she tried to coax him into a degree of flexibility toward those in power? What was the name of the German teacher at Leibniz Gymnasium, who, in front of my classmates, regretted that I was leaving his class? What were the remarks Dr. Meyer made as he accompanied me to the door on my last visit—were they somber or merely ironically resigned? Experiences, words, names: all lost or in the process of disappearing. Only some faces remain, to which, if one kept poking around long enough, a remark, an image, or a situation could be linked. Other information was provided by family tradition. But quite often the thread was simply broken. That also had something to do with the fact that when my family was expelled from our home in Karlshorst all keepsakes, notes, and letters were lost. Likewise the family photos. The pictures in this book were mostly given back to us after the war by friends who had asked for them at some point and were able to save their possessions through the upheavals of the times.

  I would have been unable to record my earliest memories if in the early 1950s I had not had a radio commission to write an account of recent German history. Wherever possible I supplemented the published historical studies—which at that time were far from abundant—with conversations with older contemporaries like Johann Baptist Gradl, Heinrich Krone, and Ernst Niekisch.1 Most frequently, however, and also at greatest length, I consulted my father, who, as a politically committed citizen, had experienced the struggles and suffering of the time as more than a mere observer. Naturally, these conversations soon extended to more personal matters and drew attention to the family’s troubles, which I had lived through but hardly noticed.

  On the whole I noted down my father’s observations only as headings. That caused me some difficulties when I came to write this book, because if I could not reconstruct the context of a remark it inevitably remained sketchy and often had to be left out. Some of his opinions did not stand up in the face of the knowledge I had meanwhile acquired. In the initial draft, however, I reproduced rather than corrected them, because they seemed important as the opinions of someone present at the time; in part they reflect not today’s historical view, but the perceptions, worries, and disappointed hopes of someone who lived through those times.