Not I Read online

  That happened in 1932. There’s a dramatic image from about the same time which always appears when I shake the kaleidoscope of my childhood days. It dates from the months when the civil war in the declining Weimar Republic had also spread to the Berlin suburbs. One evening, after nightfall, footsteps thundered up the stairs and there was an impatient banging on the door of the apartment. When I jumped out of bed and opened up, my father was standing there, his jacket unbuttoned. He had a broad gauze dressing around his head, held in place by an adhesive; a sticky black patch the size of a fist was visible on the bandage. He had two companions with him, who bedded him down carefully on the settee and said something like, “Look after yourself, lad!” And while I was still astonished at the chummy tone that they dared to use with my father, the latter muttered his thanks, got up astonishingly quickly and disappeared—without paying any attention to me—into one of the rooms at the back. Surprisingly, my mother had been quite unaware of the course of events. Now, after the removal of the dressing and a brief moment of shocked silence, I heard her exclamation—“Heaven have mercy!”—then she ran to the telephone to call the doctor. Later we heard that a group of (Communist) Red Front Fighters had forced their way into a Social Democratic Party meeting at which Albert Grzesinski, the Berlin chief of police, was speaking. They had attacked the Reichsbanner stewards with clubs and broken up the gathering.

  In the months that followed there was a constant coming and going in our house. Unfamiliar faces turned up and disappeared again without any greeting. Voices could be heard coming from my father’s smoky study, fluctuating between fighting spirit, worry, and resignation. What it was all about was quite mysterious to Wolfgang and me, who were, of course, most interested in the fights. There was talk of street battles at Nollendorfplatz and in the district of Wedding, of bloody confrontations in places I had never heard of, like Altona and Leipzig, and each of these stories provided us with tales for when we went to bed, about revolt, car crashes, missing children, and, finally, because such stories have to become ever more gruesome, about heads bashed or even cut off. However little we understood of what we overheard, we nevertheless felt the atmosphere of embittered passion that was not only spreading on the streets but also surrounded every visitor to the apartment.

  At this point I have to insert a comment which may be of help in understanding the pages that follow. In these passages there is often talk of the meek fall of the Weimar Republic. They refer only to the fragmentary memories of a six-to-eight-year-old who has preserved some inevitably sketchy images, which have only later become coherent. Events presented themselves to me in the form of stories current in every family, with almost everything dominated by politics. And yet the background events have to be sketched at least in outline, because in the course of the years they came more and more to dominate our lives.

  The same applies to my father. On his picture, too, are superimposed the family stories which were passed on in the course of many evenings around the dinner table under the ceiling lamp with its silk cloth and tasseled shade. Tall, with short, parted hair, he cast a large shadow which to us children conveyed as much fear as it did security. He saw life as a series of tasks which one had to perform without making a fuss, with firm convictions and with as much good humor as possible. Precisely because of this he possessed an authority which was never challenged, still less doubted. In the family, fragments of this elevated image increasingly asserted themselves, in the face of all childish and later all adolescent resistance.

  The character of my mother—with her then still rather mild eyes, frequently wide open in surprise—was no doubt different from the figure I remember. In those years, despite the five children she had borne, she conformed, evidently to a much greater degree than I recall, to the type of the daughter from an upper-class background: in love with beautiful feelings, with a big family as her goal and a solid basis in life, at the same time full of the certainty of having a claim to happiness. “I had everything,” she said later, “and sometimes I even thought more than was due to me.” But then her dreams and expectations had suddenly crumbled and without anyone having predicted it she displayed a firmness that could even turn into toughness. In retrospect, it appears to me that in the countless trials and tribulations of childhood each of us could find with her, more than with my father, understanding and support.

  If I venture to make a few marginal remarks on political conditions and the way they affected the family, it should be said that the calamities of the late 1920s and early 1930s, especially the inexorable rise of Hitler, had stretched nerves to the breaking point. At the same time, as always in periods of crisis, the most bizarre prophets appeared: doctors of occult recipes for saving the world, sectarian preachers and those who promised the Garden of Eden and with unctuous, crazy eyes explained that mankind was doomed to destruction. The only hope was if the message they proclaimed found followers and a leader who would resolutely follow the path set by fate and issue new instructions to the world. They were well versed in the most eccentric texts of past ages, obscure prophecies, which strangely enough often corresponded to their follies. Soon my father began to collect literature on the subject.

  What was disquieting about these bizarre predictions was that they imperceptibly cut the ground from under the republic. Given its manifest powerlessness both at home and abroad, the new state appeared to a growing number of Germans as a synonym for disgrace, dishonor, and political powerlessness. Increasingly, people surrendered to the idea that poetic, Romantic Germany, at home with profundity of thought and spirituality, had committed an act of metaphysical self-betrayal with the declaration of the republic. German culture had been worth far more than the shallow Western civilization it had been given in return.

  In addition, as the crisis intensified, the need for diversion and cheap amusement appeared ever more unrestrained. “Soup kitchen at the front and around the back the Charleston and bobbed hair, La Jana2 and hopping about on the dance floor,” as my father mocked. The traditional values which until then had given people’s lives support and orientation began to crumble in front of their eyes. There were many who contributed to this destruction, encouraged by the catchphrases of the time, which all pointed to crash and ruin: Twilight of Man, Storms of Steel, Apocalypse, Decline of the West.3 “The process of decay,” said one of my father’s friends, the Zentrum party MP Richard Schönborn, “announces itself first of all in the world of ideas.” A country and a society that employed such phrases as fashionable terms could not long survive.

  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 skat
ing 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-r
anking 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.