Not I Read online

  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.

  Johannes Fest’s suspension notice of April 18, 1933, signed by the Acting Borough Mayor Volz, who had been installed by the Nazis. The letter appoints Markwitz as provisional headmaster and continues: I request you to present yourself in the school office at midday on April 20, 1933, and hand over all official business to the provisional headmaster.

  Gossip like that gripped and amused us far more than all household worries, all politics and disputes between neighbors. At some point during the summer the letter came which turned my father’s suspension into dismissal, because no change of attitude could be discerned in him. The date for his removal from the civil service was given (as the law required) as October 1, 1933. He was allowed, in accordance with unexplained decisions by the local authority, a pension of less than two hundred Reichsmarks, plus child allowances. It was a plunge into Povertät,8 as they used to say in Berlin, and although my mother was often worried about it, she did everything she could to make sure we were affected as little as possible. There was to be no talk of lack of money. As soon as anyone infringed that rule she called out his name across the table as a reprimand. From time to time, she even tried to see our new circumstances in a positive light. “The situation has one advantage,” she would remark to us. “You can never be spoiled!”

  But of course our meals became more modest. There were no toys anymore and Wolfgang did not get his remote-controlled Mercedes Silver Arrow model racing car or I the football, which (as I’ve never forgotten) cost three Reichsmarks, seventy-five pfennigs. The model railway already lacked gates, bridges, and points, so to make any progress at all we built hills out of papier-mâché on which we placed home-made houses, churches, and towers. At Christmas, instead of the model racing car, Wolfgang got a jacket, I a leather-looking pair of trousers, and both of us some long brown socks, which we thought “girlish” and which, on leaving the house, we rolled down to knee length even before we reached the street. When he saw my disappointment, my father said, consolingly, “Things will get better! Sometime!” My mother said nothing in response to her children’s worries, which were brought to her again and again, and at most she pursed her lips. In bed one evening Wolfgang said that her eyes were red from crying; he knew about things like that.

  Gradually, however, the continuation of the familiar blurred any sense of a break. In the afternoons, as soon as the weather allowed, the family still gathered around the garden table, friends often came from nearby as well as farther away, the Lensches, the Schönborns, as well as Hans Hausdorf with his pies and his puns, the Körners and others. Sometimes also the fat son of Frau Dölle showed himself at the ground-floor window simulating gymnastic exercises, while from the first floor Frau Bikking, who was more than seventy, could be heard singing in a tremulous, old woman’s voice her favorite song: “A soldier stands on Volga’s bank …”9 or “Give the marble a beating heart …,” and again and again after three or four numbers the modulated wail: “It was long, long ago.” She had lived alone with an old cat for years and accused us of only liking animals as “Sunday grub, preferably with red cabbage and a thick gravy.” When she complained of the noise we made, she pretended to twist something in her hands and a creaking sound came from her throat to represent a neck being wrung. And, as they had done before, the SA (Brownshirt) units came marching down Marksburgstrasse singing their battle songs: “When the golden evening sun” or “The brittle bones tremble,” interrupting each song to shout up at the windows, “Germany awake!”

  For a while one saw uniformed patrols everywhere, although there was neither unrest nor brawls in public halls. Instead, the more or less declared opponents of the regime were abducted and sometimes beaten to death. Many of those arrested without justification were taken to informal concentration camps, usually set up by the SA in out-of-the-way cellars. Among the images of those months is a drunken man who, close to Karlshorst Station, stopped in front of my parents and me and, raising both arms, shouted in a hoarse voice, “Heil Hitler!” Curiously, I often recollect distant cries for help, yet I do not know what gave rise to them and where they came from. It may be that they were an echo of the fear, which for all our ignorance of what was going on outside had also taken hold of us and made the air strangely thick.

  There were good reasons to be afraid: the men in belted leather coats who came from time to time and with a Heil Hitler! entered the apartment without waiting to be invited were more than enough to create a threatening atmosphere.10 Without another word they shut themselves in the study with my father, while my mother stood in front of the coat recess, her face rigid. At table, friends were mentioned who had suddenly disappeared; others disappeared from conversation, because they were no longer friends. Among the close connections that remained there was a circle of ten or twelve Reichsbanner people, as well as Hubertus zu Löwenstein, whos
e influence on postwar politics later attracted some attention. During one evening meal he telephoned in a state of great agitation and asked for my father’s advice: the SA were causing a commotion outside the door of his apartment. “Can you hear the noise?” he said, and then he asked how he should respond. Perhaps he should open up, after all? “No!” shouted my father, so loudly that around the table we fell into a terrified silence. “Under no circumstances! Don’t let them in! Leave by the fire escape! Only by the fire escape, if the house has one!” Löwenstein didn’t open up and he escaped the bloodhounds; soon afterward he fled Berlin and later made his way by hazardous routes to the United States.

  At first, the countless violations of the law by our new rulers still caused a degree of disquiet. But among the incomprehensible features of those months, my father later recalled, was the fact that soon life went on as if such state crimes were the most natural thing in the world. Although I did not grasp much of what was happening around us, he never answered my questions. I didn’t understand anything about it yet, he said. In two or three years he would explain it to me. Wolfgang, to whom I turned after that, responded with a secretive air that it was about politics. The family story goes that I (then seven years old) replied, “But I’m political, too!”

  As I later found out, many of the agitated conversations really were about the state’s illegal actions, and how people paid so little attention to them. To my parents’ satisfaction there was only one Hitler supporter in our building, Herr Schimmelpfennig, although his wife once told my father (“in confidence”) not to take her husband too seriously. This business with the Nazis is just “silly stuff,” she said, adding with a laugh that years ago—to her lifelong regret—she had foolishly taken seriously his proposal of marriage.

  Even tenants who disapproved of the regime made mollifying remarks. “What do you want, then?” asked Herr Deecke from the ground floor, who was the father of that cute little Traute. “You’re exaggerating!” Everybody could see that things were improving by the day. Frau Dölle talked the same way; she liked to play the concierge and missed no opportunity to go into raptures about her paunchy son, who was always ready with an obscenity, in word or deed. Herr Patzek, with the deep, open voice, spoke of the mere “fairground tricks” of the Nazis, which were very far from being a threat to the Western world; with such scare stories one was only playing into the hands of the “Hitler gang.” Herr Leopold, who worked in some ministry or other and was known for his earthy cynicism, thought that, apart from the usual teething troubles, the whole Nazi dictatorship amounted to a limitation of freedom of thought. And that “doesn’t even hurt the left side of my ass,” as he put it. Because one just had to listen to the nonsense the famous “man in the street” talked; one should really be grateful to the new rulers for putting an end to all that “political blathering.” My father usually replied to such objections (as he later told us) by saying it wasn’t about the unemployed at all. And still less about freedom of thought. In reality, everyone was simply searching for an excuse to look away from the crimes all around.

  Soon a growing indifference began to spread even among declared opponents of Hitler. To a not inconsiderable degree it could be put down to the deliberately euphemistic vocabulary of the regime. My father was “let go,” as it was called; others were “provisionally” retired; arrests were called “preventive custody”—how bad could that be? At the end of 1933 my father went for a walk with his Social Democrat friend Max Fechner in the pine woods near Erkner. For reasons of safety he liked to go there to discuss politics. “So we allow ourselves to be ruled by louts for a while,” said Fechner, they wouldn’t last long. My father listed everything that contradicted this view and pointed out the “disgrace” of their seizure of power. The republican associations had millions of members, but had not even managed a general strike. Instead, within a few days of a mere government decree, they had dissolved into thin air without resistance and followed the Nazi flags at the big Labor Day parades. Now everyone was constantly thinking of new justifications for having gone along with it.

  There had then been a lengthy argument, said my father, reporting on the walk in the woods. Fechner had pointed out that the Nazis’ smartness had scuppered all of their plans: he and his friends had always expected a coup d’état; all of their plans for action had taken that as their starting point. But there had been no coup, and Hitler coming to power halfway legally had completely thrown them. The executive committee of Fechner’s party had been unable to deal with the fact that the law was against them. Consequently, it had forbidden every form of resistance. My father had replied, as Max Fechner confirmed after the war on a visit to my parents, that he understood: as proper Germans, upholding the law was more important to them than justice.

  Karlshorst, as it had meanwhile developed, was a small town in which everyone knew everyone, as well as their predilections, bad habits, quirks, and vanities. And also their affairs, minor marriage crises, or children’s school reports. Since spring 1933 everyone knew, too, whom he could trust and with whom caution was necessary. A civil servant from Number 12 suddenly shaved his head and started going around in his National Socialist Motor Corps uniform, even when he wasn’t on driving duty; the uncle of the newlyweds in the corner house was a big shot in the party and drove up every second Sunday wearing his golden brown uniform; Harry Kehl, with whom we played football in the street, had risen to section leader in the Deutsches Jungvolk (the junior version of the Hitler Youth), and in order to convince everyone of his new importance he wore the red-and-white cord of his rank even on his sailor suit. Once I heard him loudly reciting the Hitler Youth “camp prayer” to the house walls: “Du Volk aus der Tiefe / Du Volk in der Nacht / vergiss nicht das Feuer / bleib’ auf der Wacht!”11 and a little later a somewhat older girl from the street parallel to our own sent my brother packing at the door of her apartment, saying that no one was allowed to enter unless they had read Mein Kampf.

  But most of those around us were “decent people” (as the saying goes). There were hardly any denunciations at this time. At any rate we never felt ourselves excluded, and our clothes, which were soon patched a dozen times over, allowed us to roam around the poorer quarters, while we were already at home in the more middle-class ones. The friends I made at school also came from “reliable” families: Gerd Schülke, Clemens Körner, and Ursel Hanschmann from the floor below, whose father was employed in the university administration. The families had become friendly after Herr Hanschmann had several times refused to join the party at the cost of discrimination at work. The relationship became so close that the Hanschmanns were given the key to the apartment when our parents visited friends in the evening, and they gained a lot of respect in our eyes, because they never said a word about all the noisy fun and games we children got up to on such evenings.

  All of that continued in the happy present time of childhood, and reinforced the impression of familiarity. We continued to play dodgeball on tree-lined Hentigstrasse; collected cigarette cards of art works, film beauties, and football players; competed as to who could do the most knee circles on the horizontal bar in the garden; or made fun of Fat Dölle. When the milk cart rattled through the streets, we begged the driver for a piece of ice or, if need be, knocked it off the big pole when he wasn’t watching. “You’re stealing!” Fat Dölle would then accuse us. “You’re taking things that aren’t yours!” Once I am supposed to have asked him where all the fat on his stomach came from, and said that maybe his mother stuck it on.

  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