Not I (44 page)

9
Werner Bergengruen (1892–1964) converted to Catholicism and was a friend of Reinhold Schneider’s; he is best known for his novels and novellas. Stefan Andres (1906–70) attempted to wed the traditions of classical antiquity with modern Christianity in his novels and stories.

10
Ernst Rowohlt (1887–1960) and his publishing ventures are synonymous in Germany with literary paperbacks; he made both world literature and modern German literature available to a very wide audience.

11
At the end of the
Abitur
, or qualifying exam for university admission, the grades attained in the various subjects were averaged out to a composite grade, which had to be at a specific level for entry into university and thus graduate studies.

12
Despite the author’s protestations that his family did not want any special considerations for their antifascism, it is clear that they were granted special privileges by the occupying authorities, as indicated by the special permit for travel issued to them, which apparently entitled them to fly into Berlin on an American cargo plane. Back then nobody but armed forces and highly privileged individuals flew in airplanes of any sort. And they are met in Berlin by people arriving in cars; in the 1940s very few civilian cars were on the road and none without special connections and permits.

13
Fritz Kortner (1892–1970), German stage and film actor and director, emigrated to Hollywood in 1933 and returned in 1949 to a triumphant career in postwar Germany.

14
In fact, statistically speaking, the scale of damage was rather less in Berlin than in the cities Fest mentions; but he was shocked on returning to Berlin after a long absence and it was his hometown.—Trans.

15
AFN broadcasts, especially the musical programs, became the primary source for up-to-date information and then contemporary music, including jazz and swing and big band, for all those who identified with the new order; it also led to a rapid spread and acceptance of American English at the expense of previously dominant British English. The young, above all, listened to and identified with this radio network.

16
This is a commonplace of all literature on German and Jewish reactions to Hitler and the Nazis: their belief in the power of German high culture—represented by names like Goethe, Kant, Mozart, et al.—and the strength of Enlightenment traditions led them to assume—erroneously, as it turned out—that vulgarians and obviously unenlightened primitives like the Nazis could never succeed in the long run in that cradle of modern European civilization which Germany was to them.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the basis of much of modern philosophy, was regarded as the quintessential embodiment of all that is good in Prussian and German thought and behavior.

17
These courts were set up to weed out old Nazis from the administrative and other services of the emerging postwar German states, an undertaking that was so complex that British and French authorities never really pursued it, while the American efforts petered out more slowly. Only the Soviets carried out a ruthless campaign of eliminating all known or suspected Nazis from positions of public power. Poor information, denunciations, and the settling of unrelated old scores made this undertaking highly problematic.

18
An Ortsgruppenleiter would, for example, have an office, but was unpaid. Being classified as “incriminated” would at this time limit employment possibilities.—Trans.

19
Precisely this conflict between legal and moral responsibility for one’s action is central to the novel by Bernhard Schlink,
The Reader
(New York: Vintage, 1997).

20
Andreas Baader (1943–77), a student, and Ulrike Meinhof (1934–76), a journalist, were the leaders of a radical leftist group, the Baader-Meinhof Group or the Red Army Fraction (RAF). They were imprisoned in Stammheim Prison, a political prison since the eighteenth century, for carrying out terrorist acts against the Bonn Republic in an attempt to overturn the neocapitalist system, which Bonn represented to them; they are alleged to have committed suicide, but many observers doubt that official version of their end.

21
Wilton Park was an estate in England that was used as a POW camp. In 1946 it became one of the postwar conference locations where the democratic renewal of Germany was discussed.

22
“Going to the East” after 1945, and even more after 1949, when the two new German states were founded, meant going to the Soviet-occupied zone or the German Democratic Republic. Many German leftist intellectuals chose this state as the better chance for a truly new Germany, free from fascism and capitalism. Among the most prominent were Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Heym, Wolf Biermann, and many others. Western media preferred to report only defections from the East to the West.

23
Otto Zarek (1898–1958) was a Jewish homosexual writer and thus had two strikes against him in Nazi Germany, which he left in time to go to Hungary and England, only returning to Berlin after the war. An early Expressionist, he wrote novels and was active in the theater and as a journalist.

24
André Gide (1869–1951), prolific French writer of prose and dramatic works, was influential also as a founder and editor of the
Nouvelle Revue Française
. Rudolf Borchardt (1877–1945) was a German-Jewish writer who survived the war in Italy; nationalist and conservative in his essays, he is best known for his translations of Pindar and Dante.

25
This play by the dramatist Carl Zuckmayer (1896–1977), first produced in 1946, was one of the few works of literature at that time dealing with the immediate past. The author had emigrated to Vermont in 1938 and returned to Switzerland after the war. He was well established through his popular comedies before the war, best known for their earthy characters and blunt language.

26
This is a partial listing of the star professors at Freiburg in the 1950s; students from all fields would flock to their lectures in what was called
studium generale
only for their own edification, not for credit.

ELEVEN
•

Retrospect and a Brief Look Ahead

Long after my return from the war and captivity, I continued to struggle with normalcy. I even had problems with the idea itself. The whole world was talking about how we had to get back to normal conditions, but as soon as I asked what these were, the old commonplaces were brought up. Yet there had been a dictatorship and an unparalleled collapse that had left behind a people and a land in ruins. No one could really say to what extent the former rules and conditions were still valid or why they should be reestablished. For anyone with eyes to see, the preceding years had swept away almost everything. To what should we cling?

Furthermore, these doubts as to the principles of existence coincided with the long-overdue process of detaching myself from my parents. Of course, my siblings and
I had the greatest respect for what my mother and father had achieved in their lives, and in our occasional discussions we reminded each other not to forget their moral integrity during the Nazi years. This knowledge set certain limits to any conflicts of opinion we might have. But something else (as Winfried also admitted) caused us much greater problems. Unlike the overwhelming majority of Germans, we were not part of some mass conversion. Whenever talk came around to the 1930s and 1940s, many of our contemporaries felt some kind of remorse, but we were excluded from this psychodrama. We had the dubious advantage of remaining exactly who we had always been, and so of once again being the odd ones out.

On top of all this, the chaos of the times had thrown up another problem: I had two fathers. One was the man of the 1930s, a product of the Hitler years, inclined to rage and a black wit; the other was the figure who returned from Russian captivity, physically worn out, his intellect and spirit contracted. His wit, which gave us pleasure in our younger years and, in part, also a kind of apprenticeship, only gradually reemerged, and then only for moments at a time. My father had always loved sayings with the brevity of aphorisms. I remember the phrase with which, during Hitler’s Reich, he had often commented on some arbitrary decision by insignificant people who had suddenly acquired power. It was “Endure the clowns!” and it soon became a motto with a proverbial force in our family. At any rate, given his propensity for formulas as signposts, Father recommended the
phrase to us as a guiding principle for the coming years, perhaps for the rest of our lives. I once heard him draw to a close a discussion of an episode which had occurred during the Nazi years with the maxim “One sometimes has to keep one’s head down, but try not to look shorter as a result!”

It was a life full of privations, which, after a promising beginning, he had chosen in full awareness of the consequences; indeed, it had meant the sacrifice of any kind of future. Of the many heroic speechmakers who take the platform at commemorative ceremonies nowadays, I have often asked myself which of them would have done the same as my father? For compensation, my father had only the knowledge of meeting his own rigorous principles. And if this consideration did not make everything good and sometimes drove my mother, in particular, to despair, it nevertheless provided him with a significant degree of satisfaction.

My mother, on the other hand, though she held the same views as my father in political matters, had a much more difficult time dealing with day-to-day life. For her, family came before principles; only once did this imperceptibly smoldering difference of opinion burst out into the open. She got nothing but the burdens, caring for the pots, the washboards, and the tiled stove. And all the while, she wanted to get each one of us through those times, alive and at the same time “with decency.” Long after the war we heard her say, with a touch of bitterness, “He had his circles of friends, Hans Hausdorf, Dr. Gans, Dr. Meyer, and many more besides. I had the burden of
five children. Not that I’m complaining. But it was a lopsided arrangement. I don’t think I was made for a life like that. But then who is? We paid a high price.”

At the end of the 1940s something else stood in the way of normality. We were young, enterprising, and, especially after the limitations of the Nazi years, susceptible to intellectual whims of one kind or another. Yet judgment, discernment, and common sense were also demanded of us. Inevitably there was friction as these two sets of demands came into conflict. Yet no one could give a convincing answer to historical questions in the narrow sense, how Hitler and all the havoc he had caused could have come about. It was certain that only a minority had wanted the war or had wanted to settle in Byelorussia and beyond that to the Ural Mountains, and no one had been keen to defend the heights of the Caucasus against Muslim mountain tribes. Nor did the simplistic faith in a Nordic race have more than a tiny number of supporters.

Altogether it was not abstruse arguments such as these that had brought Hitler to power; the motives deriving from the personal experiences of individuals were much more determining. These included inflation and the world economic crisis, together with the collapse of the middle classes on whom the stability of the state depended. Everyone who had been affected by such troubles feared falling even deeper into the abyss. In addition, there were the ideological conflicts of the body politic and the trend of the time to totalitarian or at least dictatorial systems—especially when a master of
moods and demagoguery like Hitler was staging his oratory so attractively and powerfully. Consequently, broad but fickle sections of the population, who were essentially well disposed to the republic, believed themselves to be threatened by radicals of the right and left; they increasingly surrendered to the idea that nothing less than the spirit of the age was against them. With Hegel in one’s intellectual baggage one was even more susceptible to such thinking.
¹

The author in 1946 as a prisoner of war, drawn by Alfred Sternmann

Nevertheless, the question still being asked is how these ideas were capable of driving such an old and civilized nation out of its mind. How was it possible that the leaders of the National Socialist movement were able to overcome the constitutional safeguards with so little resistance? And, furthermore, how was so much disregard of the law possible in an order-loving country? I once heard my father say that the Germans were no longer German: “They have lost their passion for introspection and discovered their taste for the primitive. Their model is no longer—as it once was—the reflective scholar type of the nineteenth century. He prevailed for a long time. Today, however, it is the tribal warrior, dancing around a stake and showing his chief a painted grimace. So much for the nation of Goethe!”