Not I (6 page)

16
Wolfgang Kapp (1858–1922), conservative Prussian politician and administrator, attempted an armed takeover of power (March 13–17, 1920) which failed because of a general strike by the trade unions and a lack of support from both the bureaucracy and the army.

TWO
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The World Falls Apart

Karlshorst was a self-contained suburb on the eastern side of the capital, overwhelmingly inhabited by the middling middle class. Its origins as a planned community were still obvious from its orderly street plan, and one of my parents’ friends, who liked to exaggerate, maintained that the architect’s office had taken the place of the whims of princes.
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It was part of the distinctiveness of Berlin that the Prussian rulers had built it arbitrarily but determinedly in the face of the waste of the Mark Brandenburg. Consequently, at its edges the city had not only a charming village quality, but attractively melancholy surroundings, interspersed with waterways and
marshes. On some weekdays one could travel by public transport to Gransee Lake or to Nauen without meeting anyone other than a dozen market women. There were the showpiece boulevards like Unter den Linden and not far away the village streets of Potsdam and Köpenick.

In my memory Berlin is still an open, green city, unlike London or imperial, stony Paris. It has to be said that aside from the most beautiful surrounding countryside it had scant charm, but it had an attractive modesty. On the other hand it was alert and intelligent with a quick wit. It compensated for its lack of elegance with urbane irony. Keeping up with the times was always more important here than formality. Berlin was not a town one took to one’s heart, but one very quickly felt at home in it. And Karlshorst was a kind of small town variant of the great metropolis.

The house in Hentigstrasse, which my father had bought years before, was not in one of the villa quarters of the place, but in the middle of an area of tenement blocks. The residents were skilled workers, civil servants, technicians, and a few widows. At the sides and the rear of each house there was some green space, usually with an herb garden under a couple of fruit trees. Nearly always there was a toolshed next to the carpet rail. Distinctive features of our garden were a horizontal gym bar under the chestnut trees and a small, stepped swimming pool, in which we bathed in summer and in winter skipped down the iced-over steps in our hobnailed shoes.

Above all we loved the overgrown corners and edges of the plot of land. We crept around under the fruit bushes,
a cardboard tomahawk or a knife in our mouths, as noble Sioux Indians against the Comanches, and played other such war games. With my elder brother Wolfgang and one friend or another we stuck together against all the neighbors’ children. We sent Hansi Streblow to the fat baker’s wife with six pfennigs to buy “puke cakes,” as we called her baked dough corners; we stretched a string across the house doorway opposite, where the eternally sour teacher, Müllenberg, was a tenant, and he promptly stumbled over it; or we climbed over the fence to the garden of the parsonage next door and placed a worn, sweat-stained bra from who knows where on the garden path. Hidden in the bushes, stifling our laughter, we watched old Father Surma discover the item as he was saying the breviary and, after a brief hesitation pick it up, shaking his head, then finally, though not before looking around anxiously, hide it under his soutane. I was then five years old and just beginning to develop a sense, if only a vague one, of the impropriety of our idea.

We were five children, all born at intervals of two years: Wolfgang, born in 1924, was our authority figure. My younger brother Winfried, who was at once bright, witty, and inward-looking, was followed by the affectionate Hannih, loved by all, and then Christa, who was often lively to the point of folly.

Wolfgang, like most elder brothers, was my undisputed model, and on his behalf I often got into fights with other boys because of some unjustified slander or other. He was brave, quick-witted, and casual to a degree that sometimes appeared almost arrogant. At school, he not
only had the better marks but the more inventive excuses. I also heard him praised by the mothers of friends for qualities the meaning of which I did not understand. “Clever rascal,” can “express himself very well,” and “knows how to behave himself” I understood very well, but “has charm” or “knows how to flatter the mothers of his friends” were rather mysterious. Unlike me, he was never reproached for having a “cheeky mouth.”

In the garden at Hentigstrasse on my first day of school in April 1933

Wolfgang won my complete admiration in spring 1932. It was then that the DoX—a flying boat as big as a steamer with twelve propellers and able to accommodate more than 160 passengers on three levels—returned from New York after an Atlantic crossing and set down on the Müggelsee Lake, only a couple of stations from Karlshorst on the S-Bahn. Some weeks before, Wolfgang had asked my parents to take him to Friedrichshagen to see the plane land. His plea was repeatedly turned down. So on the afternoon of May 24 he set off unnoticed with just twenty pfennigs.

When he didn’t appear for the evening meal at six o’clock my parents began to feel anxious. After checking in vain with neighbors they started making telephone calls and at eight my father informed the police, while my mother said silent but fervent prayers. Shortly after nine she left the house, extremely worried, to search the neighborhood, only to meet Wolfgang coming toward her in Dorotheenstrasse with outstretched arms, full of the joys of life. Immediately he began telling her what he had seen at the Müggelsee and how already, on the way there, at Karlshorst Station, he had met a married
couple and had chatted with them “like an adult,” and had got a good place at the lake and then watched as the DoX landed with a splash. The couple had even bought him two ice cream wafers and paid for the return ticket, so that he still had money left over. In the end they had come with him as far as Birkholz’s milk shop.

My mother was tearful and relieved, but at the same time very upset; after she had brought Wolfgang to my father, who was looking very stern, they both gave him a serious talking-to. Wolfgang once again started on about his great day with the couple, the flying boat, and ice cream wafers, but my mother hardly let him get a word out. Finally, in the heat of the moment, she even threatened to lock him in the coal cellar should anything similar happen again. “That doesn’t bother me at all,” responded the seven-year-old with admirable calm, “because behind the partition are the water and light switches. I can easily get at them and turn them all off.” My mother later admitted that she had been speechless at the impudence of this statement, but also a little proud. Increasingly proud, even. I, however, who had followed the scene through the half-open door, was only proud.

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 Jana
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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.
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“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.