It was an utterly politicized world in which we were growing up. Many conversations and almost all personal decisions were made with an eye to the prevailing situation. Certainly, I know contemporaries who also grew up in Berlin at this time who perceived things differently. Apart from the National Prayer, which in some schools was recited in chorus on National Socialist celebration days, the Hitler Youth uniform, and the youth movement songs like the one about the wild geese sweeping through the night with shrill cries, they were not affected by politics.1
Nevertheless, the traditional rules of upbringing still applied, in our home perhaps even a little more than elsewhere. But they were never talked about, except in the form of the fixed formulas that we heard again and again, but whose cryptic meaning we did not understand until later: Don’t pout!, Don’t make such a fuss!, Children shouldn’t talk without being spoken to! And at table one was not to mention money, scandals, or the food being served. The principles expressed in such rules were never expanded on. No words were lost on them. They were taken as self-explanatory and were considered as basic to proper behavior. Once, when my mother complained about my impudence, my father said, “Just let him be! Let him be cheeky! Here at least. We just have to teach him where the limits are. If he doesn’t grasp it here, then outside he’ll be shown the limit soon enough.”
With all of that, our almost implicit upbringing was the very antithesis of the regime with its anticivic impulse, and today, after the passing of the years, I see it as a kind of story of civil development in uncivil times. Those in power knew nothing of civilized social intercourse, my father assured us, and consequently they were not ruling over a thousand-year Reich, but one that went back at least five thousand years, “deep into the primeval forest.” In a paper on education he noted: “All theories of education derive from a chorus of many voices. It stretches from the Ten Commandments to the moral treatises of philosophy and the great works of literature, and to much else to which whole libraries bear witness. And all of it is directed at a really quite modest goal: to teach human beings a few self-evident truths.”
Translated into everyday terms these self-evident truths amounted to setting store by “decency” and “good manners” and to showing “consideration.” Apart from which one should not regard formality, as Hans Hausdorf, my parents’ friend, with his love of paradox, once said, “as mere formality.” And my mother liked to conclude her educational epistles with a sentence we had heard countless times since early childhood, whether one of us had cut his knee and my mother was attending to it with her bottle of iodine, or one of us complained about unfair marks or about a referee whom we thought had constantly blown his whistle to penalize our football club SC Karlshorst: “Just don’t get sentimental!”—which for her meant don’t moan, don’t feel sorry for yourself, don’t weep tears for what can’t be helped. Once, when Christa, the wilder of my two sisters, had fallen and sought help from my mother with a bleeding knee, I heard my mother say, while soothingly stroking her, “Don’t cry, my dear! Don’t cry! Weeping is for the maid’s room!” A certain amount of social pride was always involved in the ban on self-pity. But far more important than that was the feeling of being subject to a stricter code of conduct.
Much more often, however, there was the world of untroubled days, on which no homework had to be done, none of our duties—increasing in number as one grew older—had to be carried out, and there were no bottles of iodine to be seen far and wide. The summer holidays were the high point. When July came we regularly traveled to the Walken, my grandparents’ isolated farm, a couple of miles from the village of Liebenau in the Neumark of Brandenburg. My uncle Berthold had taken it over when he married one of my father’s elder sisters. He was a capable, hardworking man. Everyone feared his strictness; and his mustache, stiffly drawn out when he went to church, further increased the impression of a rough countryman’s temperament. The farm was situated in a landscape of frugal dignity, and the gentle hills across which plow and harrow had to be drawn made cultivation that much more difficult. But my uncle had two sons and two daughters, who were as hardworking as he was and blessed with as practical an intelligence. They were between five and ten years older than us. As far as we were concerned they coped quite effortlessly with a difficult role somewhere between that of minder and playmate. We children were particularly taken by the cheerful Irene. She taught us to swim, accompanied us as we lay in wait for and tried to hunt wild rabbits (usually in vain), and instructed us how to catch field mice, which bit us if they could, on the freshly harvested fields. Authority can often make children flinch, but she exercised it without the least trace of intimidation. We all loved her.
The farmstead formed a square, with a domestic wing, two stable-and-stall wings, and a barn with a threshing floor. It had two gates, one opening onto the sandy road to Liebenau, the other onto a slightly sloping track, which led past a pine wood to nearby Lake Packlitz. The farm buildings with the large inner yard lay at the center of more than two hundred acres of scattered fields, which demanded at least ten months a year of exhausting work. When we were announced at holiday time, Uncle Berthold hitched up the horses and waited for us at Schwiebus Station twelve miles away. In his good suit, wearing a homburg hat and with an “anointed mustache,” as we called it, he sat on the “throne” of the shiny Sunday carriage. With awkward courtesy he invited one of us children to sit up on the driver’s seat beside him. If it was too hot my mother opened her little parasol, and we children poked fun at her and said she looked like a princess, who on some whim had ordered her liveried servants to climb down and make their way back to the castle on foot. She smiled then and hugged whichever of her children had the funniest idea as the story was spun out further and further. And sometimes, if the child was sitting farther away on the coach seat, she stroked his or her head.
The drive from Schwiebus seemed endless and often took two hours or more. When it was along deep, bumpy, sandy tracks, the flanks of the horses were stained by sweaty foam in the afternoon heat, and the buzzing horseflies circled excitedly around them. Once at the farmyard we used a couple of rags to kill the insects, which, exhausted by their bloodsucking, had mainly settled on the horses’ necks and haunches. Meanwhile, Uncle Berthold changed into his working clothes and with a long peel, which our aunt handed him, drew eight to ten trays of still-steaming cakes out of the oven: crumble-topped Bienenstich and apple cake, whose scent spread to the farthest corners of the house.
As a tireless workingman, my uncle had only one blind spot: he could not imagine that beyond work and perhaps prayer there was any other meaningful activity in life. So it was usually already on the evening of our arrival that he allocated our tasks for the next day. “We rise at five!” he said. “That’s normal here, even for city layabouts!” Over the years a running battle developed between him and us boys, when, always at nightfall, he issued his instructions for gleaning, haymaking, or stacking sheaves. Only my sisters, gentle Hannih and boisterous Christa, were spared. In the beginning we asked or pleaded for a couple of hours of swimming in the lake or for time to read. But my uncle simply growled something about “nonsense” and that was the end of it.
We, however, thought as obedient sons: No complaining! Just don’t get sentimental! Every evening, after we had gone across to one of the tiny bedrooms from the kitchen with our candles, Wolfgang, with Winfried and me, elaborated cunning strategies that would enable us to slip away while passing through a wood and gather mushrooms or on a hilly field chase partridges. But soon the cleverest tricks we thought up came to nothing, because my uncle kept an all too suspicious eye on us. Sometimes we also hid fishing rods in a hazel bush and the next morning made our way to the nearby lock, where the fish liked to linger in the bubbling water. But neither the pail with barbels, tench, eels, and puny whitefish we brought back or the middling pike we now and then transported in a second pail were enough to pacify my uncle. We had not obeyed his instructions, he barked.
And our beloved uncle could do no more than shake his head when I once asked him whether in winter he did nothing more than carry out the necessary repairs. Good-naturedly he responded, “Why? Of course, there’s nothing else!” At that I retorted that then he should understand that we had our winter in the summer; that’s how it was in the city! The long holidays were our repair time, as it were. So he shouldn’t be always forcing us to work. There was a long pause. Then my uncle tugged at the tips of his mustache and grumbled, his arms outstretched on the table, “That’s going too far for me!”
My parents usually stayed only a few days, and later I asked myself whether it was only after their departure that we began to “run behind the barn.” During his stay on the parental farm my father worked too, and showed that he still knew how to handle a scythe and a pitchfork, whereas my mother appeared rather lost in a world that was foreign to her. Our greatest love as children was the smithy, in which the horseshoes were made. As soon as the fire was kindled we were allowed to blow air into the embers until the charcoal in the middle of the forge began to glow deep red. Then the iron was placed in the fire until it too glowed, and then, blow by blow on the anvil, it was shaped to fit the horse’s foot. Hammer raised, my uncle stood in front of the hearth and was surrounded by the smell of burnt hoof when he nailed the shoe to the patient animal. And once, in the course of the holiday, usually toward the end, a pig was slaughtered, a process we followed with a mixture of horror and fascination.
The three brothers in 1933 at the Berlin Zoo: (left to right) Joachim, Winfried, and Wolfgang
Despite the constant running battle with my uncle, the Walken was the carefree, much loved playground of our early years. Packlitzsee, by which the farmstead was picturesquely situated as if placed there by the hand of an artist, was a modest stretch of water a couple of hundred yards long and broad. Since its surface lay a little below the woods around it, I remember it as a dark, smooth lake, rippling and glittering only at the edges. I shall never forget the gentle, bluish light above its surface, the scent of the pine woods behind us, and the fine white sand at the bathing place, which always got stuck between our toes. In addition, the sounds of the summer afternoon heat: the gurgling of the waves, the woodpecker hammering away somewhere, the splashing of the leaping fish and a little further on the cries of the diving birds, which at every call dipped head first into the water. It was as if time stood still. Only the myriad mosquitoes that feasted upon us disturbed the feeling of never-ending holidays.
The greenery of the beeches, birches, and weeping willows which lined the shore of the lake, and whose branches at points trailed in the water, was only broken on the opposite shore. This was particularly evident in the early evening sun. Then the glowing yellow facade of a baroque monastery with two towers stood out. It had been founded in the thirteenth century by Cistercians and later rebuilt in the Silesian Baroque style. With its bright magic it spread an atmosphere of silence and solemnity, which ever since I have associated with this style. The small village behind the monastery, hidden by the trees, bore the name which for each one of us has since that time represented the ideal interplay of natural and architectural beauty: it really was called Paradies—Paradise. It was, indeed, ours.
The other Eden, which began to open up for me at the age of eight or nine—as if at a secret “Open sesame!”—was the world of books. Like more or less everyone else, Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter had been read to us before we started school, and we could recite by heart some of the morally intimidating verses. Later, to our insatiable pleasure, came Wilhelm Busch; I remember that his verse stories and pictures—Pious Helene, Fipps the Monkey, and above all Max and Moritz—were the first texts that I read before starting school, initially with the help of my finger. We knew nothing, of course, of Wilhelm Busch’s Schopenhauerian pessimism, which sooner or later become obvious to every knowledgeable reader, yet some of his verses still make me happy today, and certain lines took on almost proverbial stature in our family. At every stage of my life, as soon as I set eyes on one of these parables, written and drawn with such a masterly, malicious wit and knowledge of human nature, I have involuntarily read on.2
That was, apart from my father’s goodnight stories, the other literary pleasure of my early years. No Dr. Doolittle, no Germanic sagas, no Uncle Tom’s Cabin could match the verses of Wilhelm Busch. Reading became more demanding, also more time-consuming, when, after dinner one evening, Wolfgang told me I now had to read “Kamai.” He was, meanwhile, on the third volume, and Hansi Streblow claimed he had already read five. When I asked how many books there were by this “Kamai,” and heard something about sixty or seventy titles, I was close to having nothing to do with him. But then I read The Treasure of Silver Lake and instantly became so addicted that within a year I went on to read Winnetou and about twenty other books, only once interrupted by one of Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking volumes, which, however, despite the numerous explanatory drawings, I found boring, even silly.
The works of one other author interrupted my reading of the adventure stories of Karl May (as I now realized he was called).3 Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn now became the other great literary experience of those years. For some time I considered the author of Tom Sawyer to be at least the equal of Goethe, who was admired everywhere as the world’s greatest poet, whereas I maintained that the correct order was in fact: Wilhelm Busch in first place, far ahead of all the others, then Mark Twain, closely followed by Goethe.
Later—I must have been about thirteen or fourteen—I read Moby-Dick, the story of the white whale, which Wolfgang had recommended to me. I had to get away from my father’s collection of bourgeois literary treasures, he said, and although I angrily disagreed, I soon began to read the heavy volume. There was much that I hardly understood, yet the tension of this mysterious book did not let me go. The drama of Ishmael and the grim, one-legged Captain Ahab with the dark scar on his face, as if struck there by lightning, and the harpoon baptized with the name of the Devil, restlessly traversing the oceans of the world, is something I have never forgotten. I realized for the first time that my father’s taste was not everything, and that in addition to the legends and calendar tales whose endings were always certain, there was a strange and sinister world. Melville opened the gates wide.
At that time it offended me that, like my brother, given the circumstances, I got only ten pfennigs a week pocket money, and the only way of earning more was to learn poems by heart, because my father had offered a one-mark reward for every ten poems recited without a mistake. So I learned Goethe’s “The Erl-King,” Schiller’s “The Pledge” and “The Cranes of Ibycus,” and numerous other ballads; above all to please my mother, I gradually moved on to nature poetry and reflective verse, and finally to Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George.4 When, returning to the classics again, I could recite “The waters rushed, the waters rose …” by Goethe,5 my father recommended Gottfried Keller’s ballad “Seemärchen” (A lake tale), which even today I think of as a continuation. It is at once brilliant and slides into the demonic, while Goethe’s contemplative verses only have a suggestion of threat at the end. The penny-dreadful literature by John Kling or Tom Shark and the rest, which was so popular with friends and schoolmates, passed me by, oddly enough. One day I started a book with the title The War of the Miami. I got bored, however, and then began a novel set in the empire of the Incas, The Divine Sacrifice, which was no better, so I went back to Karl May. But it was different with Hans Dominik, whose novels opened up vistas of a highly technological future, filled with shiny machinery.
At the beginning of 1938 I saw our neighbor Herr Hofmeister draw my father into the hallway and reproach him in a subdued voice for being too contrarian. He told him he should open his eyes at last! At the evening meal, when I asked my father why he put up with something like that, he conceded that basically Hofmeister was right. Things really were better than they had been. The seven or eight million unemployed had disappeared, as if by a conjuring trick. But the ten million or more Hofmeisters didn’t want to see the means by which Hitler achieved his successes. They thought he had God on his side; anyone who had retained a bit of sense, however, saw that he was in league with the Devil.
Wolfgang asked if that was more than conjecture and whether there really were pacts with the Devil—and what was the theological explanation for it? We frequently came back to this topic, which had a strange fascination for us. Of course, my father soon brought the conversation around to the historical Dr. Faustus and attempts by the medieval alchemists to produce gold, jewels, or the philosopher’s stone in their laboratories, then he regularly concluded with Goethe’s great play, Faust.
These discussions came to an abrupt end in March of that year, when German troops crossed the border into Austria under billowing flags and crowds lined the streets, cheering and throwing flowers. Sitting by the wireless we heard the shouted Heil!s, the songs and the rattle of the tanks, while the commentator talked about the craning necks of the jubilant women, some of whom even fainted.
It was yet another blow for the opponents of the regime, although my father, like Catholics in general, and the overwhelming majority of Germans and Austrians, thought in terms of a greater Germany, that is, of Germany and Austria as one nation. For a long time he sat with the family in front of the big Saba radio, lost in thought, while in the background a Beethoven symphony played. “Why does Hitler succeed in almost everything?” he pondered. Yet a feeling of satisfaction predominated, although once again he was indignant at the former victorious powers. When the Weimar Republic was obviously fighting for its survival, they had forbidden a mere customs union with Austria and threatened war. But when faced with Hitler, the French forgot their “revenge obsession,” and the British bowed so low before him that one could only hope it was another example of their “familiar deviousness.” The Weimar Republic, at any rate, would probably have survived if it had been granted a success like that of the Anschluss.6
Nevertheless, my father continued, the union brought with it a hope that Germany would now become “more Catholic.” It was only a few days before he realized his error. Already at the meeting with his friends, which had been brought forward, he learned of the persecution of the Jews in Austria, heard dumbfounded that the admired Egon Friedell, whose Cultural History of the Modern Age was one of his favorite books, had jumped out of the window as he was about to be arrested, and that in what was now called the Ostmark there was an unprecedented rush to join the SS. “Why do these easy victories of Hitler’s never stop?” he asked one evening after a pensive listing of events. And why, he asked on another occasion, was this mixture of arrogance and hankering for advantage breaking out in Germany, of all places? Why did the Nazi swindle not simply collapse in the face of the laughter of the educated? Or of the ordinary people, who usually have more “character”?
So there were ever more occasions for that conspiratorial feeling that bound us together; at least that’s how my father interpreted the course of events. During the summer several members of my father’s “secret society,” as Wolfgang and I ironically called it, visited us: Riesebrodt, Classe, and Fechner. Hans Hausdorf also came regularly again, and brought us children “presents to suck” and, as always, a pastry for my mother. His center-parted hair was combed down flat and gleamed with pomade. We loved his puns and bad jokes. And, indeed, Hausdorf seemed to take nothing seriously. But once, later on, when we took him to task, his mood turned unexpectedly thoughtful. He said that human coexistence really only began with jokes; and the fact that the Nazis were unable to bear irony had made clear to him from the start that the world of bourgeois civility was in trouble. He went on to say that he, at least, had the impression the bonds were loosening. Once, as Hausdorf was leaving, I heard my father complain that for the foreseeable future nothing was changed for him by the regime’s relaxation of pressure. He had always kept a hospitable house, but that was no longer possible: at present his means allowed him at most to invite friends to a modest supper once a month. In truth, not even that. For that reason he had started to invite people for afternoon tea; he could still afford that.
David Jallowitz (known as “Sally”), who dealt in suitcases and used to call occasionally, now came more frequently than before, and examined the pots in the kitchen in front of my indignant mother. Once when she grumbled about the heat, thirty degrees C. in the shade, he gave her the “good advice” simply not to stand in the shade, and Jallowitz laughed when she said the joke was stupid and inappropriate.
Other visitors were Walther Rosenthal and his wife, who, according to Wolfgang, was as “sensitive as a teenage girl,” but always listened with a serious, melancholy expression, and had intractable frizzy hair, which stood up at the side.
Sonja Rosenthal hardly ever said a word, and so it was especially surprising when she once contradicted her husband, of all people, and his assertion that the world had never before been so brutish and violent. He was mistaken, she interrupted gently, absolutely mistaken. Because there had never been a different world, different people, and more peaceful conditions than today. Life had always been quite unreasonable, extremely cruel—and she had hardly finished before she fell back into her alert silence, quietly examining the guests around her.
Among other friends who came regularly was August Goderski, whom (despite his modest reserve) we called “the man with the lip,” because of a bulging growth at his mouth. At the beginning he was usually accompanied by his grown-up son Walter. It was also Walter who on December 6 appeared as St. Nicholas in our home.7 Year after year he repeated the Christ child’s interminable personal admonitions to me, and declared that after the boorish behavior of the past year a whole troop of angels would be keeping a watchful eye on me. Naturally, I promised to say the required prayers of repentance and to be exemplary henceforth, and accompanied St. Nicholas to the door with folded hands and many pious bows. But then I aroused general annoyance when, as he was still on the half-landing, I called after him: “And a Happy Christmas to you, Herr Goderski! And come again soon! We’re always pleased to see you!” I was eight years old at the time. Hardly was the door shut when my parents accused me of spoiling the St. Nicholas fun for my sisters Hannih and Christa with my cheeky remarks.
In fact, Walter Goderski’s visits were always a particular pleasure, because he was funny and a great joker. Even today I still remember some of his “crazy” stories, as we called them; for instance, the one where a half-educated fellow rebukes his friend: “So you think yer ’telligent, Maxie? Let me tell you what you really are: Yer totally in-telligent!” Finally, also in my gallery of favorite guests was Dr. Meyer, who, whenever there was a pause in the conversation, talked about the books he was reading for the second, third, or fourth time. Among his preferred authors were Grimmelshausen, Lessing, Fontane, as well as, of course, Goethe, Heine, and—as he assured me with a smile, in answer to a question—“all the others, too.”8
But then this apparently relaxed, increasingly close circle was struck by a virtual bolt from the blue. On November 9, 1938, the rulers of Germany organized what came to be known as Kristallnacht, and showed the world, as my father put it, after all the masquerades, their true face.9 The next morning he went to the city center and afterward told us about the devastation: burnt-out synagogues and smashed shop windows, the broken glass everywhere on the pavements, the paper blown in the wind, and the scraps of cloth and other rubbish in the streets. After that he called a number of friends and advised them to get out as soon as possible. “Better today than tomorrow!” I heard him shout into the receiver once. But only the Rosenthals saw sense.
In April 1938 Wolfgang photographed the family with Aunt Dolly and Grandfather Straeter. In the foreground (left to right): Hannih, Winfried, Joachim, and Christa
It was at this time that, without notice, the only Jewish pupil in our class stopped coming. He was quiet, almost introverted, and usually stood a little aside from the rest, but I sometimes asked myself whether he always appeared so unfriendly because he feared being rejected by his schoolmates. We were still puzzling over his departure, which had occurred without a word of farewell, when one day, as if by chance, he ran into me near the Silesian Station, and took the opportunity to take his leave personally, as he said. He had already done so with a few other classmates, who had behaved “decently”; the rest he either hadn’t known or they were Hitler Youth leaders, most of whom had also been friendly to him, often “very friendly indeed,” but he didn’t see why he should say goodbye to them. As a Jew he would soon not be allowed to go to school anyway. Now his family had the chance to emigrate to England. They didn’t want to miss the chance. “Pity!” he said, as we parted, and he was already three or four steps away. “This time it is forever, unfortunately.”
Not long after the beginning of the new year, in March 1939, my father called Dr. Meyer to ask why he had not come to tea for such a long time. Dr. Meyer replied that since the death of his wife he hardly went out at all, and also November 9 had seen his worst premonitions come true. He would never have believed how much malice dwelt behind the doors of the apartments around him. He had had to give up his practice. Now and then he still attended the events put on by the Jewish Kulturbund, but he even found shopping difficult, likewise going to the bank, to the postbox, or the post office. Toward the end of the conversation they agreed on afternoon tea for the following week.
Dr. Meyer came to Karlshorst on an early spring day. Since it was warm he suggested taking tea in the garden; if one wore a coat it was comfortable outside. When he arrived I was in the garden shed cleaning some tools; at a signal from my father I brought the heavy stoneware crockery from the sideboard over to the table, while my mother made tea upstairs in the flat.
Dr. Meyer, who was in his mid- to late fifties, said that his wife had died from “a lack of will to go on living.” He continued to reside in the old-fashioned, somewhat rundown building, by now shabby with age, at Hallesches Tor. My mother, who had accompanied my father there to offer her condolences, told awful things about the state of the apartment: dirty plates lying around; cups half full of greasy tea; clothing thrown everywhere. The sole room in which there had been any effort to impose order was the library, only disturbed by two or three stacks of framed pictures by German Expressionists.10 When she arrived, reported my mother, she had immediately begun to rinse the dishes lying around and tidy up the most obvious mess. But Dr. Meyer had said that she shouldn’t bother. He spent nearly the whole day in his library, because the window looked out onto the courtyard, where he did not have to see or hear any people.
My father said of Dr. Meyer that he always walked bent forward, as if the medical sounding of a patient’s chest determined his habitual posture. Also, if one looked more carefully, one could discern a slight trembling. He spoke with a somewhat hoarse voice and constantly cleared his throat while reciting his favorite poems, perhaps out of respect or because of a throat problem. My father assured me that he had never had an inconsequential conversation with Dr. Meyer, and so that afternoon, once I had finished work on the tools, my father called me over to the garden table. “Listen,” he said, “to what Dr. Meyer has to say.” The latter was just on the German poetae minores, Geibel, Rückert, Gellert, and Bürger, as well as the “wonderful Droste-Hülshoff.” With the exception of Bürger, none of these names as yet meant anything to me.11 But Dr. Meyer had changed the subject and later—to the accompaniment of more involuntary throat-clearing—made some disparaging remarks about immigrant Jews, who some years before had come to his area of the city; he didn’t belong to them, he said. He had always felt himself to be German. He didn’t even feel that culturally he was a Jew. His parents had already taken a few steps out of that world, only the Nazis had forced him back into “alien Jewishness.” Then he returned to his poets of the second rank: Matthisson, Hölty, Stolberg.12 Curious, I thought, the two men there in the spring light, wrapped in their thick coats, look as if they’re sitting in a waiting room.
In the evening my father related that he had reproached Dr. Meyer for his snobbish attitude toward the Eastern European Jews around Silesian Station. Without hesitation, the latter had admitted that like all Jews he was arrogant. But that one was allowed to make fun of one’s own relations. My father, however, should never dare say anything like it—at least not if he valued their friendship. Then I learned that my father had arranged that I should visit Dr. Meyer every Saturday after school. I had heard, hadn’t I, how tiresome shopping and every postal errand was for him? Dr. Meyer had assured him that he had taken a liking to me and, since he was a highly educated man, the calls would surely do me no harm. Besides, it was the least one could do for people like him. After brief reflection my father continued: he would ask the Rosenthals if it suited them for Wolfgang to call on Saturdays. In fact, it was a few months before the visits began, because Dr. Meyer unexpectedly raised objections, and my father said he was evidently shying away from allowing an outsider to see how he lived. However, in late summer 1939 I visited Dr. Meyer for the first time and from then on almost every Saturday, while, as far as I remember, Wolfgang walked the ten minutes from his school in Neue Kantstrasse to the Rosenthals about once every four weeks.
For me it was an instructive period, full of ever new discoveries. I usually got to the old Berlin “musty house” at about two in the afternoon. First, I went to the shops in the neighborhood with Dr. Meyer’s list. Unlike him, he told me in the hallway, I didn’t have to have a briefcase in the hand that wasn’t carrying the shopping bag. He always held something in each hand in order to avoid the Hitler salute, with which he, in particular, was repeatedly greeted, even if only with a forearm brought up toward the shoulder. “I don’t even salute with one hand free,” I responded, showing off somewhat, and added, “my father doesn’t even do it with two hands free.”
The chaos in the apartment, which had so disconcerted my mother, hardly bothered me. Naturally, it didn’t escape my notice that Dr. Meyer lived in grand bourgeois surroundings, which had meanwhile become impoverished and dilapidated. In the library the bookcases with their dark wood carving reached up to the ceiling, and although the room was kept reasonably tidy, Dr. Meyer apologized for the mess. He had always only kept his study in order; everything else had been the responsibility of his wife and, earlier on, of the servants. At some point he began to talk about his last trip to Provence, about meeting his sons, how happy they had all been. But just under a year ago his wife had simply stayed in bed one morning and, after having been urged many times to get up, had explained she was not made for these times and simply didn’t want to go on anymore. Finally, she had put her hands over her ears, mutely shaking her head, and had not taken another bite of food. As he related this Dr. Meyer walked restlessly back and forth in the library. Then he stopped abruptly and said, “On the eleventh day Hilde Meyer was dead.”
I have sometimes asked myself whether it was the memory of the holiday in Nice or the refusal to accept his wife’s death that caused Dr. Meyer to receive me almost every time in a beige summer suit with a red neckerchief. Recently, I remembered again how quickly he spoke. My father said, no doubt rightly, that when he talked, Dr. Meyer was driven by the thought that he didn’t have much time left. When I returned from the errands he began to talk about his wife again, and three sons who had emigrated some time before. Two were, meanwhile, living in South Africa, where, in his opinion, they didn’t belong.
Life permitted itself many mistakes, he continued after a pause for thought. Sometimes, however, people threw it completely off course. He was really a failure. His grandparents had been peddlers plying their trade between Krakow and Lodz, before they had left their little place in Galicia and landed in working-class east Berlin. Had his family history taken something like a “normal” course, then he or one of his sisters would have got at least to one of the better parts of Kreuzberg, his sons then to Charlottenburg, and their children, in turn, to a villa in Grunewald. Now two of them were living in Johannesburg, one in Mexico. “Life is no longer sticking to the rules,” he concluded. “But why?” He said it in a tone of voice that suggested there was no answer to the question.
Wordlessly, he turned away and gloomily looked across a number of shelves and names in the bookcase. Then he asked me to read him poems from an anthology. I told him about my father, who awarded one mark for ten poems, and for the next occasion Dr. Meyer recommended one or two poems by Heine, Platen, and Rilke.13 Without thinking, Heine’s “I bear no grudge” comes to mind, and Rilke’s “The Merry-go-round, Jardin du Luxembourg.” Once, when I was reciting, I noticed that Dr. Meyer’s eyes were wet. As if it were today I remember that I was reading the Goethe poem “Schlafe! was willst du mehr?”14 I thought perhaps he felt it to be the fulfillment of a last wish of his beloved wife. Later we turned to prose: I read Fontane’s Schach von Wuthenow and some Kleist stories. Dr. Meyer added literary or historical references, then I read some of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s curiously cool stories; on another occasion, Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche (The Jew’s beech) and Emil Strauss’s Freund Hein (Friend death). Dr. Meyer was my school.15
Apart from that he gave me rules to follow in life, some of which I have never forgotten. It is less of a problem for the world if people are stupid than if they have prejudices, was one of his maxims; another: nothing is as expensive as a present one gets. Once he also warned me always to keep my distance. “One shouldn’t embrace people,” he explained, “because the person you embrace all too often has a knife up his sleeve.” “At most one embraces a woman,” and even she often has a knife under her nightdress. At this revelation I must have stared at him in disbelief, because after these words I heard him laugh for the first time: “Just a bad joke!”
Through visiting Dr. Meyer I got used to not going home immediately after school. In early summer 1939 I was almost fourteen. My father had suggested it was now time to take the Italian Renaissance more seriously, and even perhaps to make its study my career. Because if I were to devote myself to history, it would be a good idea not to get any nearer to the present than the fifteenth century, otherwise I would inevitably come too close to the period occupied by the Nazis. Around this time I discovered Alfred Hentzen’s illustrated book on the Berlin Nationalgalerie on his bookshelves, so I had this additional material to fuel my interests. After classes I often went to the Museum Island in the city center.16 The spacious yet intimate group of buildings, the majestic stairways, the halls and rows of columns captivated me in themselves. In terms of painting, however, I was most taken by the rooms of the Romantics, the Nazarenes, and other German painters who went to Rome for inspiration: Anselm Feuerbach, Hans von Marées, Böcklin, and everything else between late David and Manet. Of the Italian painters from Giotto to Reni, on the other hand, I admired above all their technical brilliance—the tangibly heavy brocade in the paintings of Titian or the beautiful flesh of the nakedly displayed bodies—while simultaneously asking myself why the dramatic turmoil of the times was so little reflected in these pictures. I often talked to my father about it. In the end, our conclusion was that the Italian Renaissance was historically infinitely more brilliant and somber than the idylls of Olevano or Barbizon, and much more attractive as a scholarly and literary subject. Nevertheless, beneath the fogs of Caspar David Friedrich or in the undergrowth and ponds of Monet there was more life to be discovered than in the paintings of Salvator Rosa or Guido Reni, where saints fought with dragons and other poisonous, hissing monsters. But my father said both were appealing: the intimations of art and the way it transcended reality.
With Gerd Donner or some other classmates I occasionally went a few stops farther on the S-Bahn to the Planetarium at Zoo Station. It was basically an ordinary cinema, except that before the newsreel and the main feature the starry sky of that day was shown on the domed roof and commented upon. My parents were somewhat naive in assuming that a movie theater offering such an instructive supporting program could hardly be showing any second-rate films; and so, undisturbed, I saw at the Planetarium the films of popular stars like Heinz Rühmann, Willy Fritsch and Zarah Leander, Heli Finkenzeller and Heinrich George—in short, everything that was being talked about at the time. My parents would have been a little surprised. Only the fact that—out of instinct and on Gerd Donner’s advice—I avoided all propaganda films would have halfway set their minds at ease.
That summer Emil Lengyel announced that he would be coming to see us. He was a friend of my father’s from his Weimar days and had meanwhile made a considerable reputation for himself in the United States as an academic and a political commentator. In early summer 1939 he had set out on an extended trip through the capitals of Western Europe to investigate the increasingly threatening political situation. In his letter he had written openly about Hitler’s responsibility for the impending war and described the Nazi regime as a version of the Hungarian dictatorship—which he had fled after the First World War—but established with German thoroughness.17
My mother was dismayed. “I certainly don’t care for any fiery czardas temperament in politics.18 And on top of that an American utterly hostile to the Nazis in our house,” she said at second supper to my father. “Think of your family! They’ll use it against us. Why don’t you just go to a bar?” My father stared angrily ahead and seemed to be thinking that he hadn’t initiated the so-called second supper to have arguments with my mother in front of Wolfgang and me. Finally he replied, “Like you I am thinking of all of us here. But cowardice is not allowed either. You’re forgetting that.” My mother stood up and with her hands on the table retorted quite curtly, “You don’t think about courage or cowardice. You only have your principles in your head.” In all those years it was the only argument our parents had in front of us.
But my father didn’t give way. Lengyel came to Hentigstrasse and we spent, not least at my mother’s prompting, an amusing evening around the garden table with czardas steps and hand-clapping. When night fell, our guest produced five paper lanterns out of nowhere and we continued the fun for a while longer. Then the insufferable Herr Henschel appeared on his balcony and requested quiet. “Ten o’clock!” he roared. At that Lengyel and my father withdrew to the study.
I was still calling on Dr. Meyer, and one day he got around to talking about Thomas Mann, “indisputably the greatest German writer,” as he repeatedly emphasized. Until then I had no more than heard the name, but now, in his hoarse voice, Dr. Meyer talked about the writer’s stature, the Nobel Prize, his elder brother Heinrich, and the great literary talents of his children. As he talked, he poured out so many names and titles that I soon had everything mixed up. Finally, he read me some passages from Tonio Kröger and said that the book was the briefest summing-up of Thomas Mann’s lifelong problem. All his principal characters were outsiders and every one of his books was a variation on that theme. Once he had got going, he also quoted some phrases from Royal Highness and Buddenbrooks. He stood on a step-ladder and brought down several volumes by the author. After leafing thoughtfully through them he handed me Buddenbrooks for the “next fortnight,” and told me insistently neither to turn down the corners of pages nor to damage the book in any other way, never mind lose it. Because, under present conditions, Thomas Mann was no longer in favor and new copies were hard to come by.
I began to read the first pages on the S-Bahn, but said nothing about it at supper, because I knew my father’s reservations about novels. When Aunt Dolly, who was a librarian, once brought Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund for Wolfgang, my father thought her action incomprehensible, and said novels were mostly for housewives or maids with time on their hands.19 After a long argument he read the first two or three pages of the book and gave it back to Wolfgang with an amused “Well, have fun, Miss Magda!”
With Thomas Mann it was different. After a few days, when I had just reached the description of Uncle Gotthold’s death, my father discovered the book and asked where I had got it from. When I told him about Dr. Meyer’s special liking for Thomas Mann, he was unimpressed: Dr. Meyer couldn’t know that, but he wasn’t having Thomas Mann in the house. He was certainly a significant author, but a politically irresponsible person. My father had lost all respect for Thomas Mann with Reflections of an Unpolitical Man. Precisely because it was so well written it had done more to alienate the middle classes from the republic than Hitler.20 That sort of thing was impossible to forgive. He demanded that I send the book back to Dr. Meyer immediately; he himself would include a few lines of explanation.
When I came home from school the next day, the book had already been taken to the post office. My mother remarked that she had had an errand nearby anyway and sent the book off for me. At my next visit on Saturday Dr. Meyer received me shaking his head and with Buddenbrooks in his hand. My father, he said embarrassedly, evidently did not know that literature was only a game. He took books and their authors too seriously. All of belles lettres was at home in the circus, as it were, and had a humorous side. The truth of his observation was underlined a couple of weeks later, when my father once again demanded the return of a book. This time it was Felix Dahn’s A Struggle for Rome, which Heinz Steinki, the son of a tailor who lived in Blumenstrasse, had lent me.21 My father disliked playing the censor, but he did not want such a politically dubious author as Felix Dahn in the house, either. “One ends up living with these people,” he said, “they become part of the family.” He shook his head. “Felix Dahn will never be a part of this family!” As a result, for years I had no idea how the Goths had got to Cosenza, and what had happened historically when they had sunk their king together with his treasure in the River Busento at night. What did become clear to me, however, was the depth of the wound that the demise of the Weimar Republic had inflicted on its supporters.
At around this time Sally Jallowitz, whom my mother still could not stand, turned up again. I told him about Dr. Meyer’s residence theory, according to which the first generation of Jewish immigrants settled in the Scheunenviertel or nearby in Berlin’s East End, and a hundred years later their grandchildren lived in Grunewald. That was unfortunately a thing of the past, Dr. Meyer had said, and he himself was an example of how lacking in energy even the Jews had become. In his irrepressible confidence Jallowitz merely laughed. He and his parents had occupied a basement on Andreasplatz near Silesian Station; he no longer lived in a basement but in a respectable apartment block near Spittelmarkt. Admittedly, he still went from one customer to the next with two heavy suitcases, but really he was past that. He had saved up a “pretty sum” and hidden it and a little silver under a floorboard in his small but nice two-room apartment: “The furniture, all of it the best modern, old-fashioned, fancy stuff!” And next he was going to marry. “But I swear to you”—and he pushed his hat to the back of his head, so that he could wipe the sweat from his face and neck—“my sons will live in Charlottenburg without any detour via the Seydelstrasse, and one of the three or four boys I’ll have may even live in Grunewald! I swear to you!”
In early summer 1939 the founder and director of the language school at which my father was learning Italian and Russian offered to put him in charge of the Berlin branch. My father pointed out that he had been forbidden to give private lessons, but Dr. Hartnack brushed this objection aside, saying that after six years even the Nazis had become more accommodating. Nevertheless, he recommended my father apply to the relevant department to issue the necessary permission, and my mother went every morning to the rogation service to pray for a happy conclusion to the matter. After about three weeks the answer arrived: it had been impossible, it said in the letter, to agree to a permission, because the petitioner’s behavior, “as known to the department,” did not allow the conclusion that his political attitude had changed in the intervening time. He had not even concluded his application with the “German greeting,” as had been officially required for years.22 As soon as there was evidence before the department that the petitioner had come around to a positive assessment of the National Socialist order and of its leader Adolf Hitler, then it would be prepared to review the matter.
Throwing the letter onto the table with an angry laugh, my father remarked, “The bastards will wait a long time for that. They were all once colleagues of mine.” My mother was unable to hide how desperate she was, but she was also obviously greatly impressed by her husband’s intransigence. Occasionally, I saw her in the evening sitting in the easy chair in the drawing room, her face empty and exhausted by the long day; her eyes had fallen shut over her darning things and a kind of swoon, so it seemed, had overcome her. If she felt herself observed, she started up and said, embarrassed, that she hadn’t been sleeping, but only thinking. Then she asked me to keep her company for a few minutes, but I failed in the attempt to come up with an amusing piece of gossip. So I talked about my most recent school essays, about the agreement I had come to with Wolfgang, according to which in future I was no longer supposed to support Schalke 04, but Rapid Vienna instead, and finally that recently one saw so many men with German shepherds.23 In the end my mother said, “Six or seven years and the world and people in it are turned upside down!” It would always be beyond her.
This was also when Walther Rosenthal and his attractive wife said goodbye. They didn’t understand the Germans anymore, he said on the phone, and would leave the country in three days, despite all the difficulties the authorities were putting in their way. They had always considered themselves to be Germans, but that had been overhasty. Then Sonja Rosenthal came to the phone for “one quick word of farewell.” She just wanted to say, she remarked, that the little bit of trust she still had in human beings she owed above all to some Berlin friends. “Not so few at all,” she added. Then she said, “Auf Wiedersehen!,” which almost sounded like a question, and hung up.24
On the whole, however, the summer of 1939 belonged to my brother Winfried. One day he came running into the flat breathless with effort and happiness and shouted, “Done it! At last! I’ve managed it!” For two or three months we had watched him as in wind and rain, with youthful perseverance, he practiced the giant swing on the horizontal bar. Wolfgang, who was not a talented gymnast and only managed the knee circle, had soon given up, and after two weeks I had achieved nothing more than the much easier little giant swing. Only Winfried had gone on struggling and finally performed not only a rotation but two giant swings. The whole family, including my sisters, who had never shown any interest in our boys’ world, followed him down to the garden. Because they were going on to a birthday party they had broad, colored ribbons in their hair, which my mother had been tugging away at before the beginning of the show, so that everything looked “neat and tidy.” Then Winfried jumped onto the high horizontal bar from a chair, swung back and forth a couple of times, and threw himself into the giant swing. When he came down, even ending in a standing position, old Katlewski was so impressed that he offered to register Winfried in the local gymnastic club, Karlhorst Turnverein KTV 1900, and my father aroused our envy by giving Winfried one mark—as much as for ten poems!
The next day Hans Hausdorf, who often made considerable sums dealing in dental instruments and equipment, happened to call, and the giant swing was performed for him. He was so astonished that he took five marks out of his pocket. But when he heard how much Winfried had received from my father, he gave him only one mark. “I can’t give you more than your father,” he said, and Winfried retorted, “You can! You just don’t want to!” After a brief hesitation, Herr Hausdorf added another seventy pfennigs. “But with that you have to buy an ice cream for everyone in the family!”
At around the same time the organist of our church declared himself willing to give me and my sisters piano lessons free of charge. My brothers had responded so negatively to the mere mention of instruction or (in Wolfgang’s case) with such amusement that they were never asked again. Herr Tinz was a lively, charming Rhinelander with a bald spot and curly hair combed up at the sides. He taught me how to sit at the piano, the varieties of fingering, and an appreciation of composers I knew hardly anything about, such as Handel, Telemann, and Schütz.25 More than that, his boundless enthusiasm (which in conversation could be quite trying) taught me that music demanded powerful emotions on the part of both performers and audience and that “without fire” it was nothing more than “blowing at a heap of ashes.” Passion was more important than technique, he said in his high voice. In the course of the lessons our teacher was carried away by his own enthusiasm, and he frequently concluded them by playing a movement from a classical sonata, preferably one marked presto. When I asked my mother whether, after all the artistic thunder and lightning, she could play “Ah, vous dirais-je maman”26 or one of Brahms’s dances, she looked at me from her stove with an almost pitying smile. With unusual curtness she said, “It would no longer be appropriate now!”
Then I would have to turn to my new friend, I replied, who was at least a year ahead of me on the piano. Wigbert Gans had only recently joined our class. He came from Halle and it so happened that his father, although only the previous year, had been “let go,” as my father had been in April 1933. Wigbert’s face under his long floppy hair expressed superior concentration, and Hans Hausdorf, who once met him at our home, said that Wigbert listened with a fervor which almost made one feel uneasy. Wigbert turned up at our school one day as if from nowhere and after five periods everyone knew that the class had a new top boy. He was not only ahead of us in all the natural sciences and, as it proved, of some of the teachers as well, he was also, contrary to every topboy rule, among the best in foreign languages and even gymnastics. Since he wasn’t a drudge or a show-off he was accepted from the day he arrived. Shortly afterward, when he visited me in Karlshorst for the first time, he introduced himself to my parents with the disconcertingly straightforward words: “I am Wigbert Gans and I’m from a family which is also ‘genuine’ or ‘anti’—whichever you like.”
We quickly became friends and managed to sit together at one of the double desks. We swapped stories of the most diverse experiences, complained about the ignorance of our form master Dr. Appelt, and read the The Song of the Nibelungs, Hölderlin’s Hyperion, and Knut Hamsun together.27 Now and then after school we went the few stops to the city center, to Alexanderplatz or Friedrichstrasse, and found the piled-up hair, garish blouses, and green net stockings of the ladies on parade there more exciting than the women themselves. Sometimes we also strolled through the area between Hackescher Markt and Mulackstrasse and looked cautiously into the hallways and cellar homes of this musty world familiar from Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.28 At the entrances hung pathetic pieces of clothing, pots, or linen; from below there rose a sour, poor-people smell. There were occasional cigarette-butt sellers who had spread out their goods on an old tray, neatly arranged according to length and brand; three butts cost a pfennig, a half-smoked cigar three pfennigs. Here and there we passed a group of Jews deep in conversation, nodding their heads; even on hot summer days they wore dark coats and hats. They appeared curiously abandoned, and I felt attraction, dread, and sadness at the sight of them.
Leibniz Gymnasium was an establishment without any reputation, not to be compared to such legendary educational institutions as the Fichte Gymnasium, the Grey Cloister, or Canisius College, whose names were always mentioned with respectfully raised eyebrows. The somewhat unambitious teaching methods of most of the teachers were focused upon learning, and combined acquiring knowledge with a simple system of fair assessment.
The rector of the school, Wilhelm Weinhold, was held to be a crude Nazi without really being one. The military bearing that he was at pains to maintain, his chin determinedly pressed against his neck, made his authority look somewhat forced. The watery eyes with which he liked to stare piercingly when issuing a reprimand also betrayed what an effort it cost him to appear as “Sergeant Major Wilhelm,” as he was called by the pupils. Yet was it really by chance that he entrusted timid Herr Pfaff, whose Swabian accent alone made all pathetic declamations sound ridiculous, with teaching ideological topics? In his lessons, as with a puzzled expression he interpreted Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century a paragraph at a time, we filled bags with water and hung them up above the classroom door; when they burst, to the howls of the class, he lapsed into completely incomprehensible Swabian.29 His hands at his temples, desperate for help, he would open the door to Rector Weinhold, who, in fact, did nothing more than enter the room with a firm step, his chin pressed against his throat, and order us a few times to “Stand!” and “Sit!,” before concluding the incident with a reference to the war and the good name of the school. He was a former theology student and at the annual Christmas service in the school hall, after the official part with Nazi choruses and political poems, he had the swastika flag removed from the room before giving a sermon between the reading of the Gospel and the Christmas carols.
Apart from that there was the history teacher, Dr. Schmidt, heavy and bald, who wore tweed suits and puttees and liked to relate episodes from his life; also the almost delicate-looking Dr. Hertel, who was responsible for teaching German and Latin. Then there was the geography teacher Dr. Püschel, a gruff man whose eyes would flash when difficult questions arose and then, eyes shut, he would stroke his Vandyke beard with a clenched fist. If the class of smart, big-city boys understood his politically ambiguous remarks all too well, he would boisterously correct himself, though not without linking his correction to some new double meaning: an honest boor, who, in his advancing years, against his character and temperament, tried his hand at being a political tightrope walker.
Finally, one day when we were already in our second year, Fräulein Schneider turned up. She introduced herself as the new gym teacher and, unusually, asked to be addressed as Fräulein—Miss—Doris. She looked delightful and had a figure in which (in Gerd Donner’s expert judgment) “all the right curves were in the right place.” To the amazement of the schoolboys she came to lessons wearing trousers, which the class acknowledged with enthusiasm—her colleagues, however, with unconcealed displeasure. Fräulein Doris enjoyed thinking up new exercises on the box horse, horizontal bars, and climbing frame, on the vaulting horse too, of course, all with long take-offs after which, in support position, she caught the jumpers in a firm embrace. There were some who soon recognized that the bosomy beauty was good not only for keeping us fit, but presented far more exciting possibilities. Schibischewski was the first to grasp the opportunity. He walked back from a long horse jump saying, “Bull’s eye!,” while Jendralski expressed himself more coarsely, and Gerd Donner merely raised two fingers of his right hand, whatever that meant. Only a week later he went to see Dr. Weinhold with a “delegation” of three fellow pupils to request that there should be two additional gym lessons a week, as he understood from “authoritative sources” that they were “politically desirable.” After lengthy negotiations this “exemplary request” succeeded in getting us one extra gym lesson.
In Gerd Donner, the third year of Leibniz Gymnasium had a born leader. He had had to repeat a year at elementary school and was therefore not only older but also more experienced than the rest of us. Apart from that he had a Darwinian instinct for survival, developed in the back courts of the working-class quarter of SO 36—North Kreuzberg. Always something of a dandy in his dress, he was constantly playing with his comb; at every break he would take it out and, his head thrown back, draw it through his long, unparted, wavy hair. A proletarian beau, he relished being admired as an authority on mysterious, all-night bars and exciting experiences with women. His motto was “Always use the back door”—that was the best way to get anywhere. On the way to the station he sometimes took me to see a classmate from his elementary school days. Harry Wolfhart’s father had a collection of several thousand tin soldiers. Small, plump, and sporting a buzz cut, Harry’s father, who was around fifty, spoke with an equal measure of melancholy and wistfulness about endless nights spent drinking long ago. He readily led us past the cabinets of a spacious double room and explained the accurate renderings of flags, uniforms, and cannon to us.
Then he left us alone. Harry explained that for days he had been trying to reenact the Battle of Jena and Auerstedt with almost two thousand soldiers. An account of the battle open at his side, he pointed out Napoleon’s brilliant feints as units moved forward, then avoided contact or dissolved.30 Gerd Donner had warned me on the way there: when a battle was in progress, Harry was sometimes overcome by a violent fit of temper and wanted to play fate; then he would take an old lamp chain from one of the drawers at the bottom of the cabinets and strike out blindly at the ranks of soldiers, until the whole beautiful order of battle was wrecked.
And that is exactly what happened on our visit. Gerd objected that the hitting out had come too soon today, but Harry had wanted to impress us. When I asked why he was so crazy, Gerd replied that Harry wasn’t crazy, he was merely copying life. His father had been a successful businessman, who through a run of bad luck had lost everything, and from the leafy suburb of Dahlem had ended up in this dark corner of Berlin. Indeed, as Harry, quite beside himself, panting, his face bright red, had laid into the battleground, he had shouted, “I am Fate! No one can escape me! I am omnipotent!”
Gerd said that eighty to one hundred tin soldiers fell victim to each of his friend’s outbreaks. Some could be soldered, stuck together, painted, and more or less restored. But almost half of the “seriously disabled” remained lost. And of the twenty or so buildings that were distributed across the battlefield of Auerstedt, all were gone. Harry’s father, added Gerd, often stood by in tears when his armies were smashed. But he let it happen.
1 The Hitler Youth had taken over both the organizations and the songs of the independent German youth movements of the years after the First World War. After the second war the German Boy Scouts would continue the tradition.
2 Heinrich Hoffmann (1809–94) was a medical doctor and author of satirical and children’s books, including the universally popular and familiar Struwwelpeter, translated into most European languages.
Wilhelm Busch (1832–1908) was a painter and writer whose satirical and humorous exposure of self-importance and pettiness, among other things, made his illustrated stories told in simple doggerel household items throughout the German-speaking world, especially Max und Moritz (1865).
3 Almost unknown in the English-speaking world, the adventure stories of Karl May (1842–1912) have had an unbreakable hold on the imagination of adolescents in Central Europe since the late nineteenth century.—Trans.
4 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) represent the absolute pinnacle of German and European culture in the nineteenth century to educated Germans; together they constitute the German Klassik or classical period. They serve here as a counterpoint to the “other” reading of young Joachim, such as Gottfried Keller (1819–90), a Swiss prose writer who actually did work in the spirit of Goethe’s large prose works, and to the popular literature cited immediately afterward.
5 From the poem “The Fisherman”; there’s a famous setting by Schubert.—Trans.
6 The Anschluss or union of Austria and Germany had been forbidden by the Allies in the peace treaty of Versailles, at the urging of France in particular; it proved to be a major success as a propaganda slogan of the Nazi agitation against that treaty and aided their rise at the polls.
7 December 6 is St. Nicholas’s Day, celebrated in Germany with the appearance of a figure, most often dressed as a bishop, accompanied by some coarse fellow with a sack and cudgel; they would reward the good, usually with nuts, dried fruit, and sweets, and punish the bad with taps with the cudgel and the threat of being put in the sack and taken away.
8 Johann Jakob Christoph von Grimmelshausen (1621–76) was Germany’s greatest Baroque prose writer, best known for his exuberant novel Simplicius Simplicissimus. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) was one of Germany’s foremost theoreticians and practitioners of drama, a great Enlightenment humanist, best known for his parable of tolerance Nathan the Wise, which advocates the peaceful coexistence of Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
9 Kristallnacht, so called because of all the broken glass, was the first massive and overt Nazi attempt at hurting the Jews of Germany physically and publicly, following the previous legalistic and administrative systematic reduction of their civil and property rights. As an attempt at arousing the German public to a general pogrom it failed; its intimidating effects, however, were significant.
10 Many modern German artists, especially painters, were patronized by Germany’s Jewish upper-middle class, which was an additional reason for Hitler and National Socialist cultural officials to deride their work as non-Aryan and ban it from museums and public sales. Nazi taste ran more toward the gigantic and heroic representational in both painting and sculpture.
11 Emanuel Geibel (1815–84) is best known as the poet of German unity under Prussia and for popular nature poems and songs. Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866) is the author of many narrative poems on patriotic themes, but also of the Kindertotenlieder (Songs of dead children), set to music by Gustav Mahler, and his translations introduced Persian and Arabic poetry to German readers. Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (1715–69) was a transitional figure combining Enlightenment and early Romanticism in his fables, novellas, and plays. Gottfried August Bürger (1747–94) is famous for some of the best-known ballads in the German language, especially his “Lenore” and his version of the travels of the notorious Baron von Münchhausen, teller of tall tales. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797–1848) wrote primarily poems but is best known for her novella Die Judenbuche (The Jew’s beech); she was also a close friend of the writer Levin Schücking.
12 Friedrich von Matthisson (1761–1831); Ludwig Heinrich Christoph Hölty (1748–76), author of ballads and emotionally evocative poems; the Stolberg brothers, Counts Christian (1748–1821) and Friedrich Leopold (1750–1819), are best known as Goethe’s travel companions; both dabbled in poetry and drama.
13 August Count von Platen (1796–1835) was a master poet who preferred demanding forms like sonnets and ghasels; he also wrote popular ballads and political songs. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, whose complex and profound works span a wide variety of forms; the poems cited here and later are an integral part of any educated German’s cultural vocabulary.
14 This is actually the last line of Goethe’s poem “Nachtgesang” and the first line of a poem by Hoffmann von Fallersleben written in 1840.
15 Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825–98) is famous for his tightly constructed, powerful prose and poetry, including oft-quoted ballads blending form, rhythm, and content in masterful fashion. Emil Strauss (1866–1960) was a minor prose writer, mainly known for the novel mentioned here.
16 This complex of several large museums, dedicated to major exhibits of ancient monuments and art as well as paintings through the ages, is located on an island and constitutes the heart of Berlin’s immense collection of cultural treasures even today.
17 The reference here is to the de facto dictatorship of Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya, the plenipotentiary ruler of Hungary from 1920 through 1944.
18 This reference to Hungary’s national dance, the csárdás, invokes the popular stereotype among German speakers of the Hungarians’ alleged fiery temperament, in love and argument.
19 Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), writer and pacifist, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946 before his novels were discovered by British and American youth of the counterculture movement of the 1960s, especially his novel Steppenwolf.
20 Thomas Mann (1875–1955), novelist and antifascist exile, received the Nobel Prize in 1929 and became controversial politically with his public pronouncements in critical essays; after 1918 he offended the German patriots on the right, after 1945 he was distrusted by the left. His many novels and novellas reflect on the incompatibility of ordinary life and the life of the spirit or mind, especially as manifested in the artist’s sensibilities. Refusing the blandishments of both postwar German states, he settled in neutral but German-speaking Switzerland.
21 Felix Dahn (1834–1912) was a professor of history and writer of historical novels focusing on the conquest of the Roman Empire by the Germanic tribes. In his Struggle for Rome he describes the burial of the Gothic king, Alaric, in the River Busento somewhere near Cosenza, a scene immortalized—and memorized by German schoolboys—in August von Platen’s poem “Das Grab im Busento” (The grave in the Busento).
22 The “German greeting” (der deutsche Gruss) was “Heil Hitler!” The Hitler salute was offered with outstretched right arm; most non-Nazis refused to use it on everyday occasions but had to comply at official functions and in government offices. It was also required in writing in official documents.
23 Schalke 04 and Rapid Vienna were professional soccer clubs playing in the same league at the time within the unified German-Austrian entity created in 1938. The German shepherd reference is, of course, to Hitler’s favorite dog breed, now favored by those who would emulate the Führer.
24 It was, in fact, a question whether they would ever see each other again, with good reasons to doubt it.
25 These German masters of the Baroque were all primarily keyboard musicians who wrote many pieces suitable for piano exercises on any level.
26 Variations by Mozart on a French tune best known in English as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”—Trans.
27 The Song of the Nibelungs is a medieval Germanic epic about the glory and fall of the Burgundian royal house among the Huns led by Attila; its oldest extant written version dates from c. 1200, but it contains much older materials. It became something of a cult item because of Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung cycle and the Nazi interest in the Germanic past; both re- and misinterpreted the original epic and its ethos.
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) is often regarded as Germany’s greatest lyrical poet; his Hyperion (1797–99) is a poetic novel written in epistolary form, expressing the author’s deeply felt romantic yearning and his love for an idealized ancient Greece.
Knut Hamsun (1859–1952), Norwegian Nobel laureate (1920), was a novelist of the simple stark rural life; he was much admired by the Nazis and published in the Quisling newspapers, for which he was fined after 1945.
28 Alfred Döblin (1887–1957) was a neurologist and writer who left Germany in 1933 and returned in 1945. His novels, especially Berlin Alexanderplatz, paint a very dense and often depressing picture of the helplessness of the individual in both nature and modern society.
29 Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), sometimes regarded as the chief ideologue of Nazism (although not by the Nazi leaders themselves), was the main publicist and developer of Nazi ideas; condemned to death by the Nürnberg Tribunal, he was executed in 1946.
30 In the Battle of Jena and Auerstedt (October 14, 1806), Napoleon decisively defeated and destroyed the famed Prussian army, opening the way for a complete reorganization of the German Reich and Europe as a whole. It marked the end of the Holy Roman Empire and laid the groundwork for Prussian reforms leading to the Wilhelminian Reich of 1870.