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!”
The most obvious explanation for the success of National Socialism was that—like all groups ready to use force and then endowed with funds—it attracted opportunists. That is attested to by the mass defections of spring 1933, when hundreds of thousands went over to the Nazi Party after the seizure of power, as well as by the almost instantaneous and complete disappearance of the party in 1945. No one wanted to admit to having supported a lost cause. For years people had ignored the atrocities of the regime and fawned on those in power: senior civil servants, employers, generals, and the rest. Each person soothed his conscience in his own way. The conduct of the actress Adele Sandrock will always represent the exception. At “afternoon tea for ladies” at the Reich Chancellery, when Hitler burst out with invective against the Jews, she supposedly interrupted him: “My Führer! In my presence not a word against the Jews, please! All my life they have been my best lovers!” But perhaps that was only an anecdote passed on in a whisper. Then one put the party badge in one’s buttonhole and went to cheer along with the rest. Then there followed, after 1945, the Great Denial.
The attitude in the early years after the war was later described as a “communicative silence,” which was not simply a form of repression. Disillusionment, shame, and defiance combined to form an opaque refusal of guilt. In addition there was a tendency to belatedly construct heroes. Some invented acts of resistance; others (as part of the game of contrition) sought out a prominent place on the bench of the self-accusers. But in all their lamentation, they were very ready to defame anyone who didn’t do as they did and constantly beat their sinful breasts. When Günter Grass or any of the other countless self-accusers pointed to their own feelings of shame, they were not referring to any guilt on their own part—they felt themselves to be beyond reproach—but to the many reasons which everyone else had to be ashamed. However, the mass of the population, so they said, was not prepared to acknowledge their shame.2
Seen as a whole, what I had experienced was the collapse of the bourgeois world. Its end was already foreseeable before Hitler came on the scene. Solely individual characters survived the years of his rule with integrity—no classes, groups, or ideologies. Too many forces in society had contributed to the destruction of this world, the political right just as much as the left, art, literature, the youth movement, among others. Basically, Hitler had merely swept away the remaining ruins. He was a revolutionary. But because he was capable of hiding behind a bourgeois mask, he destroyed the hollow facade of the bourgeoisie with the help of the bourgeoisie itself: the desire to put an end to it all was overpowering.
Of the twelve families at 13 Hentigstrasse, only one tenant was a member of the Nazi Party. As far as I know, it was not much different in the neighboring buildings. If asked, each person living in our building would have passionately defended middle-class and civil virtues. Yet, inwardly, this stratum of society had decayed long before, so that I was essentially brought up in accordance with the principles of an outmoded order. Its rules and traditions right down to its poetic canon were passed on to me. It kept me at a distance from the times to some extent; simultaneously, it put some solid ground under my feet, which helped to sustain me in the years that followed.
As is evident in retrospect, each member of our family had his or her own distinctive way of coping with the challenges of the age and, taken all together, we were a reflection of the various possibilities of evasion in the face of the regime. My father’s stubbornness was coupled with a contempt that never diminished and allowed of no compromise. My mother’s opposition derived from her quite different set of values, impregnated by religion, which she was able to bring into play with often surprising skill. Wolfgang was able to checkmate every difficulty with his wit and charm. I drew attention to myself with acts of impudence that my parents observed with some concern, but which also had a political aspect. Winfried had his level-headed introversion. My sisters faced life each in her own way, in part quietly, in part defiantly, and had no problems either with the world or with regarding it ironically. We sometimes defined the behavior of friends in accordance with this family catalogue of types. Everyone in our close circle of friends had their own way of getting through the times halfway undamaged.
Also among those things that survived the Nazi Reich, despite the heavy losses, was for a few years a link between Germans and Jews. In the Berlin of the first years after the war I still encountered brilliant, educated, and charming witnesses to this past, and I regard it as one of the strokes of luck of my life that during the 1950s I experienced a brief revival of this world in the home of the respected doctor Walther Hirsch. He had been born around the turn of the century and in his Grunewald villa he tried to conjure up once more the luster of the 1920s and to revive the memory of the vanished days of his youth. At the soirees which he held at his home every couple of weeks I got to know Fritz Kortner and Joachim Prinz, Wolfgang Lukschy, Hans Scholz, and Sebastian Haffner, as well as Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, Melvin Lasky, and the painter Heinrich Heuser, and many more.
Long after midnight, when most of the sixty or so guests had taken their leave, a circle of about a dozen remained behind, and each time three of them were called on to enter a kind of competition for the best story of the night. Anyone who was present will remember tales that were developed in masterly fashion and brilliantly told, and often the winner was the host himself or the writer Hans Scholz, whose great success was yet to come. I still regret that these tales were never recorded and collected. They are gone and lost forever, like the German-Jewish community.
Many voices—most prominently that of Gershom Scholem—have argued that the much-discussed German–Jewish symbiosis never existed. That is very understandable as a response to injustice stretching over generations, and above all to the horrors of the Hitler years. But as a conclusion it remains inaccurate. The relationship between Germans and Jews was always deeper and more profound than, for example, that between Jews and the French or Jews and the English or the Scandinavians.
The sense of fellowship was based above all on three things. There was first of all a delight in speculation, imaginatively taking an idea as far as it will go, even into entirely new realms of thought. Further, there was an inclination toward complicated structures of ideas, which possibly have a theological aspect and, ultimately, a utopian goal, because world and man are unceasingly searching for salvation. And, finally, there should be mentioned an obsessive love of music to the extent that it becomes almost a metaphysical background, as did German music, notably from Beethoven to Richard Wagner. This common interest can be found in the relationship between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal or Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, and in many outstanding conductors from Otto Klemperer to Leonard Bernstein. So, perhaps the Germans’ hatred of the Jews and the genocide may be interpreted as a kind of fratricide, even if one remains aware of how debatable as such an assertion is.
Such affinities were mostly destroyed by the Holocaust, and Walther Hirsch’s moving attempt to resurrect them in his house could not last longer than the lifetimes of those involved. Today the relationship between Germans and Jews is atrophied and largely trivialized. There are no great communities of interest anymore, no visible results. Among my notes I found some record of conversations with Dr. Meyer just before I went to Freiburg. They sound like an anticipated epitaph. “We have no future,” he once responded to a remark by me about how things would go on. “With our end the world ends. All of us here are appearing in a tragedy. But it has no fifth act. There is no continuation. Our book of life suddenly breaks off. Someone has simply torn out the last page.”
The shattered country to which I returned in 1947 was not so much a world of restriction and lack of freedom of movement, as it is often viewed today. There was, in fact, plenty of free space to be found. Efforts at restoration by leading figures and various governments—for which they are criticized even today—were helpless attempts to find a way back to certain rules without which life as a society is impossible.
Intellectually, too, these were years without rules. We took the freedoms that were available for granted. It was, in fact, this temptation that stopped me from returning to Berlin immediately and beginning my studies at the Humboldt University, because I could not imagine that in the eastern sector of the city there would be the same freedom as in Freiburg.3 There, in addition to my studies, I continued to read about the Italian Renaissance and to extend my knowledge of the fall of the Roman Empire. I read everything I could find by Thomas Mann, picked up all the American literature I could get hold of—from John Steinbeck to William Faulkner—as well as the more recent French writers from Raymond Aron to Emmanuel Mounier; and I went to the theater whenever I could. Among the productions that have stood the test of time are Sartre’s Les Mouches, Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning, and Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. Then I came across Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler and Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt and was deeply impressed.
Toward the end of my period of study I got to know Eckart Peterich, who was very amused to discover that he had once influenced my notion of the ideal profession.4 With him was his daughter, charmingly nicknamed “Coccolo,” and both of them invited me to their grand house high above Florence on the “other side” of the Arno. The two weeks that I spent reading and writing in the topmost tower room of the villa once again made the profession of “private scholar” a tempting one, even more so when we drove out to the country seat of the Peterichs in the middle of a pine forest in the then still rural Forte dei Marmi. Here I got to know, for the first time, the daily routine of a scholar living in sophisticated and affluent circumstances: in a Mediterranean landscape, occupied with studies by day and entertaining friends in the evening, sitting at well-spread tables late into the night.
The country home welcomed guests from all over the world. I met Ernst Jünger and Aldous Huxley, Hilde Spiel and Peter de Mendelssohn, Luigi Barzini, Indro Montanelli, and Elio Vittorini. Arthur Koestler dropped by one day with an excitingly good-looking woman, and among the guests for the month was a retired British general who told stories about India and other places full of adventure, but preferred to spend the evenings by the fire, saying nothing. It was striking that in these cosmopolitan surroundings no one treated me as a member of a nation that had fallen into disrepute. All those present felt themselves to be Europeans or at least saw themselves as part of a European-American cultural context.
The successful French writer André Germain, who lived in a palazzo in Florence, called several times; his young, homosexual secretary had just run away; but what particularly incensed Monsieur Germain was the fact that he (the secretary) had persuaded the wife of the British consul general in Florence, of all people, to take off with him. At that time Monsieur Germain was, rather bizarrely, working simultaneously on a biography of Lucrezia Borgia and another on Benito Mussolini. Years later I found the latter in the library of Gaston Gallimard, when I myself had become a Gallimard author. I assisted André Germain as a secretary for a while and during that time wrote about two dozen short stories, which an agency sold to a number of small newspapers for me, and for which I received about ten marks each. In addition, I took extensive notes on the age of the Borgias.
Italy—at least in the part I got to know—had everything that Germany (for me) lacked: warmth, lightness, naive animality, and theatrical sparkle. And, like my father, I experienced the country as an overwhelming antipode. It did not have the fadedness, the delicate patina of the day before yesterday which I had so often found striking on trips to France. After two months in Forte dei Marmi I felt as if I were at home and at the same time far from the world. For how long, I asked myself, could both be combined? When I couldn’t find an answer I felt an ever greater desire to return to Germany.
In early 1950, soon after my return, I began to address more precise topics. The first essay that I offered Northwest German Radio, and which was also in memory of the “Romantic” Reinhold Buck, had the somewhat high-flown title “German Romanticism in the Twilight of Contemporary Experience.”5 I’ve forgotten the topics and titles of my subsequent reflections, but I remember that despite my considerable reluctance, the Hitler years found their way into almost every manuscript. Gradually, the American broadcasting station RIAS6 became the focus of my early journalistic efforts. I saw my future preferably as a publisher or as the author of reflections on the reciprocity between the events of the day and the “spirit of the age.”
At the same time I was writing my doctoral thesis at the Free University of Berlin, which was just establishing itself. It investigated within a legal context the influence of advertisers on the daily press. The thesis was almost complete and a date set—some considerable time in the future, due to overcrowding in the new institution—for the oral examination, when I received an offer from the RIAS. After a long conversation with my father, who advised me to finish my thesis first, I turned it down, but shortly afterward I received an even better offer. This time I accepted. Soon after taking up my post, the deputy director, Mr. Bloomfield, whom I had already met privately once or twice, asked me to his office and suggested, among other things, that I edit or, preferably, write a series of broadcasts on German history. The idea was to treat the period from the dismissal of Bismarck in 1890 up to the year 1945 in a number of increasingly detailed individual essays elaborating the reasons for the disaster. To be taken into consideration was that listeners in the Soviet Zone of occupation were getting a completely distorted picture of the German past.
A lengthy discussion ensued, in the course of which I argued against the proposal to the best of my ability. Something like that was better placed in the hands of a professional editor, I objected. At Freiburg University I had attended several lectures by Gerhard Ritter, Hans Herzfeld, Gerd Tellenbach, and other well-known historians, but I had avoided contemporary history as much as possible. I had never been sufficiently interested in it. Consequently, for both professional and personal reasons, I did not feel myself qualified to produce a series of programs on the period proposed.
Mr. Bloomfield remained adamant; I even had the impression that it was my very objections that lent force to his insistence. But for myself, I kept on thinking—on top of everything else—of a conversation I had recently had with my father about a commentary I had written on the 1932 German presidential election. He had praised the piece for its formal aspect, but objected that my “high style” was inappropriate when writing about the “Nazi gang.” Then came the words I have never forgotten. Hitler and his rule was no subject for a serious historian, he said. It was nothing more than a “gutter subject.” Hitler’s supporters came from the gutter and that’s where they belonged. Historians like myself were giving them a historical dignity to which they were not entitled.
My father’s view, I argued, betrayed an old-fashioned and much too exalted conception of history. Nobody was ennobled by being in a history book. History simply recorded the course of events. Historians wrote about series of events, men of violence, ham actors, and murderers, just as they did about saints. But my father had experienced and suffered the Hitler years, so his objections were understandable. The younger generation, on the other hand, wanted to know how those years had come about.
My father remained unimpressed, and I began to understand just how much he continued to feel the injustice of those times, when the best years of his life had been stolen from him. I had wanted to study Colleoni, the Gonzagas, and Lorenzo the Magnificent, and now I had exchanged them for the inferior riffraff of Ley, Streicher, or Sauckel—they did not deserve any “literary enhancement,” he insisted toward the end of our conversation.7 He was quite able to see the tensions which followed from his position, but it was impossible to escape from this dilemma. I should therefore return to my old preference, the Italian Renaissance. I told him that I had mentioned that preference to Mr. Bloomfield but he indicated that after the Hitler debacle airtime for such remote topics might become available at best ten years from now.
When I called on Mr. Bloomfield again, he turned out to be as obdurate as my father had been, whom he wanted to meet after hearing my report. In the end he asked me to “simply get started” working on the series. If that did not, in the long run, agree with me it would not be hard to find some other kind of project in addition to the ones I was responsible for now. To put an end to the pointless quarrel I excused myself and, practically out the door, said to him: “All right, so be it! I should be able to crank out a dozen manuscripts about German history.” Mr. Bloomfield stopped with surprise and called me back to his desk. He said: “I am afraid we have misunderstood each other. I did not mean a dozen shows; I was thinking more like eighty. At any rate, I am planning on a program of some length.” So we were at loggerheads once again and I replied to him, “You are turning this awful contemporary history into a lifetime occupation for me!” But in the end I agreed to give it a try. It turns out Mr. Bloomfield was more prescient than I was. “It will be more than a try,” he said, standing at the door to his office. And that’s how I got into contemporary history.
I stayed with contemporary history for many years, but always with a touch of bad conscience, because I could never get the words “gutter subject” out of my head. I still preferred the Renaissance, and read whatever I could in my free time, including Charles de Brosses’s Secret Letters from Italy, Landucci’s A Florentine Diary from 1450 to 1516, and the Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois. Some of it I eventually forgot, but the Italian Renaissance remains my subject of choice.
In the early 1960s my father died. On the day before his death I spent several hours by his bedside in the hospital, and we talked in broad terms about his times and his life. Some of what was said has found its way into these memoirs, such as his reasons for showing Wolfgang and me the burnt-out Reichstag in 1933. Smiling, he recalled throwing the Hitler Youth leaders out of the house and his letter protesting his being drafted to build antitank fortifications. Reviewing those years, he managed one of his characteristic plays on words which Wolfgang had called “parsing syllables.” “Ich habe,” he said, “im Leben viele Fehler gemacht. Aber nichts falsch.” I have, he said, made many mistakes in life. But I have never done wrong.
Part of our time we spent talking about the whereabouts of old friends and those we had lost in the turmoil of war. He quoted an old French popular ballad, “Que sont devenus mes amis?” which he had learned from the Straeter family. This led us on to Karlshorst and I told him that with Mother’s help and despite all the mishaps, he had made our youthful years happy ones. Then he said, as he was fading away into some state of half-awareness: “Please, tell me a story! Any story!” And some parable about life came to me, a mix constructed of things read and invented. It was probably pointless to base the narrative loosely on the Odyssey, but I thought he, being a Prussian Bildungsbürger, might find that pleasing.
Much abbreviated, the story went as follows. When man first stepped onto this earth he had to get to know the garden, the animals, and the bushes—just as we did back then in the Hentigstrasse. Once he had become reasonably familiar with all, he might do well to explore the city near and far, as we did when driving to Unter den Linden, to Potsdam, and to the Stechlinsee. At some point he will find himself a wife, start a family, and sally forth into the world where many challenges await, perhaps even a war, albeit not like the one Hitler had started so willfully. On that and other similar occasions he will encounter a lot of useless things and even lose his way. I continued, increasingly leaning on the Odyssey: At some point everyone has to deal with a modern version of Polyphemus—the world was still filled with monsters, taking on technological or hierarchical shapes nowadays. Later it would behoove one not to submit to a magical Circe, to pass through Scylla and Charybdis and whatever else one might encounter, not to forget the graceful and barely resistible Nausicaä and her tears. And once one returned to one’s home, some stranger or other is occupying it, strutting about, and when they have finally been removed—then what? What was there to add? Then ennui awaits. Nor is there an end to travail—that much, at least, I had grasped. It seemed as if my father, lying below me on his pillow, slightly tilted his head. It even seemed to me as if he smiled one more time.
My professional life continued. First at RIAS, mainly as editor and producer for contemporary history; also a brief, happy time as a kind of impresario of the RIAS Youth Orchestra under Willy Hannuschke at the Brussels Expo of 1958; then from 1961 in charge of TV plays at North German Broadcasting and, a little later, as its editor in chief. That was when my first book, Das Gesicht des Dritten Reiches (1963), was published, which collected some twenty portraits from the contemporary history series Mr. Bloomfield had talked me into doing years before. The publication was a success, translated into many languages, and I was asked if I would undertake a biography of Hitler. Naturally, my father’s phrase about “gutter subject” came to mind yet again; against that, however, there was his maxim that one should never submit to the opinion of others. As the pressure of the political parties on the broadcasting stations increased and became almost unbearable for me, I resigned from my broadcasting post to write the Hitler book. What also persuaded me was that I would at last fulfill the dream I had had as a fourteen-year-old to live and work as an independent scholar—as I had written home in November 1941.
My mother was very worried by my departure from North German Broadcasting. She saw her own fate about to be repeated. She said, “I do not like repetitions,” or, more accurately, she added, she only liked repetition in music, as well as in lyric poetry and—sometimes—on the faces of children. Anywhere else they were an indication that things were about to go wrong. “On the subject of Hitler that is almost inevitable,” she said. “You will always antagonize one side or the other.” All my friends, when asked, advised me not to take the risk and said I was reckless, but I stuck to my guns, and, as a compensation for the book on the Renaissance which I had now finally abandoned, I went to Italy, as I would from that time on almost every year.
Germany was almost suffocating in its limitations, but whenever I visited Italy it was as if many doors were opening. Sometimes it seemed to me I was meeting the world and the people of the Renaissance in the present, albeit reduced in their dimensions. Wherever I went south of Lake Garda, I had the impression I was revisiting the “lost paradise” of my childhood years, an overwhelming combination of natural and architectural beauty. It was also a land of sharply etched profiles and entertaining stories. I simply must talk about one of these encounters. One of the first acquaintances I made in Italy was Conte F., from a tiny town near Florence that time had passed by. The tales with which he entertained his friends were a vivid reflection of a multicolored world, despite its distance from the present.
The Conte was a stocky man who turned visibly grayer every time we met, brimming with the solid energy found in many Italian nonurban nobles. He also possessed a defining kind of charm which I likened to that of a condottiere who had been civilized over the course of many generations. But that comparison was met by a short, bellowing laugh and the comment that rheumatism, thick glasses, and an incipient paunch prevented any jumping onto coursers: “Just ask my sons!”
They were called Fabrizio and Camillo. Fabrizio was correct to a fault, pedantic, and had a tendency to be rather stern with himself, while Camillo lived only for dolce far niente and would at most act the eccentric Englishman. When I first met the Conte, people talked about the latest of Camillo’s scandals. He had invited two of the local worthies to dine with him and a surprise guest in the private room of a local club; when they arrived they found that guest to be a totally naked woman, stretched out on a sofa next to Camillo. As one might expect, he met an unhappy end a few years later, while Fabrizio rose to become a director of a reputable bank. Whenever these names came up I was reminded of Eichendorff’s poem about the two “brave lads” or the friends Charles and Sebastian in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. I also thought of the two Buddenbrook sons. One of them, Thomas, spends his time abroad acquiring an education and brings home his future bride, while the other, Christian, can only tell stories about Johnny Thunderstorm and sing “That’s Maria!”
I was so deeply caught up in my notion of Italy that back then I believed that the Florentine tale of Conte F.’s family was simply a continuation of the Renaissance story, while the English novel or the German tales were mere literature that made visible every calculated thought in every line. It seems to me one could base an entire research project in intellectual history on this observation, and once again I regretted that I had to busy myself with Munich’s bohemian circles and Hitler’s march to the Feldherrnhalle in 1923. For at the time the Conte told me about his two sons, my intellectual game playing had already ended. The decision had been made some time ago.
Around this time my mother asked me to write down her recollections of the Nazi years. She indicated her willingness to help me record them. When I mentioned that Father did not want anything written down about those years, she replied it was only he who refused to record his experiences. Our conversation lasted all evening. Once or twice it seemed to me that she regarded her life as a failure. I suggested that she had borne a greater burden than my father, but she firmly denied it. “It was his decision,” she said, “his responsibility.” She had borne nothing but the external burdens, whereas his life had been destroyed. Did one suffer more at the hearth, she asked, or from the utter lack of prospects imposed on one’s life? That depends on how one looks at it, I said. Her life, too, had been ruined. She replied that she had never seen it like that and did not want to do so, either. “Ruined” was in any case the wrong word. Only her girlish dreams had been smashed. But where were they ever fulfilled anyway? No matter how much she tried to downplay her own role, I could tell that she was very far from having come to terms with the Hitler period, even if it had been long ago by then.
When Winfried also refused to record his memories, my mother chose to say nothing more about the Hitler period. She remained stubbornly silent, as if she had erased it from her memory as a final sacrifice. However, when she read a draft chapter of my Hitler book, she was moved to observe that, from a distance, world events seem rather grand, whereas if one looks at the fates of individuals, one discovers a great deal of shabbiness, powerlessness, and misery. But once again, she refused to talk about her own feelings.
Some time later she fell ill. When I visited her in the hospital for the last time, a few days before her death, she had begun to lose consciousness with increasing frequency. She talked unceasingly and ever more quickly. With every word that could be understood the misfortune of her life burst out of her. It was the first time I heard her quarrel with fate. She spoke about the never-ending worry, the constant shortages and making do, the informers everywhere, and, above all, how much she suffered losing a son in Hitler’s war. From time to time she returned to the world from her confusion, became aware of me, and managed a sign of acknowledgment by raising her hand from the blanket. After that she fell into a semiconscious state and damned the world and her botched life. I had never heard her curse before, but now it seemed to me she was making up for it—for all those years of repressed bitterness. I took her hand, but she hardly noticed and went on cursing. It lasted for hours. When it had already grown dark, she managed some coherent words. Once she said, with lengthy pauses, “The days are no longer lost … God knows they’re not! … They count again … Each one is another twenty-four hours less! … That’s what I always tell myself! … That is my comfort.”
Two days later nothing was left of the rebelliousness which had haunted her semiconscious state only hours earlier, and she passed away in her sleep. After her childhood and the happy early years of marriage, my mother had increasingly begun to realize that evil exists. It was easily visible in the simple images which constituted her world. It was embodied in drunkards, swindlers, murderers, and Nazis. Even long after the end of the Third Reich she said that one always had to be on one’s guard against evil. Because evil is extremely imaginative. Life had taught her that. It liked to present itself in a humane guise, as a lover or benefactor, a flatterer, and even as a kind of god. Masses of people fell for it.
In a conversation we had a few months before her death, she said that the preferred guise of evil in her time had been the slogans, demonstrations, and festivities of the Nazis and the Communists. When I was young she had always been the one to contradict my father’s gloomy view of things, and her plea “Stop being so apocalyptic!” had become almost proverbial in the family. But looking back she had to say that he was right. She still could not understand why so few had seen the naked evil around them: the obscenity of political uniforms, the sheer loathsomeness. Dr. Gans had always said that at the end of time reason would prevail, but she did not believe it. Rather, she was certain that evil would triumph. It required no justification, because people loved it. She had belonged to the wrong generation, she said, and she hoped we would have better luck. That was more or less all that life had taught her. When Winfried and I left her apartment in Zehlendorf, he said that her words were a simple and, in fact, conclusive judgment on the world of political daydreams.
If I remember rightly, it was after this visit and on some other occasions that we discussed the formative influence of our parents and our home. I talked about the many attacks I had come under for not conforming to the left-wing mood of the time, and, laughing, we quoted the nonsense then making the rounds about me. In our youth, Winfried explained, we had been taught a kind of pride in stepping out of line—and that was something none of these “grown-up Hitler Youth kids” realized or understood. Whenever I was asked about my guiding principles, I would always refer to my skepticism and even to a distaste for the spirit of the age and its fellow travelers. I had never doubted my father’s ego non, to which he had introduced us on that unforgettable day when he instituted our “second supper.” The lesson of the Nazi years for me was to resist current opinion. Hence I was never seriously tempted by Communism, unlike many respected contemporaries, who succumbed at least for a while. Several friends from my youth remained in East Germany, and in the years that followed it became evident that the Communist regime there was often more successful at persecuting its citizens and more impenetrable in its bureaucracy than the Nazis, and that it would not have tolerated the survival of such a halfway happy family home as ours had been. At any rate, we never had the feeling as children that we were growing up in a world without a future, unlike some of my schoolmates who lived in the German Democratic Republic. Yet Communism has largely succeeded in not being equated with National Socialism in the long run. That is surely its greatest propaganda victory.
If I look back at the key experiences of my youth, both my background and my education taught me political skepticism. At the time it was mainly directed against the prevailing ideological assumptions. Similarly, I have never understood why the rebels of 1968 and other politically confused and morally self-important young people longed to explain the world from a single point of view. The blindness and horrors of such ideas had only recently been patently manifested in our own country. And as for those older radicals, who suddenly wore jeans and long hair in carefully coiffed disarray—I never found words for them and never wanted to.
For those who could read the signs of the times, the wrongheadedness of all the fashionable nonsense of the age was always evident. Already in the 1930s Communism—and then in its train Nazism—should have caused every unprejudiced observer to take up a position of fundamental opposition toward them. The inhumanity of both ideologies, arising from their formulaic explanations of the world, was all too clear. There were many, however, who could not resist the temptation of making their dreams a reality. Even today, plenty of people remain sentimentally attached to some “ism” or other which has long since failed dismally. Against such nonsense, the much more intelligent words of Henry David Thoreau have always impressed me. “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good,” he said, “I should run for my life.”
Such observations would later become the topic of some of my works and thus leap ahead of time. I mention them here because they were and are important to me. Another look ahead concerns one of the most important events of our lifetime. Sometimes I am reminded of the pessimistic moods of my father and most of his friends which surfaced again and again. At our garden table one of them once tried to equate the proportion of reason and unreason in the process of world history to a ratio of ten to ten thousand. The gloomy picture of man and history which my father’s generation could not get away from reflected the times. I shared in this mood, as when I observed that in all history the liberating trumpet signal of Beethoven’s Fidelio had hardly ever been heard and was no more than an “opera idea.” Yet I feel happy every time I drive down the long road to Glienicke Bridge, where the temperamental Sophie had once flung her arms around my neck and where—after 1961—all roads ended.8 I am lucky enough to have experienced a historical event in which, exceptionally, reason overcame all blindness and the desire to inflict horror. Then—just once, at least, and in the face of all experience—the sound of the trumpet became audible. It made the wall fall down and forced those in power to surrender it.
On the ninth of November, 1989, I found myself in Palermo, Sicily. I had come home late and had arranged an interview the next morning with a journalist from the Communist newspaper l’Unità. It had been agreed that we would discuss recent political developments and the German media and I wanted to tell him about that “république de lettres” which was the inspiration and ambitious goal of that part of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for which I bore responsibility at the time. But when I arrived for the interview, before I had uttered a single word, the journalist jumped up from behind his desk, spread out his arms and exclaimed, “Il muro della vergogna è caduto!” (The wall of shame has fallen!) Assuming he meant the easing of restrictions on travel between East and West Germany, I said, “Yes, indeed! Things are getting better.” “No, not better!” my interviewer, a young man with unruly, curly hair, almost shouted. “It has fallen! Gone! Finished!” Only then did I discover details about what had happened and gave a long interview. I expressed my regret about having to hear about the fall of the wall in faraway Palermo, but he replied that for him my presence on this day was pure reportorial joy. To my annoyance, I could not leave for Berlin immediately, as I had an appointment in Rome that could not be put off. I spent all of the tenth and eleventh of November 1989 in front of the TV, and often thought of Henri IV’s words: “Pends-toi, brave Crillon! nous avons combattu à Arques et tu n’y étais pas!” (Hang yourself, brave Crillon! We fought at Arques and you were not there!)
The Freiburg University bookseller Fritz Werner meeting the author in 1988
Early in the morning of the twelfth of November, 1989, I flew to Berlin.
1 Fest here refers not to the Hegel whose reception, especially via France, has dominated so much of postmodern Western thought. He writes of the founder and main representative of German Idealism as he was popularly dispensed in German secondary schools and universities well into the 1960s. One of the seminal modern thinkers, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) has profoundly changed speculation in most fields of philosophy from logic to ontology and from philosophy of history to aesthetics.
2 This was a right-wing hobbyhorse after the war and Fest loves to ride it. While antifascist himself, he cannot abide—echoing the sentiments of most German conservatives—the assumption of national shame and guilt urged upon the nation by most of its left-wing postwar writers. These include Günter Grass (born 1927), whose many novels and essays were the first and most successful attempts to deal meaningfully and critically with the Nazi experience. This was seen as inappropriate for serious art and as demeaning to the German nation. He was accused by CDU politicians of “befouling his own nest,” an opinion Fest obviously shares.
3 The Humboldt University building was located in the Soviet sector of Berlin at the time; it was to become the flagship university of the GDR. In 1948, professors leaving because of the Communist influence on teaching and administration founded the Free University of Berlin in West Berlin.
4 Eckard Peterich (1900–68), who lived primarily in Florence and wrote about myth, religion, and art in classical antiquity, is the prime exemplar of the “private scholar” young Fest always wanted to be.
5 Writing essays, radio plays, or short narratives for the radio was one of the most readily available and frequently used ways to make a little money for both established and aspiring authors.
6 RIAS: Radio im Amerikanischen Sektor (Radio in the American Sector)—i.e., the American Sector of Berlin.—Trans.
7 Fest senior here lists several notables of the Nazi regime who were tried as war criminals by the Nürnberg Tribunal and found guilty. Ley committed suicide while the other two were hanged.
Robert Ley (1890–1945) headed the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labor Front), in charge of all aspects of the organization and welfare of German workers.
Fritz Sauckel (1894–1946) wound up in charge of the massive slave labor recruitment which involved as many as five million people, many of whom were mistreated and died.
Julius Streicher (1885–1946) was Nazism’s most heinous anti-Semite and Jew baiter; his hysterical utterances and slanders became too much even for the likes of Göring and Goebbels and he was forbidden to appear in public by 1940 and dismissed from his party posts. He remained unrepentant all the way to the gallows.
8 The main road from Berlin to Potsdam crosses Glienicke Bridge, which today marks the boundary between the cities. The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 cast the boundary in concrete, as it were. From then until 1989 the bridge had a certain notoriety as a place where spies and others were exchanged between East and West.—Trans.